Blogging for the 99% and the preservation of our Democracy against the Corporatists and the Citizens United ruling.
In Salon.com, Jonathan Bernstein put forth the usual set of excuses given by all Obama supporters who will not consider reality as part of their opinion-making process. He grants that Obama may have not been very effective, but it is because his position as President is inherently weak:
What that means is that while the president’s overall influence is certainly far greater than that of a House subcommittee chair or a mid-level civil servant in some agency, his influence over any specific policy may well not be greater than that of such a no-name nobody.
I think the power of the Presidency can be argued with just two words: George Bush. George W. Bush got everything he wanted and more, including the after-the-fact legalization of his warrantless wiretapping. Unlike George W. Bush, Obama has had 70% of the country or more behind the ideas that would work best for our country, yet he has chosen to ignore the good of the country in exchange for what he thinks is political expediency.
What Obama seems to not understand is that good policy and improving the lives of Americans is the foundation for re-election, not a relentless pursuit of imaginary Independents whom he must capture in 2012.
With the issue of jobs being number one in the minds of Americans, Obama has chosen to focus on the deficit, cutting spending and creating more joblessness.
When the majority of the country believes that the people who can most afford increased taxes should be taxed, Obama has focused on putting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid on the table, a move which would certainly result in increased illness and loss of life due to lack of access to care. However, only the expendable poor and elderly will be harmed, so no need to worry.
Glenn Greenwald has written at length about Obama’s power, and the fact that he is not weak. Instead, he has used his power to achieve his Reaganesque goals of a smaller government, the dismantling of the New Deal, and the betterment of the top 2%:
the President, as usual, was too weak in standing up to right-wing intransigence — or simply had no options given their willingness to allow default — and was thus forced into this deal against his will. This depiction of Obama as occupying a largely powerless, toothless office incapable of standing up to Congress — or, at best, that the bad outcome happened because he’s just a weak negotiator who “blundered” — is the one that is invariably trotted out to explain away most of the bad things he does.
It appears to be true that the President wanted tax revenues to be part of this deal. But it is absolutely false that he did not want these brutal budget cuts and was simply forced — either by his own strategic “blunders” or the “weakness” of his office — into accepting them. The evidence is overwhelming that Obama has long wanted exactly what he got: these severe domestic budget cuts and even ones well beyond these, including Social Security and Medicare, which he is likely to get with the Super-Committee created by this bill (as Robert Reich described the bill: ”No tax increases on rich yet almost certain cuts in Med[icare] and Social Security . . . . Ds can no longer campaign on R’s desire to Medicare and Soc Security, now that O has agreed it”).
http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/08/01/debt_ceiling/index.html
The fact that Republicans argue with Obama when he is actually making sure that GOP policies are implemented can only be chalked up to political theater. Even Obama’s jobs proposals are straight from the GOP playbook, as well as his payroll tax cut proposals.
David Bromwich recently said:
In these August days, Americans are rubbing their eyes, still wondering what has befallen us with the president’s “debt deal” — a shifting of tectonic plates beneath the economy of a sort Dick Cheney might have dreamed of, but which Barack Obama and the House Republicans together brought to fruition.
A redistribution of wealth and power more than three decades in the making has now been carved into the system and given the stamp of permanence.
Only a Democratic president, and only one associated in the public mind (however wrongly) with the fortunes of the poor, could have accomplished such a reversal with such sickening completeness.”
“Sickening” is the operative word for Obama’s choices and his purposeful exercise of power to help the corporations and the rich, at the expense of the other 98% of us. His weakness is not his political office as President. Obama’s weakness is his inability to have empathy with those people in the country that are suffering, and his lack of interest in doing anything about it.
