Ever since the Health Care debacle there's been a huge WTF hanging over the netroots. Just about every Progressive voice has been asking why doesn't Obama fight? Why does Obama cave time and time and time again? Many of us who worked our asses off for him, canvassed for him, gave to his campaign, fell in love with "Hope and Change" and wanted a change in direction SO BADLY were ripe for the picking. To his marketing teams credit, He played us like a fine tuned instrument to get elected. Tuesday's Press conference in response to justified outrage from the Left/Progressives/Liberal (or whatever we're called these days) to the Tax Capitulation should leave no doubt in anyone's mind that President Obama is doing what he WANTS to do.
For over a year many on this site and others in the Progressive Blog-o-sphere have been wondering why President Obama has capitulated time and time again ... giving Republicans everything while never requiring them to give up much. He kept deferring to them..even when they were voted out of power everywhere. He reinforced their frames..their arguments..their point of view over and over. We kept wondering how a candidate who built one of the greatest campaigns in US History could no longer craft a message worth a damn.
We now know that its because President Obama BELIEVES in conservative ideology. He is a Center-Right corporatist. He has never believed in Progressive ideals and has been from the start out to further dismantle the New Deal framework. I read an article from The Black Agenda report, a progressive African American blog, that puts it more succinctly than I ever could. You can read the article in its entirety here: http://www.blackagendareport.com/...
One of the paragraphs that struck me was this one:
The president harkened back to "the debate that we had during health care" when much of his party complained that he was too "willing to compromise" with Republicans and bargained away the public option. Actually, Obama was determined from the start of his presidency to conspire with Republicans and corporate leaders to derail any possibility of a bill that might set the stage for single-payer legislation in 2009 or some future Congress. Instead, Obama protected private insurers by locking them so tightly into the system that it will be near impossible to dislodge them in the foreseeable future. Obama accomplished this, not just by ruthlessly marginalizing single-payer supporters, but also by choosing his own congressional operatives and effectively bypassing Democratic leadership – much the same m.o. as in his latest "compromise" with the GOP. He wielded the power of the White House and the false lure of bipartisanism to utterly smash the left half of his party, deriding the dwindling "public option" holdouts as starry-eyed perfectionists who had become the enemies of the good – a performance he reprised on Tuesday in lambasting critics of deal with the GOP on taxes on the rich.
In the course of the long health care battle – a struggle waged entirely within Democratic ranks –Obama let the air out of the Democratic balloon, and the GOP steadily rose from its valley of near-death. The Republicans wound up conceding nothing on health care, while their corporate patrons won more than they could have dared imagine back on Election Day, 2008, when it seemed that single-payer was an idea whose time had come.
That year, we were all dumbfounded that he didn't start from single-payer and compromise at the public option which polled at damn near 70% consistently. No, what we got was the REPUBLICAN health care plan from the Clinton Era. Even though President Obama was on RECORD campaigning on a public health plan, even after he SAID repeatedly on RECORD that he was against mandates. Remember, one of the ways that President Obama was going to pay for "Health Care Reform" was by TAXING the insurance plans of Union Workers ..the so-called "Cadillac Plans". Union Workers are one of the core groups that make up the Democratic base and he actually tried to screw them over. In retrospect that should have given us a clue where President Obama's allegiances lay, but we were too busy being told that we needed to accept whatever piece of crap came out of the process and be "pragmatic"
During the course of his short Presidency though, President Obama has shows us the same M.O. over and over:
Obama doesn’t really want folks to take the long view of his time in office. His modus operandi after every debacle is to claim to have rescued bits and pieces of the Democratic agenda from GOP savaging: a health care bill that, in total, is worse than none at all, a financial "reform" unworthy of the name. He early in his term set in motion his infernal deficit reduction commission, knowing it would attack social spending across the board, so that he could later "rescue" selected programs from extinction and claim saviorhood. Obama will claim to have "saved" extension of unemployment benefits by this week’s "compromise" with the Republican minority in the lame duck Congress when, in reality, it is Obama’s center-right modalities of governance and back-channel dealings that have allowed the GOP minority to behave like a majority.
The overarching truth of the last two years Is that Obama has been at constant war with the New Deal and the left hemisphere of his party, acting as Wall Street’s Trojan Horse in the White House.
Now the argument I hear against criticism of this President is "President McCain would be worse". How in the world could it be any worse when our Democratic leader is trumpeting Republican values? At least with Republicans you know where they stand. If the Democratic Leader of the Democratic Party is trumpeting REPUBLICAN ideology then why are we even supporting the Democratic Party at all? Say in 2012 Sarah Palin is not the nominee and Tim Pawlenty is. If the only reason to support a 2nd term by President Obama is to stop Sarah Palin from becoming President and she's not on the Republican ticket, then what?
The fact that I'm even writing this diary is something that I would not have thought possible 2 years ago. I shed tears of joy when President Obama won the election. I believed in him, believed in what I thought was his platform. Now, I have to live with the fact that because of my support, a DEMOCRAT has opened up the first salvo in gutting and defunding Social Security with this ridiculous payroll tax "holiday" that will soon be made permanent. My money and time spent working for the Obama campaign has given Republicans a HUGE VICTORY that they could never have achieved on their own. Because of my desire for something better, I fell for a lie and now I have to live with the fact that I helped elect a man to the White House who is doing everything he can to destroy the legacy of Democrats past in name of "bipartisanship".