I had delayed this writing even in the wake of Bernanke confirmation developments, spending freeze announcements and other news from the Obama administration in order to see the State of the Union speech. I sort of resent President Obama’s speaking skills as it makes disagreeing with him rather difficult. I often found myself smiling and nodding my head during the speech only to realize later that not much had actually been said. Obama loves to stay above all the controversy and get his hands dirty as little as possible, which in these times is becoming steadily more unacceptable. His ambiguity during the healthcare debate allowed for 4 different bills to be drafted and his inability to close ranks made it simple for Lieberman to hack away at any chance for a reasonable bill. Indeed, the bill came to look more and more like the deals Obama had made with industry at the outset and makes Lieberman look more like a henchman of Obama’s rather than a stray wandering from the pack. I’m happy that House progressives had stood against the Senate’s bill and hope that rumors of a “sidecar” reconciliation fix are realized to make passage of the Senate bill tolerable. Where the bill was discussed last night, Mr. Obama made sure never to mention the names of those who have fought progress and didn’t mentioned any specifics of what the bill(s) should require. Again he is keeping his hands clean and letting congress fight it out for him.
One thing the President’s speech did was to increase my dislike of the Senate. Again and again, Obama announced that key measures of his agenda had been passed by the House and were slowly dying in the Senate. As it stands now, the Senate only represents the aristocracy and corporate interests of the world (now foreign companies can get in on the fun too). Each time the President mentioned a good bill that had passed the House I knew that once it was debated on the Senate floor that it would be obstructed by Republicans and hacked away at by corporatist Democrats. My frustration reminded me of an article Matthew Yglesias wrote last year that spoke of a unicameral legislative branch for the United States. In it, Yglesias writes, “we would now have passed both a comprehensive health care reform bill and also the most important piece of environmental legislation in the history of the world.” I can also add the jobs bill the President also mentioned in his speech, which has also passed the House but not the Senate. It makes me long for either a dramatic restructuring of the Senate or a complete dismantling thereof. That a state such as Connecticut, with about 1% of the country’s population, is able to send a single person into the Senate who has the ability to mutilate a bill demanded not only by his or her own constituents but by large majorities across the country is supremely undemocratic. Andrew Sullivan has created an imaginary map showing what states would look like if the Senate were based on population rather than land, which I find rather fascinating considering my love of alternative-history.
President Obama also took the time to discuss his planned “freeze”. So disappointing was this announcement, as I can recall Senator Obama debating Senator McCain on this very issue, calling it the use of “a hatchet where you need a scalpel.” Economists everywhere have denounced spending freezes during a recession. Rest assured fellow Americans, our ability to build bombs and instruments of death will not be affected by this as defense spending will not be touched. Even while we spend more than the rest of the world combined on defense and every defense analyst can find gobs of wasteful spending in the Pentagon, scared Democrats will not think to touch its precious spending. Paul Krugman calls the freeze, “appalling on every level” and a “pure disaster.” Just last week the Democrats were calling such spending freezes “fiscal snakeoil”, which begs the question, who is in charge of Democratic messaging because they need to be fired. The Obama administration has been quick to point out that it is less of a freeze and more of a cap on spending. Why then are you using the right’s language, reinforcing their failed ideas, and embracing their framing of the debate!? You are only now making it easier for Republicans to campaign on a giant “I told you so!” campaign and the past decade should have shown you enough lessons that using Republican frames only results in more Republican being elected.
The polls of the Massachusetts special election should have showed the Obama administration that voters were protesting his lack of action on important issues and not that he was being too liberal and in fact wanted more progressive action. However, as evident from the President’s recent behavior we can see that he will now be running ever further to the right in the panicked motion that nearly all Democrats have become used to doing. After calling liberals “fucking retarded“, one has little wonder for what Rahm Emmanuel is cheering the president to do. Without his progressive base in 2012, Obama may just get his wish of being a one term president. If the Senate will allow a 50 vote yes-or-no confirmation of Ben Bernanke, the man in charge at the beginning of our financial crisis, but not on healthcare reform; and while he camouflages himself in Republican language what is he doing exactly to differentiate himself?
This week we lost leftist author Howard Zinn. It is sad that one of his last public writings was in this week’s issue of The Nation in which he wrote that finding a highlight to Obama’s first year in office has been “hard” and that “Obama is going to be a mediocre president – which means, in our time, a dangerous president.” If this first year is any indication of what the next three have in store, I fear Mr. Zinn may be very right.