Robert Kuttner games out the narrowing options of where President Obama is leading the Democratic Party, and the country, and what he sees isn't pretty:
Let's stop pretending. Barack Obama is a disaster as a crisis president. He has taken an economic collapse that was the result of Republican ideology and Republican policies, and made it the Democrats' fault. And the more that he is pummeled, the more he bends over.
So what exactly are our prospects and alternatives?
Absent radically different policies, an economic depression will continue indefinitely. This is not a "Great Recession" in the New York Times' cute pun. It's a depression, made up of persistently high unemployment, reduced consumer purchasing power, damaged banks, and business unwillingness to invest, just like the 1930s. Unemployment is not quite as severe, but measured properly it is around 18 percent. And unlike in the 1930s, we don't have a strong Democratic president using activist government to dig our way out.
What's needed is to be able to draw stark contrasts between Democrats offering progressive policies to help people get through the bad times and cure the economy, and the Republicans who are doing everything they can to block them.
Absent that kind of leadership, the Republicans going onto 2012 will succeed in blaming the continuing crisis on Obama and the Democrats. Obama is rapidly becoming our Herbert Hoover. As you will recall, Hoover's legacy was Democratic dominance of American politics for a generation.
The 2012 election is especially bleak because redistricting, with the increased Republican control of statehouses, gives the Republicans a likely pickup of ten to twenty House seats independent of other electoral trends. On the Senate side, just 10 Republican-held seats are up for re-election compared to 23 Democratic ones. The arithmetic alone suggests a Republican Congress.
Kuttner suggests that leaves progressives and Democrats with three options, all of them painful:
*Let Obama continue to undermine the economy, the real Democratic Party, and the New Deal-Great Society legacy...
*Do a ton of grass roots organizing to put pressure on the administration to change course and in the meantime to back real progressive leaders....
*Run a progressive candidate against Obama in the 2012 primary...
The unthinkable third option becomes increasingly less unthinkable, he says, as you game it out. A progressive challenger might win (highly unlikely); a primary fight is a terrific organizing oportunity no matter what; and it might scare Obama back into a more recognizably Democratic policy course.
The GOP will likely take both Houses in 2012. If Obama hangs on, he becomes the Democratic Hoover presiding over the New Depression, and Republicans will run against him for a generation. If he loses, the GOP presides over four years of economic misery, leaving the way clear for a progressive Democratic comeback in 2016.
The calls for a primary challenge for Obama in 2012 have sounded utterly ridiculous and self-defeating to me up till now. But I've got to say, put this way, they're almost starting to make sense.