It’s the election in 2008. If you were like me, you were fed up. The current administration had told half-truths for eight years. Justifying war, illegal wiretapping of its citizens, the torture of foreign combatants and the thoughtless deregulation of industry. The administration waged two wars while cutting taxes. Previous generations had sacrificed of themselves so that wars wouldn’t leave us financially barren -the administration didn’t share this mindset. This coincided with and helped lead to an impending collapse of our financial/housing markets.
These circumstances led to the election of a young, Democratic Senator from Illinois that could get even the most cynical people to stand up and cast a vote in his hopeful direction. If you were like me, you voted for Barack Obama because you knew that a “new day” was just around the corner. If you were like me, you went to Ohio and worked for his campaign, you knocked on doors and made sure people knew where their polling station was. You saw him speak in downtown Cleveland and got to hear Bruce Springsteen introduce him (very cool). You sat on the steps of the Lincoln memorial while he was sworn in. If you were like me, you were smitten.
If you were really, really like me, the night he won the election you were SO elated that you went down to your music studio in your basement and recorded the song posted here. “It’s a new day, it’s a new day for all” are the only lyrics. I had been so fed up with the previous administration that I sincerely felt like the slate had been wiped clean and we were in for a new kind of leadership.
Was I wrong? Was I too naïve? Have we received a new type of leadership? –I’d say yes, we have. Have we received a new kind of politics? –No. The hyperbolic nature of partisan politics is horrible right now. Was it like this under Bush? My first instinct is to say, “No, no way, it was never this bad under Bush”.
It was though.
The difference is, when Bush was in office I was on the offense. I was the one saying he was an “idiot” he was a “terrible leader”… and worse. There were plenty of people throwing horrible slanders Bush’s way but the political climate didn’t feel as poisonous to me then as it does now. Why? –Because I was on offense.
I helped our current President get elected, which means now I’m on defense. Being on defense sucks. You don’t score on defense, you’re constantly walking backward and any achievements you make aren’t noted on the front page. No matter what though offense vs. defense, someone is always losing. This needs to change.
I no longer feel the hopeful idealism I felt the day he was elected, but no person could have met those expectations. I no longer think it’s within any one persons power to change our political climate. I don’t regret my decision to help Senator Obama become President Obama. I still know he was the right man for the job, I just don’t think it’s a “new day for all”. –It’s kind of… well, just another day.
btw: Still like the song.
Elderly people who have to wear diapers are exposed to strip searches by TSA employees, as are infants, unable to crawl or walk. I am absolutely disgusted by this administration. They have no decency. Obama hasn't fought for a single progressive issue, he has continualy stood back and allowed fools like Harry Reed and Nancy Pilocy lead us to crippling compromises that have rarely if ever done much service to our nation. The only fight he has led is the one to increase the debt ceiling, and if you thought that turned out for the best well..... On the up side he as appointed competent administrators to many positions in the government in general and has ran much better wars then the previous administration. These are truly significant upsides compared to the Bush administration. If you thought that Bush was an idiot than you were the one that was fooled. Bush ran one of the most successful presidencies in ages. He ran government into the ground, crippling over site and red tape. He got his war in Iraq, and he expanded the power of religion in government. An incredibly successful presidency, just not a liberal progressive one. Wake up to the vile powers of your enemies, stop underestimating them by labeling them idiots and terrible leaders, it just paints you as a fool. Obama is ineffectual or believes in nothing that he feels is worth fighting for, maybe he will change his stripes, but I won't hold my breath, I like living.
If Obama is reelected, I will be interested to see what he does in a term without the threat of being deposed. I'm really late for work and will come back to this later cgod, but his administration has accomplished a good amount of progressive benchmarks. Healthcare, Financial Reform, Stimulus package, Bin Laden dead and the wars being drawn down, Don't ask-don't tell repeal etc. Is he perfect, no. Is he better than the options we were given, yes. Is he better than the option we are likely to be given, I think so. We shall see.
Stimulus, well it was better than nothing, but it wasn't progressive. Stimulus dollars showed no significant correlation between unemployment and money revived. Dollars went to buy votes from legislators in low population states, like Montana and South Dakota that had unemployment levels far below states like Oregon and Michigan. It was better than nothing, but as far as helping put people back to work in areas devastated by the downturn it was poorly targeted and wasted an enormous amount of money if reducing misery and stimulating the economy was concerned. An obsession for shovel ready projects meant that the ability to prove you could spend the money fast rather than the enduring value that a project would have for future growth meant a bunch more money was wasted on projects that showed little promise for helping the economy. So Stimulus, it wasn't focused toward efficiently ameliorating unemployment or helping to ensure long run growth. It did alleviate some unemployment, and did build some good infrastructure, but it really wasn't targeted in the way that a policy wonk or economist would choose. Obama put very little on the line to stimulus passed, he mostly sat back and let congress fight it out, sent some cabinet officials around to make some speeches. He could have aggressively campaigned for a program targeted at helping those most in need or focused it toward projects that have a good track record of providing growth. Like I said, better than nothing, but calling it a triumph is like being glad you you finished third in a four man race. Healthcare. Obama managed to be the sitting president at the time a formerly Republican think tank healthcare bill got passed. We now have nationally subsidized insurance companies, that will continue to rake in the money by denying as much care as they can, Huzzah!!!!! Really the republicans were pushing this kind of plan as an alternative to single payer years ago, the new republicans don't like it but the old guard loved to think of more ways to transfer government tax receipts to the private sector. I'm not a huge fan of privatization, I don't believe the myth that business is always more efficient then government, especially when it comes to public services and best outcomes that can't be measured in purely in $$$. The single fastest way to decrease heath care spending would be to cut the layer of profits that insurance companies make, there is little evidence that insurance companies will do a better job at rationing care than the VA or Medicare dollar for dollar. A progressive health care policy would be a single payer system, people say that it would be impossible to set up single payer in the US, but you don't know if that is true if you don't try. Trying would entail some pretty big risks...... Sooooo... I think the health care bill is an expensive subsidy to the private sector, you may think it's progressive, we can disagree. Financial Reform, it's a mixed bag. I was for TARP, but that was the Bush administration, I'm for clearing houses for derivatives and while not perfect it's a step in the right direction. Most the progressive stuff like not kicking people out of their homes when the guy holding the mortgage can't prove he owns the place are being done judicially, so maybe we have progressive judges, but actually I think it's just the law being the law. Regulation is still much loser than it was pre-Reagan, and in my opinion not really as stiff as it could be, there are a variety of regulatory measures that could be brought back from the past to strengthen government over site and reduce risk. I like the new Consumer Protection Bureau who knows if it will amount to much, but seems like it could be one of the only "Progressive" things this administration manages to accomplish. I said before the man runs a good war, we'll see about draw down and how soon the we will really get out. I remember on the campaign trail when he said the first thing he would do as president was pull our troops out of Iraq, oh the memories.... Don't ask don't tell, a progressive move that I like, doesn't really add up to a record of achievement, it's nice to see gays get enfranchised, it was a terrible waste to let a large pool or talent sit on the sidelines. Still waiting on that immigration reform, judges ended the worst of Secure Communities, not the administration. A bit of good legislation has been passed on immigration, but I haven't seen Obama taking the lead on it (or on much of anything). Is he a terrible president, no, he's decent, not progressive, not much of a leader, runs a pretty good war, appoints competent people to run agencies, avoids bang up fights, settles for lousy compromises instead of fighting for good ones. For a grade I'd give him a B, but if you broke it down he would his report card would have a few D's, maybe enough to knock him to a B- or C+ if I took a hard look. I'm disappointed, mostly on civil rights stuff, there shouldn't be 50k warrentless searches of Americans a year that can in no way be challenged judicially, it's blatantly unconstitutional. People in wheel chairs in their 70's and 80's shouldn't be forced to remove their depends and have their genitals inspected by a TSA employee that would have been working at Wall Mart or McD's if they government hadn't put on the enormous security theater production which they have. It makes me sick, and angry. I would vote for a republican if he would promise to end these types of abuses, I don't understand why the courts can't. It fills me with contempt for our president, that he doesn't have the decency to accept a bit of risk to maintain our rights as citizen. He is risk adverse, you see it every time he don't fight for better legislative outcomes, it just sucks.
Overall, I agree. I think I'd give him a solid B.
I had no such expectations, but clearly we are in agreement regarding the systemic erosion of our inalienable and constitutional rights. There is a clear continuity of policy in certain areas that is entirely irrelevant of party and/or personality .. evident to anyone who cares to view matters outside of the emotionally framed (and frankly conditioned) notions of the one-dimensional -- left/right -- political space.
I have to agree that I am disappointed for many of the same reasons. National Security Letters are a travesty in a democratic society. I am really trying to figure Obama out. He is smart, and he can be effective, but I don't see vision behind his actions. That is the most confounding thing to me. When he had majorities in the Senate and the House, he could have let the Bush tax cuts expire. Sure, the GOP could filibuster, but he could have taken a stand, and veto any extension of cuts for the highest income earners. Apparently, he now wants to make it an election issue, but I have no faith in his stance now. At the time, his argument was that unless Congress came to an agreement, unemployment benefits would not be extended. I don't think so. Too many states would be upset about that to let it continue for long, Republican or Democratic states alike. There may have been a short gap, but if his veto position was crystal clear, and all the GOP had was a filibuster, who would have been blamed for the unemployment benefit gap? A similar thread has run through his financial policy concerning the banks and mortgage lenders. I see a missed opportunity. A strong democratic President with majorities in Congress would have split banks that were 'too big to fail' into smaller banks. We all agreed that 'too big' was the problem, the banks needed the tax payer money, he could have played that card. And finally, as you mention, when it comes to the 'War on Terror' he has changed some window dressing, but in large part, the same policies that were established in the Bush administration continue. So much so that staunch Liberals and Tea Party Republicans have common ground when it comes to the erosion of our rights. I really wish that a Democrat would challenge Obama in 2012. There are going to be a lot of people that have no candidate. BTW, really awesome post thenewgreen.
We find ourselves at a peculiar moment today in the Western world, a moment at which it seems to be becoming more and more difficult for any such "grass roots movements" to have a serious effect. It's something I've been trying to explain to myself for a long time. The English documentarian Adam Curtis has done lots of work that points at what may have gotten us into this position, even if only obliquely. In his three part series "The Trap," he deals with the way cold war game theory, a theory designed to predict the actions of nation-states that treated them as rational, self-interested individuals, filtered into the logic of psychology and found itself in a strange (or not so strange) alliance with the logic of business and Capitalism. The idea is, once we start treating human beings as totally rational and self-interested creatures, once we begin to assume that each person is going to do what's in his best interest, even if it means screwing over his best friend, they, to some extent, begin to actually interact that way more. What's more, it produces a sort of suspicious paranoia between people, preventing bonds of trust from really forming. I think trust and communal solidarity are also now limited by the decline of habit and conventional modes of accepted interaction (I owe this line of thinking to Slavoj Zizek). This has been a sort of unforeseen side-effect of the utopian liberal vision of casting off all forms of social pressure and replacing norms with the simple notion that anything that occurs between two or more consenting adults is ok. The problem with this attitude is twofold:on the one hand it leads to people confused about how they should interact with one another (formulaic Hollywood movies aside, nobody these days really has any model on which to base their friendships, relationships, or family connections), and on the other, and as a result of this uncertainty about how to conduct oneself publicly, interaction itself with those outside of one's immediate social circle increasingly comes to be experiences as an intrusion or harassment, simply because (again, increasingly) nobody quite knows when to approach a stranger or how to react to a stranger who approaches. In Curtis's more recent three part series, "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace," he discusses various attempts in the 1960s and 1970s to produce communes within the United States that did not function by virtue of any conventional rules. Some hundreds of thousands of people participated in these experimental communities (150,000? 500,000? I forget - watch the film!), but they mostly failed relatively quickly because there was no set of conventional habits that equalized the power of various personalities. That is, each of these communes became, in a sense, a cult of personality, a space in which the most domineering personalities won influence and power. The point is, some sort of overarching cultural norms are necessary to provide each individual with a truly "democratic" space for expression. In today's increasingly administrative Western world, where the left has given up on political visions in the face of the failures of the Communist experiments of the 20th century, where only the right provides a living political vision (albeit an overly simplistic and generally entirely reactionary and ultimately destructive vision), mainstream society itself has begun to become just such a "cult of personality." Anyway, this was a fun rant, but I think I'm going to call it here for the moment. I've got some things to do today.
If you have a link to the "Machines of loving grace" series, that'd be swell too. Thanks for the rant -look forward to more of them- hope the day went well. P.S. The Hubski grass roots "pizza" party is my vote.