As the Obama agenda slowly crash lands, many in the liberal community are seeing their hopes go along with it – causing them to strike out in, what I think, several wrong directions.Liberal blogs flash headlines across their sites identifying the latest turncoat Democrats: enemies of the state; traitors to Obama’s administration. I too have been guilty of this, even starting this blog with a letter to Senator Lieberman attacking him for his destruction of the Senate’s healthcare reform bill. But I’d like to take a nuanced opinion of this in the future as more and more becomes obvious to me about the status quo of our country and how fiercely it is protected. It’s true, Senators like Lieberman, Nelson, Landrieu, and Lincoln should have the full force of the Left’s anger and those aforementioned liberal blogs are right in attacking them. However, it’s the angle of attack and source of the anger that I’ve decided needs to change.
We need to first understand that the Obama administration is not a progressive government. Obama, whatever his personal politics may or may not be, has decided to govern as a Clintonian conservative. Despite the rhetoric (whether perceived or real) and revolutionary energy he brought with him on his campaign, he is a true politician in the style of the status quo. Cenk Uygur commonly postulates that Obama tends to advertise himself as the center of whatever political environment he finds himself in. In the Democratic primaries he seemed to be left of center, in the general campaign he was pretty centrist, and finally in Washington he is well to the right of center. However because of Obama’s predecessor and the financial crisis our country is currently in, he rode a wave of very strong reformist enthusiasm to the White House. This enthusiasm wasn’t something he shied away from, either. He used his propagandizing talents to stoke those flames and exploited them for electoral gains. Now that he’s in office, it is obvious he has no intention of living up to any of this. He is strictly here to preserve the status quo and become a mediocre president, or as Howard Zinn concluded, a “dangerous president”. He is in a tough situation because of the place in history our country is in, to maintain order and stay in office he has to be seen as striving for the reforms his base demands while also sabotaging them through the political processes our country has developed to ensure nothing much ever changes.
So, when we see Republicans obstructing virtually every move the government tries to make to fix the country and using the filibuster in an unprecedented manner, we have to wonder what this means. The Republican party has become so overrun with far-right ideologues that the very image of effective governing seems to be intolerable. Why then, have the Democrats not done away with the filibuster as an historical anti-democratic relic that no longer applies, given the present situation? True, some Democrats are trying to do this very thing by claiming that at the beginning of the next congress Vice President Biden, as President of the Senate, could state that the Senate is not a continuing body, that previous rules do not apply, and that the Senate should elect rules for which it will follow at the beginning of each congress. While someone as useless as Harry Reid would never think to take aggressive action on anything, including the removal of the filibuster, Senators Harkin and Shaheen have introduced resolutions towards this measure while Tom Udall has gone with the Vice Presidential strategy I summarized above. Reid’s insistence on keeping the boat as unrocked as possible, even when it flies in the face of good governance isn’t the ignorant strategizing that many liberals charge him with. Rather, it is in the status quo’s best interest to keep things as much the same as possible! Of course Harry Reid won’t change the rules willingly because it just doesn’t benefit major campaign donators. Changing the rules might allow more progressive legislation to get passed in the Senate, where now it is sent only to die. The progressive legislation is more than likely to be regulation of industries that currently are the benefactors of those very same legislators! Harry Reid and President Obama have a vested interested in keeping in good favor with these industries.
When America looked on as Senators Olympia Snowe, Joe Lieberman, and Ben Nelson hacked away at the healthcare reform bill – where was the administration’s wrath? It was only seen when liberal and progressive legislators balked. Even now, large swaths of the liberal community show anger only at House progressives who refuse to pass the Senate’s disgusting bill. Where are the angry demands for the Senate to pass the House bill? Liberals have only too easily accepted the fact that the Senate, being the house of America’s aristocracy, will not act in the public’s interest. But this brings us back to those conservative Senators who seem to get away with everything they do to sabotage progress. Lieberman, remember, was Obama’s mentor in the Senate – shouldn’t there be some political loyalty? After breaking with his party, Lieberman campaigned for Obama’s opponent and has taken every opportunity to undermine Obama’s agenda. However, we can see now that Lieberman’s opposition during the election only helped Obama’s liberal reputation among Democrats and conservative Democrats’ action against Obama’s proposals have helped make Obama look like he’s trying to give us healthcare reform while simultaneously ensuring its demise.
Rest assured that we will see more mind-boggling failures in this administration. Neither of the two main parties have the public’s interest in mind and only go out of their way to enact change when people organize separately and independently to challenge their authority, and then only begrudgingly. Liberals need to realize that Obama doesn’t have an agenda that enacts real change and that corporatist members of congress seeking to obstruct his agenda are just working on his behalf. It’s good that we attack them and we should continue that but we have to stop thinking that defeating them will enable Obama to act freely. Now that campaigns can and will be financed with the huge accounts of foreign and domestic corporations, these parties will continue to move to the right and help to establish a corporatist feudalism that takes less and less of the people’s demands into account. Unless radical democracy-enabling changes are enacted, our voices are going to matter less every year and that many liberals are still infighting instead of divorcing themselves from the movement entirely only serves to help this become a reality.