You need to know about three styles of Democrats in the US Congress, and
you need to be aware that our President may or may not fit in where you
think he does amongst his Democratic colleagues in the Federal
government. Here’s a few things you need to know about the Democratic
Party and its players in Washington:
Being a Democrat most
certainly does not mean that you are on the left, and being on the left
these days does not necessarily mean that you’re a progressive. The
needle on the political gauge in the United States has been moved so far
to the right due to the success of billionaire funded right-wing media
machines and think tanks (The Heritage Foundation, for example,
which pretends to be academic in nature), as well as persistent and
unrelenting talking points that filter throughout every news and talk
broadcast in the country. Even the President has engaged in right-wing
talking points just this past week, including referring to “entitlement”
programs as a cause of national debt that need to be fundamentally
reformed.
In Congress and amongst the Democrats, we have the New Democrat Coalition, to which Florida congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz belongs, and the Congressional Progressive Caucus, to which her neighboring congresswoman in my district, Frederica Wilson, belongs. Then there are the dwindling “Blue Dog ”
Democrats, who coalesce around a “Republican-lite” (often none too
‘lite’) meme that had been fostered by Rahm Emmanuel and basically got
some Democrats elected from heavily Republican districts until the last
election. After the mid-term elections, many of them fell to either real
Republicans or to more progressive candidates as the right and the left
moved farther apart at the behest of the Tea Party movement.
The New Democrats
are aligned with the Clinton-esque “third way” style of politics, which
appeases big business in order to get campaign financing from Wall
Street so that some legislative benefits might eventually trickle down
to the rest of us. During the national health care debate a couple of
years ago, Bill Clinton announced that progressives in America should
“be willing to accept less than half a loaf.” Of course, you can guess
where the rest of the more-than-half of that loaf should go (yes, big
corporations). New Democrats are more likely to be pro-war, pro-insurance companies, pro Wall Street and pro-big banks. The New Democrat Coalition is far smaller than the Congressional Progressive Caucus,
yet it is far more powerful because of our system of campaign
financing from multi-national corporate interests and the super-rich.
The Congressional Progressive Caucus
is by far the largest coalition in Congress, and yet its members are
the most inconsistent as they struggle to appease their own campaign
financiers amongst the special interests. Sadly, the CPC is too often the weakest coalition despite having around 80-plus members inside of the Democratic Party’s “big tent.” CPC
members include Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, Frederica Wilson- as I had
mentioned, and Bernie Sanders, an Independent senator from Vermont who
is the only senator in the caucus. Raúl Grijalva of Arizona and Keith
Ellison of Minnesota are its co-chairs.
Barack Obama had some time ago before being elected President referred to himself as more in the model of a “Blue Dog Democrat.” He had always been a “moderate” in the Senate, and in his book, “The Audacity of Hope,”
he was far less than audacious in many of his positions on both social
and economic issues. Despite being labeled “the most liberal politician
in the US Senate” by the Republicans- as Kerry had been when he had run
for President against George W. Bush- Obama could barely have been
legitimately labeled as a ‘liberal.’ Just a couple of weeks ago, John
Kerry stood with John McCain to announce their mutual support for
continued military intervention in Libya. There’s a couple of liberals
for ya, huh?
Rather than being any kind of political
radical, Barack Obama’s talent for inspiring and soaring rhetoric during
his campaign was all that had really set Obama apart from any of the
other moderate candidates, which included everyone in the ’08
presidential primary campaign other than Dennis Kucinich and Mike
Gravel. John Edwards had been the only candidate to continually talk
about the poor and the disintegrating middle class, but I don’t think
that he had truly been a liberal politician, either. He saved his
genuinely radical liberalism for his home life, and its destruction
thereof.
We may see a more boldly progressive agenda from
President Obama should he be elected to a second term, but I believe
that a template of the Obama administration has been to mimic the
success of Clinton’s “welfare reform” by moving along from health care
reform to then “reforming” Social Security. It is not the current
fiscal crises that is instigating that effort, however. It has likely
been Obama’s intention to reveal his plan to reform Social Security
during his second term. He seems to me to be convinced that his own
version of the “Third Way” and his continuation of its principles is
through fundamentally altering the Social Security program.
The
President may pursue appeasing both the right as well as those
Democrats he believes are convinced that the fundamental structures of
the Social Security program are causing the nation unnecessary fiscal
strain. The reality is that the failure to appropriately tax wealth and
to consistently fund the program as it had been designed upon its
implementation has been continually ignored. Nevertheless, President
Obama has a choice to pursue reforms via aggressively funding Social
Security or through dismantling its basic structure so that increasing
taxes and truly restricting raiding its funds for pork projects and war
can be avoided. We’ll see which, if any, approach he decides upon, but
conventional politics and President Obama’s template thus far lean
towards that latter option.
That latter approach would be a
profoundly flawed template for winning the middle and thus securing
further Democratic electoral successes, but I think that Obama is a
true believer in that “third way” that Clinton’s administration had so
proudly brought into full fruition. President Obama has not as yet been
dissuaded from pursuing what he perceives to be his version of
Clinton’s success in appeasing corporate interests while duping
progressives and the middle class. It certainly seems to me that he has
taken Clinton’s approach, however, to new and terrifying heights.
I
believe that the crux of the problem with Barack Obama and his
administration is that he believes that the only way to get things done
is to continually attempt to work with the other side, to compromise on
major, structural fiscal dynamics in America, and to always give the
Republicans either a little or even a hell of a lot. Many of his
supporters insist that he has to, and that he wouldn’t have to otherwise
but for the disasters wrought by the previous administration and its
Wall Street cronies. I think, however, that he and those in his
administration think that they’re just very smart and very clever- and
that true progressives like myself are just totally unrealistic.
What
he doesn’t seem to get until perhaps right now- as “debt ceiling” talks
have completely broken down- is that even if he gives them everything
that they want, still nothing gets done. They are not Republicans in
Congress today- they are extremists– purely venal extremists
cruising the men’s room stalls for billionaire hedge fund managers
seeking ‘special services’ from their Congressional lackeys. There are
female Republican lackeys for Wall Street and big business that are also
boldly strutting into that old boy’s room, including congresswoman
Michelle Bachmann from Minnesota, who persists with the fascistic “don’t
believe your lyin’ eyes” style of religious nuttiness in order to
distract her followers from any kind of nefarious, corporatist
realities.
Our campaign financing system is what is
leading this nation to give everything to the super rich, and the
Republicans are not becoming venal only as they feel is necessary in a
panic to fund their campaigns. They all seem to believe, as Eric Cantor
seems to me to exemplify and John Boehner has far more skillfully
practiced, that venality should be the acceptable norm in
American politics. Although I’m certain that they think far more highly
of themselves, a lot of these entrenched and powerful politicians in
Washington- mostly Republicans- would otherwise be used car salesmen in
their rural or suburban districts if they had been unable to trick their
voters with their outrageous hucksterism.
It isn’t simply
Wall Street’s largess or billionaire industrialists that politicians
in Washington are clamoring after. It is also the latest breed of
billionaire hedge fund managers they are attempting to appease- a newer
and different strain of ignorance and greed. We have entered into an
era of political venality on steroids. Billionaire industrialists, heirs
to vast fortunes and hedge fund hucksters are a very few in America,
and yet they have politicians as their captives. The American people,
however, want leadership, not simply electoral successes… thus our
radical swings in elections. If you take a steadfast position and you
are determined about it, you can bring people along with your thinking-
eventually. The Republicans know this well, and they have the
financiers funding their think tanks and media machines now and over the
previous four decades to aid in that effort. The Democrats during that
same period have been pre-occupied with their little matter of having
peed in their pants.
Americans like toughness and
determination. American voters love a good and comical insult from one
political candidate to another. American voters too often vote for the
politician who is simply far better at verbally humiliating the other
guy. Obama’s politeness and gentlemanly nature have been greatly
appreciated across this land as a refreshing change from eight years of
George W. Bush, even in more reddish territories, but that only goes so
far. I don’t believe that there will be any kind of deal on raising the
debt ceiling, for example. Obama will have it lifted by executive
order, or we may experience something next month that very few living
Americans can even anticipate.
What we are seeing is the
implementation of a plutocracy with less and less “trickle down” to
ordinary Americans, but it will not ultimately succeed. Eventually,
there will be a global effort to stop this creep of plutocratic
oligarchy, no matter how many people are jailed in private prison
systems in America and how much access to voting throughout the states
is suppressed. Eventually, there will be a way for the poor, the
working poor and other ordinary workers and the unemployed to thwart the
consolidation of wealth and power into the hands of the few, and a
successful effort to do so may begin outside of not only the United
States but outside of the first world nations as well. We’ve seen an
inkling of that in some Arab states, and even some protests in the UK
and in France have been far more vociferous that what may be expected in
America, where output from the entertainment industry is basically our
mother’s milk.
While I complain a lot about the radical
right, however, I just hate it when some people refer to the “far left”
and “extreme” positions from progressives. To assert that we have in
America an “extreme” progressive left is disturbingly absurd. We don’t
have movements and coalitions and lobbies for some kind of shocking,
frightening and outrageous progressive positions, unless you perceive
legal abortions instead of back-ally abortions; a livable minimum wage;
worker protections; a right to collective bargaining and unionization;
a viable social safety net; universal health care; fair and reasonable
immigration reforms; a significant reduction in the
military-industrial complex and continual war; publicly financed and
limited political campaigns as well as a right to same-sex marriage
equality as “extreme.”
We could certainly refer to the efforts of the Koch Brothers and the US Chamber of Commerce as “extreme,” as well as ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council,
which is just now being exposed in mainstream media as an organization
that creates “model legislation” on behalf of multi-national corporate
interests with the participation of Republican politicians, including
Nan Hayworth’s latest effort to ban the forced disclosure of outrageous
CEO salaries compared to those of ordinary workers). Bargaining with
corporate and plutocratic extremists should be seen as disturbing, not
petitioning for the interests of ordinary workers and American families.
Instead, aggressively lobbying for the rights and the political access
for ordinary Americans and for the basic human rights for anyone who
stands within our borders, let alone around the world is disparaged as
“extreme” and- in the words of a Democratic congressional aide I spoke
with last week about peace activists in my district- “nuts.”
The
financial powers who successfully lobby to consolidate public money
into the private hands of the powerful and eliminate regulations that
should protect a true concept of a “free market” have become normalized
in America. People and politicians who are oriented to the “third way”
style of Democratic politics too often perceive such financial
extremists as a normal consideration when implementing policy. Jobs,
labor, worker rights, ordinary Americans uninvolved with the political
processes- those should be a perfectly normal consideration in our
political debates. Instead, all we’re hearing about are the
extraordinary burdens that ordinary people are inflicting upon the
oligarchs. Politicians like Paul Ryan of Wisconsin and Allen West of
Florida refer to ordinary Americans, both employed and unemployed who
earn below the bracket that encompasses the federal income tax, as
“parasites.” That word references terminology espoused in the writings
and pronouncements of America’s great menace, the late Ayn Rand.
The
progress we’ve achieved by having Barack Obama in the White House is
mainly a product of having a Democrat there instead of a Republican.
That makes him neither a champion nor a leader for progressive causes,
however. Skepticism and criticism are healthy factors of our political
dynamics as long as they are based on facts and not on propaganda and
the plutocratic agenda to deceive ordinary voters. That said, here’s
some healthy skepticism for you: Barack Obama does not want what the
vast majority of those who had voted for him want. The sad fact of the
matter is that there is a concerted effort underway to ensure that
those voters matter less and less. It is the financiers of our
political system and its campaigns that truly matter, and for New Democrats
and other “third way” political players in the party, along with far
worse political hacks both within the party and on the other side, big
financiers calling the shots seems just as it should be.
So
where do you fall in? If our President doesn’t appear to be aligned
with your style of politics and progressive leadership, that shouldn’t
mean that you won’t vote for him again should he be the Democratic
nominee in the next general election. Remember, even though the Congressional Progressive Caucus
is the largest amongst Washington legislators, and even though the vast
majority of Americans want investment and consideration for our basic
needs over the demands of the military industrial complex and other
multi-national corporate interests, the right-wing and the “third way”
style of Democrats are winning. We’ve got a long and complicated road
ahead of us to alter that.
Obama had spoken out against Citizens United,
the Supreme Court decision that had unleashed unlimited campaign
financing from corporate coffers, but he is also enamored with that
style of cronyism and the big financiers, and I don’t think that there
is anyone who had anticipated that other than perhaps a handful of
political analysts. Barack Obama has little more than zero interest in
changing the American political dynamics and our system. That is what
has been so surprising about him to most observers, both the political
experts and to the rest of us. Yes, he was always a “moderate” who
leaned towards being a “blue dog,” but his administration’s
appeasement to the financial sector and to other big business interests
despite some clearly criminal endeavors has been extraordinary.
As
things stand right now, what crumbs Obama has gradually offered us are
still a hell of a lot better than whatever the Republicans are offering.
Just know where you stand, and understand where the President stands,
and don’t fool yourself by believing that he’s entirely on your side or
that your side can otherwise triumph over our entrenched political
system. Let’s be realistic. You may believe in that “third way,” or you
may believe in true and consistent progress for ordinary Americans of
all ilks, or you may believe in fearfully coalescing amongst the old
guard (a la the mostly male white working class), but wherever
you stand, you need to know it. And where your representatives stand as
well as your President- you need to know that, too. Amongst Democrats in
Washington there’s the New Democrat Coalition, the Congressional Progressive Caucus and the Blue Dogs.
Don’t fool yourself about where you fit in, and don’t let any of ’em-
including the President- fool you about where they fit, either.
