We Need Candidate Obama in Wisconsin

Once upon a time, there was a Presidential candidate that ran on “Change”, and promised that if workers rights to collectively bargain were ever threatened, he would grab some comfortable shoes and join the workers on the picket line as the President of the United States.

A fairy tale, right?  We have a huge crisis in Wisconsin with a right-wing, Koch Industries tool in Governor Walker trying to bust the unions.  President Obama made some vague mention that it looked like an attack on unions, and for that, the right-wing noise machine went berserk.  Obama backed off, as he doesn’t seem to ever feel strongly enough about anything to stand up for those beliefs.

On top of that, Obama confirmed today that he has no plans to come to Wisconsin.

Perhaps he was a community organizer because he always saw the merits of the other side.  It would seem that when he never responded to his critics in the campaign,  it should have been a tip-off  that he was unwilling to ever fight back, even on his own behalf.

I don’t think Obama hates Progressives.  After all, we worked hard for him to get elected.  I think it is possible that he does not want to risk offending his corporate donors.  There might be other explanations.  Perhaps Obama is unsympathetic to the middle class.  Perhaps he is a coward, and is afraid of the GOP.  Perhaps he has intellectual deficiencies that prevent him from grasping the situation.  Perhaps political ambitions trump all other considerations.  Perhaps he is just a reluctant leader.

Those are not flattering alternatives, but one thing is for sure, Candidate Obama certainly “got it”, when it came to labor unions, the middle class, and the real working people of this country.  See for yourself:

That’s the man we need in Wisconsin, walking with the protesters in Madison, in his comfortable shoes.