[lbo-talk] Tea Party: less than meets the eye

[Alan Rudy]

CB, I'm with Dennis and the others on this one.  Acknowledging that he's an
upwardly mobile biracial striver with strong neoliberal tendencies, Obama
had a fairly well organized multiracial population of kinda grassy netroots
people - from traditional democrats to independent swing voters who expected
him to publicly lead, publicly promote and publicly defend the kinds of
reforms he explicitly said he was going to seek in terms of national
defense, government opacity, economic policy, immigration policy,
environmental policy, education policy and health policy.  As Jon Stewart
pointed out in the Daily Show interview, Obama's appointments signalled that
greater continuity than change was likely to be the order of the day and
then - mostly clearly in terms of the health care debate - Obama went for
opaque and labyrinthan bipartisan back room deals without simultaneously
publicly advocating for anything specific (at least not until six-to-eight
months had been frittered away and his opponents had been firing scatterhsot
invective and building momentum the whole time.  I guess, on his own terms,
he's done somewhat better on the stimulus - though, here, his advisors were
far to the right of the constituency that elected him.  On transparency, he
claims that the public of who comes to the White House is a game changer
while simultaneously using state's secrets arguments and all sorts of
appeals to national security interests to utterly cloak any number of
policies and programs far to the right of the constituency that elected
him.  On environmental policy, the EPA's a little bit, but not very much,
better than the Bush Admnin and Obama only made any noise about climate
change in the few days running up to the fiasco that was the UN Summit...
and that noise was all kinds of cap-and-trady, the worst plan imaginable.  I
shouldn't even right about the advocacy/mandates associated with race to the
top... On immigration, how much support from the 95% (or so) of Hispanics
who voted for him do you think he's wasted by being John McCain-lite in
immigration... yeah, they are suing AZ, pretty weak tea.

It should be clear that Obama is a DNC loyalist through and through and that
the DNC holds no truck with the idea that there remain serious civil rights,
feminist, envirionmental, educational, and cultural problems that cannot be
solved by neoliberal marketization and the discipline of competing for
scarce resources much less with the idea that the Democratic Party would be
much stronger if they gave up on bipartisanship and fought back.  The DNC
and most Dems are afraid of sustaining challenges to Republican orthodoxy,
much less crazies.  The Dems don't need to move to the left hardly at all to
win, big, regularly, they simply need to be willing to sustain a political
fight... but they've given up, in significant part because the DNC (and by
extension, Obama) rejects the party's 1965-1985 roots in union, liberal
civil rights, liberal feminist, liberal environmentalist and liberal
education/community re/development movements but moreso because they've
become Republicans lite.  I don't believe the policies they could generate
were they to represent the people who voted for them would make a sea change
in conditions on the ground in the US, expecting that would be ridiculous,
but they'd make the kind of small differences very very important to the
American public, differences which would significantly improve many peoples'
quality of life, even if only in the short run.

I am in complete agreement with the folks on the list who argue that Obama's
problems are not grounded in the racism of whites, the racism of whites is a
part of the problem because Obama and the Dems have, on the one hand,
alienated their historic constituencies and, on the other hand, refused to
fairly, strongly and sustainably challenge Repugs and Tea Partiers...
they've chosen a largely passive and back room bipartisanship that fails to
inspire those who voted for Dems in 2008, while not even publicly advocating
for or broadly defending the bipartisan legislation they've passed.  The
proof, the election on Tuesday.

On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 9:39 AM, c b <cb31450 at gmail.com> wrote:


>
> Maybe using the White House as a "terrific platform" or
> "superb/wonderful pulpit" might work. But making it terrific and
> superb and wonderful is easier said than done.
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