The Foolish Fantasies of the Left, and why The W. Virginia Results Should Worry Barack Obama
The left in America continues to argue that Obama is too far to the right. They believe they need a strong left-wing people’s movement that will organize and force Obama to the real left, just as the CIO forced FDR to initiate the so-called Second New Deal and pass scores of new laws including Social Security and the Wagner Labor Relations Act. Big Labor also persuaded Roosevelt to undertake the beginning of a shift to something approximating an American social-democracy.
The other analogy, one E.J. Dionne makes in a Washington Post column, is to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which pushed Lyndon B. Johnson to favor and introduce a civil rights bill that would give African-Americans long-delayed legal equality all through the country. As LBJ said in his speech to the nation, using the very words of the movement as his own, “We shall overcome.”
So E.J. Dionne asks: “Why hasn’t there been a tea party on the left? And can President Obama and the American left develop a functional relationship?” His answer is that they must, if Obama is to be the man his supporters thought he was in 2008. He is somewhat jealous, since he writes: “The entire political agenda has shifted far to the right because the tea party and extremely conservative ideas have earned so much attention.”
What he really means is not that the Tea Party gets attention, but that it has managed to mobilize the populace against the very dangerous Obama policies that have wreaked havoc on the economy. Indeed, whatever attention these conservative ideas have received comes in the form of endless attacks on them from the MSM, whose practitioners are committed to liberal shibboleths, and as Ronald Reagan once quipped, “liberals will fight to the death to defend the right of people to agree with them.”
What Dionne complains about is something else: namely, that when Obama won, the Left stopped mobilizing, thinking that all their problems were over, and they took at Obama’s word that he would soon begin the “fundamental transformation of America” that he had promised.
Dionne acknowledges that Democrats controlled both houses of Congress. But he fails to ask since that was the case, why could he not get through the type of legislation he says now is not possible because Republicans control the House? Dionne also says Obama only pretended to be a left-winger; something he could pull off because there was no organized real Left to show that he was not. In his eyes, he only wanted the Left as a force to support his rather mild and cautious semi-reforms, such as ObamaCare.
Thus Dionne treats ObamaCare as a half-measure, which if one compares it to British old-style socialized medicine or total single-payer system favored by the Left, it certainly is. But of course, most Americans have read serious conservative critiques of the existing Obama health care legislation, and know full well that it will completely ruin the health care system we have, drive the price of health care up, and make it less accessible for everyone. And like Paul Krugman, he argues that the problem with the stimulus was not that it could not work and actually made things worse, but that it was not large enough!
Good article.
Minor comment: you wrote wrecked when you seem to have meant wreaked.
Cheers
The odds are against Barack Obama’s reelection. There are still three things in his favor:
1.) White guilt. Many people are still overly impressed with “the historical significance of his election.”
2.) The majority of Americans fail to realize that Obama is poorly educated. The foolishly believe his Harvard credentials should be taken seriously. They have no idea that the less than brilliant Sarah Palin is still far better more knowledgeable than the president.
3.) Obama is still “personally liked.” This man is one of nastiest men who ever resided in the White House. He is the equal of Richard Nixon and Lyndon B. Johnson in pure viciousness. And yet, countless Americans prefer to perceive him as well meaning and sincere. “I disagree with Obama on many issues, but he is a good human being” is something one hears on a regular basis.
Well put, Mr. Radosh. Except I have one caveat; As Obama himself said (paraphrasing) if things don’t change by his third year that he would be a one-term president. Given the recent ravings of Elizabeth Warren, Peter Orszag and Bev Perdue, does the phrase a “one-term president” really mean president for life?
The Occupy Wall Street wing of the Democrat party know that as of now not only Obama and a huge number of Dem candidates will go down in flames next November, but that the election is going to be a referendum on liberalism itself. They will be marginalized like never before.
The Gunwalker scandal is percolating even in the legacy media. Could it be that if it comes to a boil that they would use it to call for the impeachment of their own president (or at least go along with a Republican call for same), since asking him to step down would completely alienate black voters?
Something is going to happen in the next few months, and I do not think it is going to be pretty. The leftists will not go quietly into that good night – not when they have been so close to capturing this country as they have been the past few years. They never have and never will,
Some leftists believe they can only win by pressuring Barack Obama. He may or may not capitulate to their demands—but their screaming and yelling will convince many naive American voters the current occupant of the White House is a political moderate. Obama angers both the “conservative extremists” and the “left-wingers.” This supposedly shows that he could even be a center-rightest!
Thank God that no one, yet, is trying to implement card check in governmental elections. Private voting booths are the only place that most libs/ dems are able to admit their mistakes.
First, has E. J. Dionne ever been right, in any conceivable way? I have been listening to his drivel for lo’ these many years, and his predictions and analysis have not even the most tenuous hold on reality. Why does noone just simply dismiss him as a boob and a hack?
Second, Unions ain’t what they was. Because of cronyism (“my uncle is in the union, so I’m an ironworker”), laziness, drunkeness, et al, only the government can afford unions. They have been so diminished in the real world, who is going to help these scummy Democrats steal elections? ACORN patrons are, by definition, not capable human beings. They don’t hold real jobs because they are indolent, lazy, poor, ignorant miscreants. They will not be as efficient at laundering tax money to fund the Democrats as their union buddies, who are more accustomed to successfully running criminal enterprises.
The funny thing about these latest scandals is that they answer a question everyone is asking: where does all the money go? The answer is obviously to run guns to Mexico, and give payback to Obama supporters, who hide behind Green Jobs. When the economy is tooling along at high speed, noone really cares, but when everyone sees Obama’s idiotic policies making you pay more for gas, electricity, food, and almost everything else, while running your pay into the ground, people are certainly watching this stuff like hawks. Starving hawks. If the Republicans can’t get traction on these issues now, they’re too stupid to be in politics.
It’s amusing in a grim sort of way that the leftists are dissatisfied with Obama. He’s about as left as they’re ever going to get. On the other hand, people who think they represent 99 percent of the American people probably harbor the leftist fantasy that the people would support them if only the people truly understood their interests, as the left defines it for them because of course the people cannot be trusted to define their own interest.