The day Barak Hussein Obama was elected President of the United States will probably remain one of the most memorable days of my life. It seemed like every voice in my small mid-western college erupted as one as we poured out of our dorms. Screams ‘of U-S-A, U-S-A’ could be heard from every direction. Student leaders and professors gave impromptu speeches celebrating what we saw as a monumental achievement. My friends and I who had spent our teenage years in George Bush’s America had never seen this kind of joyfulness from the American Left. This, it seemed, was a brave, new world. We felt as though we hadn’t just defeated John McCain and the Republicans, we had defeated the status quo. We had defeated the racists, the bigots, the nativists, everybody who was responsible for the budget deficit, the wars in the Middle East, and meanness everywhere.
Not only that, it seemed like the entire world felt joined in our celebrations. Rather than hearing more and more stories about how everybody hated us, every day statistics from all over the world declared Obama more popular than any domestic leadership. After the embarrassment of the Bush years, it seemed like everybody loved Americans again. Politicians, pollsters, and citizens declared the coming of a new era of politics, one where any divide could be bridged. It wasn’t just that we wanted to change the world, for a brief time during the buildup to the inauguration and in parts of the first year of the Obama presidency we felt sure that change had begun. And we were not shy about it. Perhaps no move appears, in retrospect, more impulsive and rash than Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize. After all, it was awarded for what? Saying nice things about other countries? Not having tendencies that put him in the same boat as many war criminals? Both admirable qualities that had been missing in our previous President, but certainly not deserving of one of the most supposedly distinguished humanitarian awards in the world. This was just one of the self-congratulating actions that the left bestowed on itself and its new champion. We weren’t sure what the change was that was right around the corner, but we knew its name: Barak Obama.
There were two major problems with this. First, like the words of Obama himself, this all sounded really great and meant about nothing. Obama was not about to declare himself President of the World. Other than the Democrats basking in the glow of their seeming-victory, little action was taken to capitalize on this. All of this pageantry freaked the hell out of the Right. Nothing scares nativists and xenophobes more than an overseas celebration of a non-military decision their country has made. The idea of Obama as ‘other’ or ‘unAmerican’ certainly began earlier, but it was certainly bolstered by the backlash to the reactions of both liberals at home and abroad.
There was just one other problem. Obama just wasn’t quite on board. It would have been one thing if Obama’s own actions had earned this conservative reprisal. If he had say, grievously endangered our national security by closing or just increasing transparency in our internationally-based prison camps, or by starting to destroy free enterprise by nationalizing industries, increasing funding to the arts, or working to close tax loopholes, or even if he’d tried some gimmicky communist plot like introducing the metric system or suggesting that schools should focus more on teaching depth and critical thinking rather than simply focussing on standardized testing. But no, Obama is not a socialist. He’s not even a European-style Leftist. He is just a relatively inexperienced centrist neoliberal with a fantastic speaking voice. That is to say, he is the perfect embodiment of a modern American Democrat politician.
Whenever I make this point, the usual rebuttal from my friends is ‘But look at him, he’s the one that finally passed Universal Healthcare, he’s the champion liberal!’ While that’s certainly enough to prove that he’s a Democrat, there are plenty of voices, at home and abroad, who believe in Universal Healthcare that one would not normally describe as ‘liberal.’ Even in the United States, Healthcare has been a major priority for the Democratic party at least since Hillary Clinton first tried in the 90s. And let us not forget that, for all the uproar, we still do not really have Universal Health Care as other countries would describe it. Particularly the whole ‘universal’ part of it.
Am I suggesting, as a number of bloggers have brought up over the past few weeks, that Democrats should be regretting their choice of Obama? In a word, no. Its not that simple. The three Democratic candidates for President with a chance to win the 2008 nomination were Barak Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the man who at the time was my choice, John Edwards. I don’t think its possible to say for sure just how a Clinton administration would have dealt with the problems Obama has been facing, but it is safe to say that the programs they might have supported would have been relatively similar. And, well, in terms of John Edwards, his extra-marital extra-political affairs make Bill Clinton look like the Pope, and the conservative backlash that would have known no bounds. Obama was and still can be the man for the job.
I titled this introductory essay ‘The American Left has an Obama problem,’ but that it only part of the situation. The Presidency of Barak Obama has been a perfect example of what the American Left looks like today. It speaks beautifully, but when it comes to policymaking, the litmus test seems to be ‘well, at least its more liberal than what the Republicans proposed.’ I’m certainly not suggesting that the Republican alternative presented is preferable. However, since it is widely known that the Republicans now basically answer to the far right, now really the time to consign us to always just having to pick the lesser of two evils? Or, to put it another way, are we so unsure of our principals that we allow the opposition to dictate what choices are available?
And that brings us back to our Obama problem. During the 2008 election, one of the messages of the Obama campaign was that we needed to place winning the election over pushing any individual policy point. Rather than give money to interest groups that supported a particular policy that you may have felt more strongly about, everyone was called upon to close ranks and just give to the Presidential campaign. After eight years of Bush, the idea that having a Democrat in office was the first priority rang true to many citizens and the push was a big success. This did two things. First, it left a lot of Progressive organizations with budget gaps. Money which would usually have been donated to them went instead to the Obama for President campaign. Second, it created the idea in the Obama administration that it didn’t need those organizations, it could go it alone. This is why, from the beginning, Obama has turned his back on traditional allies. He simply feels as though he does not need their support to govern.
Since the election, local progressive groups across the country from Wisconsin to Ohio have been slowly reinvigorated almost entirely without the help of the President. In his recent Labor Day speech, Obama somewhat hypocritically paid homage to a number of local labor movements that have, for the first two years of his Presidency, captured the national attention far more than his own. Perhaps this is showing a greater appreciation for the actual desires of the people who elected him. Liberals, especially the past few months, have made it known that they are generally dissatisfied with the job Obama is doing.The question, particularly with the current candidates leading the polls for the Republican nomination, is not whether or not Progressive interest groups will support Obama in the upcoming election. A primary challenge, just like a liberal third party, would only serve to deliver the country to Rick Perry, Michelle Bachmann, Mitt Romney, or any of the other extremists vying for the most important job in the world. The only way somebody other than Obama could be supported would be if there was a process for Obama to name a successor and resign. Since that does not seem to be in the cards, it should go without saying that Progressive groups will work hard to get him re-elected. That does not mean that that support must be without conditions. Progressives cannot allow Obama to run on a campaign that is simply a mixture of ‘give me some more time’ and ‘Republicans suck!’ He has a year and half not just to give pretty speeches, but to actively pursue an agenda that reflects the desires not only of his base, but of the American people. Fixing up roads, bridges and schools, raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans, closing tax loopholes for massive corporations, expanding public transportation, ending oil and gas subsidies: these are all policies that, for the most part, enjoy massive popularity amongst the citizens of the United States. Yes, with the current state of Congress, President Obama may not be able to make gigantic progress on these issues before the election. But bills can be drafted and vetted, and ideas can be debated with a clear sense of what everybody is talking about. If Obama comes out firmly in support of these overwhelmingly popular principals, whoever is eventually nominated by the Republican party will be forced to either take a stance against these popular, populist, policies or to agree with the President. The American jobs act is a good start, but its just that. A start. Even presuming it gets passed, gigantic amounts of work must be done to put it into affect as quickly and efectively as possible. We cannot allow this to be the only piece of major legislation to be introduced that pushes these ideals. We are looking for a path, not just a first step. Let Obama’s campaign message be ‘re-elect me, return the Congress to the hands of the sane, and we can pass these bills within the first six months of the new administration’. In the next twelve months it is our job, the people’s job, to show Obama that not only is this the way for him to rebuild his connection with the people he is supposed to be representing, but the way to win the election. This is not about trying to blackmail the President into endorsing massive progressive reforms. This is about reminding him what the average American actually wants. That means that a massive effort must be put into popular civic action over the next twelve months and that we must be willing, once more, to have the audacity of hope in Barak Hussein Obama.
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