It's fairly likely Obama will be the next President, and we should all help elect him or work to elect a new and more progressive Congress. And there are good reasons to be optimistic about the direction of our country. We do have something of a thicket to get through, and much of it starts with the attitude Democratic base voters have towards their leaders.
I was at a panel last week with Governor Corzine about paid family insurance, and there were a lot of bright people in the room discussing the tactical issues involved in passing legislation to allow someone to spend 6 weeks with their newborn. And all I could think, while Wall Street was getting tens of billions, is how utterly small the conversation was.
Even obvious mainstream policy ideas get sabotaged, like the paid sick leave campaign to give workers seven days of paid sick leave every year in Ohio that Democratic Governor-Scumbag Strickland fought against. Strickland decided that he would rather food service workers put snot on the food they serve than be allowed to take sick days. This is an easy question, and he didn't just get it wrong, he fought to get it wrong. And labor capitulated.
There is in fact a reason that lobbyists are more excited about an Obama administration when it comes to passing free trade bills. The progressive space is used to fighting Republicans like McCain, but Democratic leaders know that they face no pressure at all from progressives should the Democrats bail out the irresponsible rich.
And so we get to Atrios and his diagnosis of the massive crisis, which Chris Dodd and Chuck Schumer are shepherding through:
This has been the problem all along, the pretense that all problems are just liquidity problems. Until another bank goes under. Then, well, they were bad, but for everyone else it's just a liquidity problem!
Again, the problem is that lots of bad loans were made, lots of people made highly leveraged investments in those bad loans, and still more people bet on those loans by insuring them. The loans are bad. The mortgages are not going to be repaid in full. Housing prices are not going to magically shoot up 50% over the next 6 months. People gambled and lost and now the Democrats are racing to bail them all out.
Dodd, despite a brief flirtation during the Presidential campaign with an interesting new form of politics, is basically your standard Democratic Senator with your standard crappy Hill staff. And when a manufactured crisis comes to fruition, he hands over a trillion dollars without thinking about it.
Obama is no different; he hired Daschle's chief of staff Pete Grouse to run his Senate side immediately upon assuming office, and his policy ideas are built upon elite business interests, though instead of coal and telecom it's probably coal, Google, and telecom. Take his science advisory council, which actually has scientists, though two out of five of them have heavy ties to biotech. That's just the way the system is designed right now, to pull the plug on fights over social justice instantly while allowing for drag out conflicts over conservative policies, some of which we win and some of which we lose. And occasionally there's a huge crisis and the mafia gets a trillion dollars without question.
The problem is ideological, it's about the way we do politics not the policies we pursue. Progressives are as much a part of it as any other part of the Democratic-industrial complex, though people who read blogs a little less so because we're a little newer to political culture. There are no forums to discuss ideological disagreement, much disagreement is couched in strategy talk, and the rest of it is organized around arcane policy discussions that don't matter because none of the policy will be implemented anyway.
The big question on our side - the war on terror, the war on drugs, the creeping police state, ending subsidized suburban society, the military industrial complex, global unfair trade, etc - are not even on the table. We're talking about whether workers should have time off work if they are sick and celebrating laws that allow six weeks off after having a baby. And our 'leaders' are giving away fantastic amounts of resources to irresponsible gamblers.
It's the way these decisions are made that are the problem, and the architecture of our political system swaps out elite decision-making roles between corrupt right-wing conservative elites and coastal socially liberal conservative elites. It's why FISA and NAFTA were such big deals, and why the gang around Obama, where the most progressive of the bunch is Stiglitz and the rest are a bunch of Clinton and Bush neoliberals, suggests that the basic contours of political decision-making are only going to change in ways that move us sideways rather than forward.
There is reason for optimism, because we can now fight against the tide. The tools we have - organized memory, a contextualized conversation without gatekeepers, and grouping capacity - are remarkably powerful. It's a tide we're fighting, though, because Obama doesn't agree with us on the big things (like the war on terror). Either you can accept his disagreement, as many of us do, and recognize that his Presidency won't be a betrayal of progressive values because he never had any to begin with, or you can keep the pretense that America can be turned around in one shot and have your good faith approach turned against you. Or, as many of you will do, you can decide that it's too hard to hold to a progressive set of values, and decide that there is a war on terror, and that post-partisanship, whatever that means, is a good thing.
But ultimately taking the easy road, one in which you believe that Obama and his franchise of advisors agrees with you instead of recognizing that there is a wide gulf here, is a foolish path. Many DC progressives have taken this road, and many progressives took this road in the primary. It was always foolish, and it's always going to hurt the marginalized and the middle class, and it's going to empower the vicious conservative movement in this country.
We should be optimistic, because great things are possible, and great things are coming. The work cut out for us is making sure that our side gets bigger while continuing to stop the policies of the conservative elites in the next administration, while making some marginal progress in building political coalitions.
The rules are stacked against the people right now, and if you don't believe me, go ask the Fed Chairman for a trillion dollars and see what he says.
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