[lbo-talk] If McCain had won

[// ravi]

On Jul 21, 2011, at 9:15 AM, Marv Gandall quoted Fred Branfman from TruthDig:
> Democrats were united on one issue in the 2008 presidential election: the absolute disaster that a John McCain victory would have produced. And they were right. McCain as president would clearly have produced a long string of catastrophes: He would probably have approved a failedtroop surge in Afghanistan, engaged in worldwide extrajudicial assassination, destabilizednuclear-armed Pakistan, failedto bring Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu to the negotiating table, expanded prosecution of whistle-blowers, sought to expand executive branch power, failed to close Guantanamo, failed to act on climate change, pushed both nuclearenergy and opened new areas todomestic oildrilling, failed to reformthe financial sector enough to prevent another financial catastrophe, supported an extension of the Bush tax cutsfor the rich, presided over a growing dividebetween rich and poor, and failed to lower the jobless rate.
> 
> Nothing reveals the true state of American politics today more, however, than the fact that Democratic President Barack Obama has undertaken all of these actions and, even more significantly, left the Democratic Party far weaker than it would have been had McCain been elected. Few issues are more important than seeing behind the screen of a myth-making mass media, and understanding what this demonstrates about how power in America really works—and what needs to be done to change it.
> 
>  <snip happens>

Although I am sympathetic to the criticism (and I think there are some very good points in the second half of the piece), the above (and what followed) - IMHO - sounds a lot like reverse reasoning. The author lists things that (a) those left-of-liberal would rank higher than liberals would, (b) things that Obama has reneged on, tried and failed, or only partially succeeded at. Then he says, ergo, McCain would have been no worse.

And then adds that perhaps he would have been better because Democrats would have been stronger: Dems, he says, could have held out for a “public option”.

Underlying this analysis is the axiom that big money is united and Obama is a tool of big money in the same sense that McCain would have been. But somehow, to this axiom there is the corollary that the Democratic party would rise to represent the people via a public option demand.

This reasoning in my opinion is a more than a bit wishful.

One could go the other way and talk of the Supreme Court nominees that McCain would have appointed (given Senate Democrats's demonstrated willingness to cave on that matter), the full on crazy he might have brought to the war in/on Pakistan, etc.

I think if at all we are to play the comparison game, it would be better to see how Obama would compare to a better liberal - e.g., the FDR mentioned in passing in the article.

2 cents,

	—ravi

P.S: It is possible that the Republicans, especially McCain, might have played tougher with Israel (similar to Papa Bush), but Israel/Palestine perhaps is more representative of the liberal/left schism than any other issue. The Democrats that the author starts with - the ones who were united in the belief that McCain was a worse prospect - are at best ambiguous on the issue of Palestine and are less likely than “us” to find Obama’s behaviour problematic.