With President Obama pushing a huge troop escalation in Afghanistan, history may well repeat itself with a vengeance. And it's not just the apt comparison to LBJ, who destroyed his presidency on the battlefields of Vietnam with an escalation that delivered power to Nixon and the GOP.
There's another frightening parallel: Obama seems to be following in the footsteps of Bill Clinton, who accomplished perhaps his single biggest legislative "triumph" -- NAFTA -- thanks to an alliance with Republicans that overcame strong Democratic and grassroots opposition.
It was 16 years ago this month when Clinton assembled his coalition with the GOP to bulldoze public skepticism about the trade treaty and overpower a stop-NAFTA movement led by unions, environmentalists and consumer rights groups. How did Clinton win his majority in Congress? With the votes of almost 80 percent of GOP senators and nearly 70 percent of House Republicans. Democrats in the House voted against NAFTA by more than 3 to 2, with fierce opponents including the Democratic majority leader and majority whip.
To get a majority today in Congress on Afghanistan, the Obama White House is apparently bent on a strategy replicating the tragic farce that Clinton pulled off: Ignore the informed doubts of your own party while making common cause with extremist Republicans who never accepted your presidency in the first place.
"Deather" conspiracists are not new to the Grand Old Party. Clinton engendered a similar loathing on the right despite his centrist, corporate-friendly policies. When conservative Republican leaders like Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey delivered to Clinton (and corporate elites) the NAFTA victory, it didn't slow down right-wing operatives who circulated wacky videos accusing Clinton death squads of murdering reporters and others.
For those who elected Obama, it's important to remember the downward spiral that was accelerated by Clinton's GOP alliance to pass NAFTA. It should set off alarm bells for us today on Afghanistan.
NAFTA was quickly followed by the debacle of Clinton health care "reform" largely drafted by giant insurance companies, which was followed by a stunning election defeat for Congressional Democrats in November 1994, as progressive and labor activists were lethargic while right-wing activists in overdrive put Gingrich into the Speaker's chair.
A year later, advised by his chief political strategist Dick Morris (yes, the Obama-basher now at Fox), Clinton declared: "The era of big government is over." In the coming years, Clinton proved that the era of big business was far from over -- working with Republican leaders to grant corporate welfare to media conglomerates (1996 Telecom Act) and investment banks (1999 abolition of the Glass-Steagall Act).
Today, it's crucial to ask where Obama is heading. From the stimulus to health care, he's shown a Clinton-like willingness to roll over progressives in Congress on his way to corrupt legislation and frantic efforts to compromise for the votes of corporate Democrats or "moderate" Republicans. Meanwhile, the incredible shrinking "public option" has become a sick joke.
As he glides from retreats on civil liberties to health reform that appeases corporate interests to his Bush-like pledge this week to "finish the job" in Afghanistan, an Obama reliance on Congressional Republicans to fund his troop escalation could be the final straw in disorienting and demobilizing the progressive activists who elected him a year ago.
Throughout the centuries, no foreign power has been able to "finish the job" in Afghanistan, but President Obama thinks he's a tough enough Commander-in-Chief to do it. Too bad he hasn't demonstrated such toughness in the face of obstructionist Republicans and corporate lobbyists. For them, it's been more like "compromiser-in-chief."
When you start in the center (on, say, health care or Afghanistan) and readily move rightward several steps to appease right-wing politicians or lobbyists or generals, by definition you are governing as a conservative.
It's been a gradual descent from the elation and hope for real change many Americans felt on election night, November 2008. For some of us who'd scrutinized the Clinton White House in the early 1990s, the buzz was killed days after Obama's election when he chose his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, a top Clinton strategist and architect of the alliance that pushed NAFTA through Congress.
If Obama stands tough on more troops to Afghanistan (as Clinton fought ferociously for NAFTA), only an unprecedented mobilization of progressives -- including many who worked tirelessly to elect Obama -- will be able to stop him. Trust me: The Republicans who yell and scream about Obama budget deficits when they're obstructing public health care will become deficit doves in spending the estimated $1 million per year per new soldier (not to mention private contractors) headed off to Asia.
The only good news I can see: Maybe it will take a White House/GOP alliance over Afghanistan to wake up the base of liberal groups (like MoveOn) to take a closer and more critical look at President Obama's policies.
Jeff Cohen is an associate professor of journalism at Ithaca College and former board member of Progressive Democrats of America.
Follow Jeff Cohen on Twitter: www.twitter.com/jeffcot
currently it seems progressives are going the way of dinosaurs and actual conservatives. i think the last real conservative died in the 40s. any conservative concerned with dark ages religious social issues (the antis, like gay rights, women's rights, et al) obviously isn't very conservative.
Compromising is the only way we are going to get anything done. Who cares if an idea is progressive or conservative. All I really give a crap about is that it's good. Now that Obama has given the GOP a nice Q&A lashing I think the Dem's need one to.
Sometime's its like no one on either side has ever negotiated anything with anyone else outside of politics. Every decision that you make that effects people other then yourself has to be negotiated with the people it will effect and they might not agree with you so you have to accommodate their needs as well.
Why don't we expect politics to work the same way? The GOP is not all bad its just that they are stuck behind this wall of partisanship, judging by the tone of this article it appears so are we.
Well... I am no longer going to behave that way. We can't expect the GOP to changes their ways if we don't
I would LOVE to see all of YOU take on the job that this president is tackling. He has had to wipe up the biggest bowel movement in the history of this country...and he's still wiping it up before he can get down to actually scrubbing and cleaning everything.
Our guy is in.
He has, actually, brought up some crucial progressive programs. Some were kicked off with executive statements, others wait on legislation. It is ridiculous to think everything should have been done yesterday. That would have been best, but after fourteen years of yesterdays since the Republicans took the Congress, a start is as much as could be expected. Don't blame our guy for yesterday, but admit it, progressives disagree among themselves.
The Republicans agree: They give the President an 80% negative rating.
Why, one wonders, is American politics today so desultory? Gone are eloquent Republicans who can invoke Edmund Burke. Gone are Lincolnesque Democrats (ala Adlai Stevenson or George McGovern) who can powerfully (and wittily) argue for social equity and fairness at home and abroad.
One needn't be a Marxist to appreciate Marx's brilliant summation of the power of money to purchase completely unreal false impressions:
Money "confounds and confuses ... [and turns] upside-down...all natural and human qualities. He who can buy bravery is brave, though he be a coward. ... Assume...relationship[s] to...be...human...: then you can exchange love only for love, trust for trust, etc. If you want to enjoy art, you must be an artistically cultivated person; if you want to exercise influence over other people, you must be a person with a stimulating and encouraging effect on other people...."
Today's elected Democrats are all denatured, faithful puppets of their moneyed lords.
The "good news" is that the (bipartisan) age of artifice is costing our country too much in blood, treasure, karma. Immoral extreme inequality is now straining stability.
A new social democratic party "of, by and for" the nation's everyday people is waiting to be born. One whose leaders will emerge based on real aptitudes, records, mettle, inspiring personalities and a fierce Lincolnesque commitment to public morality and the common good.
Eric C. Jacobson
Public Interest Lawyer
Culver City, California
We have now created a war in Afghanistan so that we have an excuse to continue our presence in this region fighting a war that profits only those who profit from war.
The lives of thousands of families will be shattered and ruined as more and more bodies return to the States in coffins. The Republicans will have Obama exactly where they want him and then they will mount an anti-war campaign against the backdrop of Obama's Afghan debacle.
This was a trap and Obama walked right into it with his eyes open. If he left Afghanistan the Republicans would paint him as a cut and run coward and if he is stays then the Republicans will paint him as a coward who would sacrifice lives to avoid criticism . The only way he could have safely gone was to leave the region and not allow another soldier to die in a war for profit. He should have taken the criticism and defended his decision with the realities of this war which are the loss of lives and treasure. I think the public would have been behind him and the criticism would be seen as harassment.
But, we won't ever know because Obama will not risk that kind of criticism and he going all in with thousands of more troops.
Obama is making a minimalist kind of enlargement while visiting Dover and calling the troops in what might be taken as a campaign of public education in the issues. We have no ideas how he may follow up on this.
PLEASE get a grip!
It is high time to re-read his article and readdress his question.
Other than that, the choices are limited as far as I can tell.
And as far as the Green Party, yea it's tough in our two-party (one-party) system but if the Democrats are a lost cause, what else is there?
Maybe by then enough in the country will have reached a tipping point to facilitate the break-up f the two-party stranglehold.
Or as Obama might say, "One can hope."
They all need to be defeated in their next primaries. It won't matter if they get voted out of office by Repubs. They all vote pretty much straight Repub ticket anyway.
When I read the vile, vicious and unhinged attacks against him, I become more inclined to support President Obama, simply to let these disgusting "tea party" types know that we reject their messages of hate and violence.
When about 1/4 of the country is hoping for the death of President Obama, his spouse and his kids, it's time for people of decency and sanity to say "ENOUGH" and push back.
Barack Obama has disappointed me in many, many ways. He's far from what I was hoping for. But he's still literally a thousand times better than the alternative would have been.
And to desert him completely---instead of appealing to him directly and pushing him in a progressive direction---can only help the Republicans and the worst elements in our society.
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Sorry. That's no longer an option. The President is completely in cahoots with the corporations.
Sometimes you have to cut your losses. "Hoping" the President will someday become the person he pretended to be during the campaign won't change anything and only delays the inevitable reckoning with reality. Progressives need to play hardball and stand up TO this corporatist President instead of standing up WITH him hoping against hope he'll some day be the person we thought we was. De-nial isn't just a river in Egypt.
Only the diehard Obamaniacs grasping for excuses to believe that the President is still the person they hero-worshiped during the campaign would be fooled by another irrelevant speech.