[Peace-discuss] Anybody but Obama, even if it’s Mitt Romney!

[C. G. Estabrook]

Weekend Edition
August 5 - 7, 2011
CounterPunch Diary

Ready to Vote for Mitt Romney?
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Start with Obama. Of course he blew it. Whether by artful design or by sheer 
timidity is immaterial. He blew it. Two days before the United States was 
officially set to default on its debts on August 2, Barack Obama had the 
Republicans where he wanted them: All he had to do was announce that he’d 
trudged the last half mile towards a deal but that there’s no pleasing  fanatics 
who  reject all possibilities of compromise, who are ready and eager to shut 
down the government, to see seniors starve and vets denied their benefits. So, 
Obama could proclaim, he was invoking the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution 
which states that the "validity of the public debt of the United States ... 
shall not be questioned."

Obama could have done that, but he didn’t. At the eleventh hour and the 
fifty-fifth minute he threw in the towel, and allowed the  Republicans to exult 
that they’d got 95 per cent of what they wanted: cuts in social programs,  a 
bipartisan congressional panel to shred at its leisure what remains of the 
social safety net, no tax hikes for the rich, no serious slice in the military 
budget.

As America plummets into phase 2 of the double-dip recession Obama’s deal has 
stripped the country of all available remaining  defenses: no jobs program, no 
hope of stimulus money for stricken states and cities across the country. It’s 
as bad as the Republicans’ onslaught on Franklin Roosevelt’s programs  seeking 
to prise America out of the great Depression – a Republican onslaught that 
launched the terrible downturn of  1937, from which America was extricated only 
by the vast war spending after Pearl Harbor.

Why did Obama do it? Like all first-term presidents he thinks first and foremost 
about reelection in 2012, and the thinking in the White House is that the 
all-important independent voters, are eager for deficit reduction, however 
ruinous it may be for the economy.

Polls show that Obama had a winning hand. His approval ratings are in the mid 
40s in percentile terms, more or less where they’ve been for months. But 
Congress is now down at 18 – the lowest since records began. So he could have 
called the Republicans’ bluff at any time. Sure, Americans will always say that 
deficits should be reduced. That’s like asking if you support an end to gassing 
badgers. But when you ask them something serious, like Do you want a job, they 
say Aye – by any means necessary, including increased federal spending.

But beyond coarse political calculation, and eagerness to satisfy his Wall 
Street backers, it’s plain enough that Obama is a quitter by nature. As someone 
joked bitterly last week, he turns up for a strip poker session already down to 
his shorts.  In the crunch, the weapon he snatches from its scabbard is the 
white flag, which he flourishes brzenly  at the bankers, the Pentagon, and 
America’s billionaires.

It was plain in 2006 – the first time I looked at his record -- that Obama was 
gutless and devoid of principle. By 2008, before his victory,  he was already 
reassuring the Establishment he was set to “reform” Social Security and Medicare 
– i.e., to hand these entitlement programs over to Wall St and the insurance 
industry.

Indeed, the best outcome for the left in 2008 would have been a victory for 
McCain, Obama’s Republican opponent.  McCain! But, you wail, he would have 
plunged America into new wars, kept Guantanamo open, launched an onslaught on 
entitlements, surrendered to Wall Street and the banks…

McCain would have tried all these things, but maybe he would have quailed amid a 
storm of public protest. Under W. Bush’s two terms the spirit of opposition 
throve; the antiwar movement flourished; the labor movement was active; blacks 
militant.  Amid a brilliant campaign mounted  by the AFL-CIO, Bush’s hopes to 
gut social programs were dead within months of the start of his second term  in 
2004.  But since 2008 a Democratic president has neutralized all these 
constituencies.

In 2010, in the midterm elections,  the American people spoke, and their message 
was confused. When exit pollsters questioned 17,000 voters across the nation as 
to who should take the blame for the country’s economic problems, 35 per cent 
said Wall Street, 29 percent said Bush and 24 percent said Obama. Just over half 
of the respondents (57 percent) said that their votes in House races had nothing 
to do with the Tea Party. The other half was split on the Tea Party, pro (22 
percent) or con (17 percent). More than 60 percent said the all--important issue 
is the economy; 86 percent said they are worried about economic conditions. On 
whether government should lay out money to create- jobs or slash expenditures to 
reduce the deficit, there’s also a near-even split.

The American people wanted a government that wouldn’t govern, a budget that 
would simultaneously balance and create jobs, and spending cuts across the board 
that would leave the defense budget intact. Collectively, the election made 
plain, they hadn’t a clear notion of which way to march.

Obama carried substantial part of the blame for this. He delivered no clear 
message, no clarion call. For two years he gave labor nothing; he gave his most 
loyal constituency—black America—nothing. When the “One Nation” rally mustered 
in Washington on October 2, 2010 there was no stentorian message of support from 
Obama for the event, sponsored by the NAACP and the AFL-CIO. Among the vast 
throngs who gathered for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s politically 
inconsequential “sanity rally” on October 30, how many were young people who had 
voted for Obama in 2008, their passionate expectations now mutilated on the 
battlefields of Obamian realpolitik?

As Obama reviewed his options after the midterm elections, which way would he 
head? He’d already supplied the answer. He’d try to broker deals to reach 
“common ground” with the Republicans, the strategy that destroyed those first 
two years of opportunity.

But even after last week’s frightful betrayals, there’s been barely a fretful 
bleat from Democrats about running a challenger to Obama in the primaries such 
as the late Ted Kennedy mounted against Carter, another Obamian sell-out, in 
1979. A serious challenge to Obama from inside the ranks of the Democratic Party 
has always been a non-starter.  The time to launch a third party left challenge 
to Obama was back in January of 2010 when the writing was on the wall. In this 
very page I implored the ousted U.S.  Senator from Wisconsin,  Russ Feingold to 
do just that.  Now it’s all far too late.

In 2013 we could be faced with a Republican majorities in both houses and the 
prospect of Obama spending four years catering obediently to their requirements, 
defusing all liberal and left opposition.  We need a Republican in the White 
House to dispel narcosis which will otherwise neutralize left activity till 
2016.  Who? Michele Bachmann is popular mostly with Tea Party ultras, Jon 
Huntsman with the Washington elites.  Gov. Rick Perry of Texas has yet to enter 
the race and is loathed by the Bush clan.  At present the only candidate within 
reach of Obama is Mitt Romney, the Mormon millionaire businessman whose 
nomination bid fizzled in 2008.

I acknowledge the obvious: the clothes, the grin, the unrelenting fakery that  
so blatantly imbues every atom of his being. Mitt is a hard sell and his drive 
to be the first Mormon president is surely not helped by this summer’s 
Mormon-in-the-headlines -- Warren Jeffs , now convicted of  child rape.

Romney kept quiet through most of the recent brouhaha about raising the deficit 
ceiling, aside from a pro forma nod to the Tea Party ultras near the end, 
designed to placate the ultras in early primary states like Iowa. In the 
briefest of inspections, he is not marked for greatness, but greatness is not 
required of him – just the tenacity to win the White House and drive Obama out 
of national politics and destroy his appalling vision of bipartisanship as the 
way forward for America.

Anybody but Obama, even if it’s Mitt Romney!

Mind you, a politician with some guts would be preferable, but we’re talking 
about politics and the art of the possible.   Check out this truly terrific 
outburst from the Republican governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, attacking 
the “ignorance” of attacks on his successful nomination of Suhail Mohammed as a 
Superior Court judge.

“He represented  people who were inappropriately detained by the FBI after 
9/11,” Christie says.  “The fact of the matter is there were lots of people 
inappropriately detained by the FBI post-9/11.”

http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn08052011.html