[Peace-discuss] Fw: Rahm was right about progressives, for the wrong reasons (Stephen Hill, In These Times)

[David Johnson]

By STEVEN HILL

In These Times, April 6, 2011

http://wwww.inthesetimes.com/article/7080/was_rahm_right/



  
Features » April 6, 2011
Was Rahm Right?
If progressive don’t realize how much they’ve been had by President Obama, they are “f—-ing retarded.”
By Steven Hill
Volunteers Brian Heath (L), Dustin Watkins (C) and Gary Lahman paint an Obama campaign logo on the side of Lahman's garage on Oct. 4, 2008 near Bowling Green, Ohio.(Photo by: J.D. Pooley/Getty Images)
In 2009, then-White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel infamously said that progressives are “fucking retarded.” Lately I’ve begun to think he was correct—though not for the same reasons as Emanuel, who thought that progressives held unrealistic expectations for his boss, President Barack Obama. Progressives are retarded because they had those expectations for Obama to begin with, and poured so many of their hopes and aspirations—not to mention dollars—into electing him.
It was always questionable—and still is—whether Obama was going to be better than Hillary Clinton or for that mater John McCain, but the course of progressives’ “relationship” with Obama—from infatuation to letdown to spurned—shows a bewildering level of “drink the Kool-Aid” naiveté on the part of some otherwise sharp people. How could this have happened? Are there lessons to be learned for the future?



During the presidential campaign, while Obama deployed the lofty rhetoric and vision in his speeches that became his stock in trade, some of us were pointing out that there was nothing in this former state senator and then-U.S. Senator’s unremarkable record that indicated he was a strong or reliable progressive. Sometimes he had progressive tendencies, other times not. A friend of mine from Chicago who had Obama as a law professor presciently predicted that an Obama administration would be characterized by “ruthless pragmatism,” not progressive idealism.
But many progressives believed, quite fervently, that in the course of finding that ruthless pragmatism, Obama would cleverly figure out how to lean strongly progressive. There was always a nod and a wink coming from the Obama movement that seemed to say, “Don’t worry, he’s more progressive than he’s revealing. That’s what you have to do to get elected president in the United States.” When some of us continued to express doubts, these Panglosses got upset. Very upset. “It’s time to get on board,” they said. And I felt like Bongo, the one-eared rabbit in Matt Groening’s Life in Hell cartoon, shut up and gagged in a detention room.
How can so many brilliant people have fallen for so much hokum? That question is not an easy one to answer. Perhaps at some point Arianna Huffington, Robert Kuttner, Michael Moore and other left-ish pundits will engage in a bit of self-criticism and enlighten us as to how they were hoodwinked so easily. Because here’s my fear: Progressives don’t seem to be learning from their mistakes. Right before Obama’s inauguration, Huffington wrote, “Now, more than ever, we must mine the most underutilized resource available to us: ourselves… It is not just the Bush Years that should be over on January 20, but also the expectation that a knight in shining armor will ride into town and save us while we cheer from the sidelines. Even if the knight is brilliant, charismatic and inspiring. It’s up to us—We the People.”
Yet that’s exactly what so many did—they invested their hopes and aspirations, their passion, activism and money, in a shining knight for whom there was scant evidence of his progressivism or legislative accomplishments. Was it their desperation to see the GOP run out of town and the Bush legacy overturned? And the Clintons too? Was it their desire to see an African American elected president? Kuttner, author of Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency and co-founder of The American Prospect, wrote about a friend who said, “I so wanted to be supportive of a great progressive president this time instead of being back in opposition.” 
So does the despondency of the struggle explain progressives’ massive miscalculation? How do they account for the stunning failure of their leadership? It is time for some major self-criticism within the progressive movement, especially among its leadership. At the very least, we should note how the “netroots” failure to keep its knight galloping in the right direction shows the stark limitations of a movement that does not have a strong enough ground component. 
New rules
Yet a progressive future is not only contingent on a genuine grassroots movement. Structural political reforms are needed for that movement to transmit change through government at all levels. We would never have had this latest meltdown of our economic system if our political system had not melted down first. The two-party system is sclerotic. As Obama’s presidency shows, more than ever, there is no room for progressives at the table of highest political power. The reason for this is that the rules of the game that elect our representatives actually hurt progressives.

Reader Comments
The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC). 
Every vote, everywhere would be politically relevant and equal in presidential elections. Elections wouldn’t be about winning states. Every vote, everywhere would be counted for and directly assist the candidate for whom it was cast. Candidates would need to care about voters across the nation, not just undecided voters in a handful of swing states. 
In the 2012 election, pundits and campaign operatives already agree that, at most, only 14 states and their voters will matter under the current winner-take-all laws (i.e., awarding all of a state’s electoral votes to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in each state) used by 48 of the 50 states. Candidates will not care about 72% of the voters- voters-in 19 of the 22 lowest population and medium-small states, and big states like CA, GA, NY, and TX. 2012 campaigning would be even more obscenely exclusive than 2008 and 2004. Candidates have no reason to poll, visit, advertise, organize, campaign, or care about the voter concerns in the dozens of states where they are safely ahead or hopelessly behind. Policies important to the citizens of ‘flyover’ states are not as highly prioritized as policies important to ‘battleground’ states when it comes to governing.
Since World War II, a shift of a handful of votes in one or two states would have elected the second-place candidate in 4 of the 13 presidential elections.  Near misses are now frequently common.  There have been 6 consecutive non-landslide presidential elections. 537 popular votes won Florida and the White House for Bush in 2000 despite Gore’s lead of 537,179 popular votes nationwide. A shift of 60,000 votes in Ohio in 2004 would have defeated President Bush despite his nationwide lead of over 3 Million votes.
The bill would take effect only when enacted, in identical form, by states possessing a majority of the electoral votes—enough electoral votes to elect a President (270 of 538). When the bill comes into effect, all the electoral votes from those states would be awarded to the presidential candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC). 
The bill uses the power given to each state by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution to change how they award their electoral votes for president. Historically, virtually all of the major changes in the method of electing the President, including ending the requirement that only men who owned substantial property could vote and 48 current state-by-state winner-take-all laws, have come about by state legislative action.
In Gallup polls since 1944, only about 20% of the public has supported the current system of awarding all of a state’s electoral votes to the presidential candidate who receives the most votes in each separate state (with about 70% opposed and about 10% undecided).  Support is strong among Republican voters, Democratic voters, and independent voters, as well as every demographic group surveyed in virtually every state, partisan, and demographic group surveyed in recent polls.
The bill has passed 31 state legislative chambers, in 21 small, medium-small, medium, and large states, including one house in AR, CT, DE, DC, ME, MI, NV, NM, NY, NC, and OR, and both houses in CA, CO, HI, IL, NJ, MD, MA, RI, VT, and WA. The bill has been enacted by DC, HI, IL, NJ, MD, MA, and WA. These 7 states possess 74 electoral votes—27% of the 270 necessary to bring the law into effect.
http://www.NationalPopularVote.com 
Posted by mvymvy on Apr 6, 2011 at 12:00 PM
Unfortunately the change is not going to happen politically. The political infrastructure is configured to lock out reform.
Egypt and Wisconsin have shown what is required. 
Posted by aacme on Apr 6, 2011 at 10:28 PM
See two articles by me: “A Voters’ Revolt Against Two-Party Rule” (http://www.opednews.com/articles/A-Voters-Revolt-Against-T-by-Scott-McLarty-101 1029-859.html) and “Memo to Progressives: Green or the Graveyard” (http://www.opednews.com/articles/Memo-to-Progressives-Gree-by-Scott-McLarty-101 1216-690.html)
While Dems continue to compromise & capitulate, the GOP reaches for ever greater extremes, pushing the US in an increasingly dangerous direction.
This will change when voters begin to understand that it’s not “Democrats vs. Republicans” but “Dems + Repubs vs. the rest of us”, that both parties have an interest in limiting debate to the narrow D vs. R spectrum and barring any other political competition, that the two parties are symbiotic factions of an imperial Washington establishment that makes service to corporate lobbies its chief business. 
Posted by Scott McLarty on Apr 7, 2011 at 3:17 AM
= 

 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20110410/a02163e7/attachment-0001.html>