Saturday, November 06, 2010

Life In Another Country [Anthony McCarthy]

The size of the disaster in the mid-term election should have been enough to make Barack Obama face what he has been unwilling to face before. the Republican Party is the foremost political factor in the corruption which is the only thing that is flourishing in the United States after forty years of their political ascendancy. It should have been enough to make him face it but there is no sign that he is facing it. As he continues to transform his image from the strong, confident leader, the messenger of hope to a weak, vacillating, bureaucrat, trading away Democratic ideals, he leaves the country without hope, without leadership.

We, friends, are faced with the prospect of our country rapidly falling into overt plutocracy, when even such somber, respectable people as Bill Moyers and Robert Reich are saying it, you can't pretend it's only easily dismissed no ones like me who see it. We don't live in a democratic America anymore. If you live in a state which is about to be in the hands of a teabagger governor with Republicans in control of your legislature, watch how fast they dismantle it and give it away. The governor-elect in Maine has already assembled the lobbyists and think tankers to set it up for immediate sale to the highest bidder.

In his statements about compromising on tax cuts to the richest, made less than a day after the election, there is, for anyone to see, what is a well known pattern now. The early compromises in this administration were so at odds with the situation. The size of the Democratic majority that had won in 2006 and grown in 2008, were all that he would need to carry out the program he led us to believe he favored. This was especially true since one of his claims boasted at his skill at working with Republicans who could be persuaded to do what was right.

Most confusing of all, early on, were the appointments in the financial departments, Summers and Geithner, two men who had helped create the economic crisis he inherited. In order to explain that a lot of people figured he was holding his fire for the major hurdles, health care, climate change, and ending at least one of the two Bush era wars he had inherited.

I won't go over the history of how those were abandoned and with them the hopes of the base that had elected Barack Obama and had put Harry Reid in a position to govern the Senate. Many of us expected some brilliant, covert, strategy to turn retreat into victory from the clearly far from stupid, Obama. Instead, as the health care bill shows, it was Nancy Pelosi who was the real political hero and tactician of the past two years, unfortunately, she couldn't do it when the two men proved weak and timid. She fought for a public option up until it was impossible to get one, then she got what she did. I doubt she's expecting any back up from Obama and Reid now that she's got a lot less power because of them to do more than she could when she was Speaker. They didn't give it to her then. If any history of the past two years wants to get it right, they should focus on her and not the guys.

Barack Obama doesn't have two years, he's got about two weeks to show us he's learned anything and he doesn't seem to have yet. He's talking about giving more away in the form of tax breaks to the filthiest of the filthy rich, it seems to be what he does. I'm not waiting in the expectation that some brilliant move will become apparent in his post-election appeasement. The past two years have shown when he does that, it's just a sign that he continues to give up. I he doesn't immediately change course and start fighting, the real meaning of this election will be clear. That will be that it isn't the base hasn't given up on Barack Obama, he gave up on us after he had our votes. There is almost nothing I would like more than to be proven wrong on that. If he doesn't force through passage of campaign disclosure through the senate before, where it has been stuck along with more than four hundred other bills Nancy Pelosi got through the House, he may as well have announced his decision not to run again. Losing with him looks a lot like losing without him would. None of the major players in his administration should work for Democratic entities again, some of them are serial hope killers.