Why do liberals seem hell bent on aiding Republicans in making the Obama Administration impotent? I seriously don't get the criticism from the left about how President Obama isn't doing everything the left-wing wants and somehow hasn't done enough to destroy Republican opposition. There really seems to be a self-defeating instinct liberals possess to rip their best hopes at advancing their agenda apart.
Even an otherwise concise attempt to explain the inertia of the status quo in Cenk Uygur's diary Why our Nobles Betray Us still slips in some Obama bashing.
We keep waiting for the Obama administration to bring us the change they promised. What are we, children? The current system got Barack Obama, Rahm Emanuel, Tim Geithner, etc. where they are. They have gotten to the pinnacle of power by playing within that system. They've made millions in that system. That's why they have no intention of actually upending it. They just want to tweak it and do exactly what Obama said he wouldn't do if he got elected
To address the passage above, from Cenk's diary, I'd first like to take stroll down memory lane, to show that opposition from Democrats or opposition within the Republican Party can derail the goals of the Republican President, even when they control the Whitehouse and both houses of Congress. One of the key pieces of Republican energy policy was to open up as much of America to oil and gas drilling as possible, including national wildlife refuges such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), which was set to be opened up to oil exploration in several bills that were proposed between 2002 and 2005, but defeated by Democratic filibusters in the Senate or wrangling in the House by (get ready for this) moderate Republicans!!!
BACKGROUND: Both the U.S. House and Senate budget bills included a provision that would allow for oil drilling in a small fraction of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The Senate passed its budget bill last week, but leaders in the House dropped the ANWR provision late November 9 after a small group of moderate Republicans threatened to withhold support for the budget if ANWR were included. Although the House repeatedly has voted to allow drilling in ANWR, since most Democrats were expected to vote against the budget, the moderate House members had exceptional leverage in this instance.
One of the moderates, Rep. Charlie Bass (R-NH), wrote a letter opposing ANWR drilling that was signed by at least 24 of his Republican colleagues and delivered to House Rules Committee Chairman David Drier early this week. Rep. Bass' objection to drilling is largely philosophical: "Including the drilling provision in the Deficit Reduction Act would undermine the protection of all public spaces by valuing the worth of the potential resources contained within these lands over their conservation value... Rather then reversing decades of protection for this publicly held land, focusing greater attention on renewable energy sources, alternate fuels, and more efficient systems and appliances would yield more net energy savings."1
http://www.nationalcenter.org/...
Even though some Republicans derailed attempts to drill in ANWR, did this stop Republicans from embracing the "drill, baby, drill" slogan, when gas price shot up two years ago? NO!
The people who want to to open up the coasts to drilling and ANWR and my backyard, if there's oil to be gotten, don't declare they were betrayed by Republicans in 2005, but keep plugging away because Republicans, generally, will be attentive to their demands.
I just don't get the feeling interests on the Left have understood to not throw the people who are willing to work with you, even a little bit, under the bus for not getting everything they want.
"Over? Did you say 'over'? Nothing is over until we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!"
Or did the groups, who wanted to dismantle Social Security on the right declare it was over and that the Republicans betrayed them, when President Reagan kept Social Security viable by passing the 1983 Social Security Act Amendments? HELL NO!!!
Link to President Reagan's speech, when the 1983 law passed and he made his "iron clad promise" Social Security will be there for future generations, despite Republicans like Jesse Helms who had proposed to dismantle Social Security in 20 years and replace it with private retirement accounts.
Did the anti-tax groups go into conniptions because the 1983 Social Security Act Amendments kept Social Security viable by passing the largest payroll tax increase in history? HELL NO!!!
They generally got what they wanted in lowering of income tax rates, so they have turned Ronald Reagan into the patron saint of tax cuts; a man who could no more raise your taxes than the sky turn yellow and the sun rise in the west and set in the east.
General Jack D. Ripper: Fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face.
Or Treasury Secretary Geithner and Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel are "the most monstrously conceived and dangerous [insert bogey man here] plot we have ever had to face" and are the greatest threat liberals face in America today.
Yeah, I know Geithner's not big into Wall Street Banker punching and doesn't go to meetings with a pitchfork and flaming torch to run the bankers out of town, but he wasn't a bad pick for Treasury Secretary. Four months before President Obama was sworn in Lehman Brothers collapsed, triggering a series of events, which would've lead to the near destruction of the financial system and the economy with it.
Geithner may not be the best person to enforce a new regulatory regime, if Congress every passes it, but when he was tapped to be Treasury Secretary Wall Street was still teetering, TARP money was still being paid to banks and economy was still falling off a cliff.
Getting Geithner, who was part of the group that got TARP established and banks recapitalized, had better knowledge of what was going on at the time than most people. The banks were still choking on their mistakes, in early 2009, and having a Treasury Secretary who would put his boot down on the banks throat wasn't going to help.
you basically had three people who were the core in making the policy recommendations to the president and implementing them. And they were Hank Paulson, Ben Bernanke, and Tim Geithner. Now it’s Larry, Ben, and Tim, and Tim has moved chairs. What this means is that two-thirds of the core policy group is unchanged from Bush to Obama.
SNIP
That reality has become a liability. Geithner designed Obama’s response to the crisis—a response that, along with the stimulus and the Federal Reserve’s actions, has been cheaper and more effective than many people predicted, though still imperfect. But this success has been obscured, partly by stubborn high unemployment but mostly by the perception that Obama has "put the interests of Wall Street above those of Main Street." And more than anyone else, Geithner is held to blame.
http://www.theatlantic.com/...
Geithner maybe loathed by many people, but he did stabilize the financial sector, without which even the modest recovery we are experiencing this year wouldn't be happening.
As far as Rahm-bo is concerned, he doesn't make the final decisions. He has input into things, just like Vice President Biden and Cabinet Secretaries. He hasn't stopped Secretary Hilda Solis from being the first pro-labor Labor Secretary in a long a time. Rahm-bo hasn't prevented Energy Secretary Chu from expanding investments in renewable energy. He couldn't even stop the most sweeping health care reform legislation from being passed, even when it was very politically difficult.
In the end Presidents don't write their histories and the perception people have of them is defined by outside parties. Republicans are more unified in their opposition to President Obama than any time one Party has been in the minority than I can remember. The opposition President Obama has faced is unprecedented.
Even though many feel the Democrats enabled Bush & Co., oil companies still aren't drilling in ANWR because of strong Democratic opposition and some Republican opposition, but that hasn't stopped oil companies from backing Republicans who are generally supportive of them.
When President Reagan didn't take advantage of a serious crisis in Social Security to dismantle it, the people pushing for privatization didn't declare Republicans betrayed them and wander in the political wilderness. They kept working to influence the GOP to embrace their ideas, so that by 2000 a Republican Presidential candidate had made privatizing Social Security the center of his domestic policy program.
Liberals need to spend less time about how President Obama hasn't reformed Washington or betrayed liberals by not pushing for a single payer health care system or a public option or frog marched bankers to jail for the financial collapse and focus on the successes we have seen in this Administration and keep pushing Democrats to embrace a liberal shift in policy.
You won't change things overnight or even in a few years, but unless you keep pushing the positive things liberalism has done and is going to do, you won't be able to change anything. If the entire discourse becomes about all the things President Obama hasn't done, from both the left and the right, whatever chance liberals have of advancing their agenda will just fall apart, because Republicans sure aren't going to embrace a bit of it.
A better way to pursue things is to emphasize how the country is moving from the conventional wisdom of a center-right nation to a center-left nation, with the overwhelming election of President Obama and the Democrats in 2008.
Push the liberal agenda rather than attack the Administration for not embracing it fully. Emphasize how Americans wanted and got health care reform and continue to push for changes because controlling costs is as important as universal coverage, so more needs to be done. The anti-tax nuts didn't stop trying to undo the estate tax or capital gains taxes, just because the marginal income tax rates dropped in the 1980's.
Emphasize the need to not just get off our dependence on foreign oil, but our dependence on oil. Period. The Gulf Coast spill shows the risks that's come from our dependence on oil. Use it as a moment to start advancing the cause of wind power, wave power and other renewable sources of energy. Even push for investments in mass transit, so people will drive less and consume less gas. Emphasize how this Administration has done more to invest in renewable energy than its predecessors.
There's so much good that can be done, if liberals focus their energy on advancing their agenda, rather than tearing down the current Administration, because with the all out push by the Republicans to oppose and distort what this Administration is doing, they don't need any help from liberals to undermine this Administration.