Matthias Wasser writes:
> But the DP...has a trifecta. If history is any guide they'll get hit hard
> in the mid-terms, so the window of opportunity, if they really want to
> change things, is now. The President has wide leeway to act independently
> of Congress...
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Does he? Seems to me the administration as well as the Congress is more
impressed by the power of the financial, energy and health care lobbies than
of the the unions, environmentalists, and other reformers, and that this
explains the administration's legislative retreats in all major policy areas
over the past six months.
The DP's liberal base is disappointed and restless, but afraid to mobilize because they accept the DP leadership's argument that this could drive the "independents" back to the Republicans, particularly in the Blue Dog states - an impression reinforced by the polls and the pundits. Further, the first term political strategy of the Obama administration seems predicated on splitting the Republican party, isolating it as the party of Palin and Limbaugh, another reason why it is not "acting independently" and has instead subordinated it's program to capturing the uncertain "moderates" on the centre-right of the political spectrum.
A lot of frustrated liberals and leftists, including on LBO, have been urging Obama to boldly use the Presidency the way Roosevelt did to forge a powerful new popular coalition as in the New Deal, but this overlooks that conditions today are not the same as those which prevailed then. The militant labour and socialist movements which were the New Deal's underpinnings and which drove it forward have disappeared.
So, again, the institutional context. The balance of forces in contemporary politics, not only in the US, remains heavily weighted in favour of the bourgeoisie. As the crisis evolves, this may change and the Obama administration, in spite of itself, might become emboldened under mass pressure. But so far the American public, though angry, still seems as ideologically confused and atomized as ever and this, IMO, is why there has been so little political advance. Despite the attention paid to them, politicians, including confident and talented ones like Obama, will not move before the masses themselves go in motion.