[Peace-discuss] Anybody but Obama, even if it’s Mitt Romney!
C. G. Estabrook
galliher at illinois.edu
Sat Aug 6 03:07:50 CDT 2011
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
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