[WS:] First, polls do not measure public opinion, but manipulate it. Claiming that polls show something beyond what the pollsters wanted to show strikes me as rather naive.
A broader point is that most "average US citizens" have no firm opinion on anything that goes beyond their immediate sphere of concern (job, their children, family, home, friends, and maybe their football & baseball team.) These are the only things they actually experience, and which actually matter to them, everything else is just a buzz generated by the media machine - background noise if you will. Most people are too busy, too lazy or both to spend much time on forming opinions on issues that do not matter in their everyday lives. If they say they have opinions on such issues, it is because such opinions have been handed to them as canned food for thought, or talking points if you will, by the media machine. They do not arrive at these opinions by some sort of rational process, they merely parrot what the media spit out, and what everyone else around them is saying.
So neither yours, nor Somebody's claims about Americans being to the left or right of Obama have a determined truth function. Public opinion is like a mirror - it merely reflects the light being projected at it. Since the great majority of popular media outlets used by a majority of the US population has a strong pro-business (if not right wing) bias, the US public opinion simply reflects this bias.
However, if the media changed their bias in some other direction, the public opinion would follow suit.
So the bottom line is that if Obama administration or its supporters engaged in a massive public relations blitz, the "average US citizen" would view this administration as "going in the right direction." However, they chose not to - for reasons that remain a mystery to me - thus ceding ground to the right wing noise machine. Consequently, the "average US citizens," parroting what is being broadcast at them, call Obama "socialist" and similar nonsense.
Wojtek
On Sat, Oct 9, 2010 at 8:20 AM, Marv Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca> wrote:
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> On 2010-10-09, at 4:41 AM, Somebody Somebody wrote:
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>> Marvin: But, as we know, Obama chose to listen to the counsel of the "realists" at the DLC and in the White House who are closely tied to Wall Street and who badly misread the mood of the country. We know the effect their wise counsel has had in bringing relief to the country. Now their shrewd realism, from the narrower perspective of the Democratic party's own political fortunes, is about to be put on display in the forthcoming mid term elections.
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>> Somebody: Yeah, but given the utter absence of left-wing or working class consciousness in this country - one obvious metric is strike activity, or the lack thereof - Obama's been about as progressive as we could hope for. I mean, Marxists can't have it both ways. You can't say, oh, the state is the executive committee of the ruling class and only responds to pressure from below, and then condemn the government for not being more leftist than the average reality TV watching American.
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> Two points.
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> First, I'm not trying to "have it both ways". I've previously argued that the state does not "only respond to pressure from below" but also to the imperatives of the system as defined by the bourgeoisie, with the latter taking precedence. If the liberal bourgeoisie in particular does not accede to popular demands for reform - all the while seeking to shape the agitation to its own purposes - then reform movements are ignored or repressed. The New Deal was the most vivid illustration of how the capitalist state responds to such dual pressure.
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> The current pressures for reform of the US's dysfunctional financial, employment, healthcare, energy, and foreign policies have been weaker both because of the lower level of working class consciousness and organization and because the bourgeoisie, while still uneasy and unhappy with the pace of recovery, feels the crisis has been contained. But these pressures still exist both within the liberal bourgeoisie and among the constituencies which constitute the active base of the Democratic party.
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> Second, I don't think it's at all clear that the Obama and the Democrats are to the left and ahead of the "average US citizen" outside the party and the liberal intelligensia. There's plenty of polling evidence to suggest that, while most Americans reflexively define themselves as conservative, they favour policies typically identified with the left which the Obama administration has been unwilling to introduce because of its ties to Wall Street and because of the nature of the US political system which disproportionately favours smaller rural states. These include support for tighter regulation of the financial and energy industries, public healthcare, and withdrawal from Afghanistan.
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> The election of Obama was a clear indication of the public hunger for change and the direction in which it was moving. The administration could have built on this momentum and used its strong congressional majority and broad public support to introduce reforms consistent with the needs of the system and public opinion. Instead its abdication allowed the Republicans to tap into and exploit this sentiment and to demagogically present themselves as the party of the change to a largely apolitical, confused, and angry public which could not, strictly speaking, have been described as belonging to either the "left" or the "right" but as very volatile and up for grabs.
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> In other words, I'm still unconvinced by the talking points of both the Democratic and Republican leaderships that the American population is inherently to the right of the administration, that the administration's failure to act more decisively was because the Republicans stymied its reform efforts in Congress, and that the modest initiatives the administration took to address America's multiple crises rather than the bolder ones it avoided were the cause of its precipitous decline.
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>> Actually, I would argue that Obama is more self-consciously leftist than the average U.S. citizen. Sure, you can cherry pick polling data, but in terms of a consistent world-view and policy orientation, this administration has probably been more progressive than a solid majority of this country. Most Americans aren't in favor of government spending right now, and are even retrospectively opposed to the original recovery act.
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