What's the worst case, and the best case, that we can imagine for the next two years? Let's look at the economics first.
Republicans and the White House both seem determined to make the recession worse by reducing the budget deficit long before the economy is in recovery. The deficit commission's two co-chairs have proposed that the cuts begin in October 2011, when unemployment is still expected to be at least nine percent. The economy needs a massive fiscal jolt, and instead is likely to get austerity.
Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve's experiment with buying Treasury bonds in order to keep interest rates low is not working very well. Mainly, the policy seems to be annoying America's allies. Cheap money by itself won't fix the prolonged slump.
Obama's ill-fated Asia trip was intended to bring home a foreign policy victory to divert attention from the domestic economic and political carnage. But Obama failed to get the Koreans to agree to a (badly conceived) trade deal, and failed to get the G-20 leaders to agree to new strategy to pressure nations with big export surpluses to do more of their part to help the global recovery. An economically weakened America with a politically weakened president has less weight to swing around.
So as President Obama gears up for a re-election battle in 2012, the economy is unlikely to be much different than the one that sank the Democrats in 2010. The question is whether Obama and the Democrats can change the national understanding of what caused the economic collapse and who is blocking the recovery.
In this enterprise, I don't have high expectations for Obama. I cannot recall a president who generated so much excitement as a candidate but who turned out to be such a political dud as chief executive. Nor do his actions since the election inspire confidence that he will be reborn as a fighter.
The president's defenders offer an assortment of alibis for the epic defeat. The in-party always loses seats in the first mid-term (but not this many). The recession was far more protracted than anticipated (Obama's own chief economic adviser, Christy Romer knew how bad things were pressed for a much larger stimulus than Obama was willing to embrace.) The Republicans blocked him at every turn (yes, and he kept trying to conciliate rather than fight.)
Consider that the Democrats got particularly shellacked, as Obama put it, among the elderly. When you remember that the Republicans hope to gut Social Security, this is quite remarkable. When you add the fact that Democrats have been far more committed to defending Medicare than Republicans who want to turn it into a voucher, the sheer political malpractice of this election loss among seniors is just stupefying.
Because of the poor design of the Obama health plan, and the ineptitude of explaining or marketing it, older voters came away convinced that the scheme would come at the expense of their Medicare. Even today, as a fiscal commission appointed by Obama tries to take more money out of Medicare and Social Security, our president and his budget wonk advisers cannot bring themselves to draw a simple line in the sand and declare that the Democrats will never cut Social Security benefits. Had Obama done so before the election and dared the Republicans to match the pledge, dozens of Democratic House seats might have been saved.
And had Obama made clear that the real obstacle to comprehensive health reform and cost savings is the private insurance industry, not our one island of socialized medicine--Medicare--he might have clarified who is really on the side of America's seniors.
The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg, who has tended to give Obama the benefit of the doubt, attributed the electorate's punishment of the Democrats to "a kind of political cognitive dissonance."
Frightened by joblessness, the American people rewarded the party that not only opposed the stimulus but also blocked the extension of unemployment benefits. Alarmed by a ballooning national debt, they rewarded the party that not only transformed budget surpluses into budget deficits but also proposes to inflate the debt by hundreds of billions with a permanent tax cut for the least needy two per cent. Frustrated by what they see as inaction, they rewarded the party that not only fought every effort to mitigate the crisis but also forced the watering down of whatever it couldn't block.
Hertzberg goes on to tick off a litany of misperceptions on the part of the electorate, adding with his characteristic gentle understatement, "But why don't the American people know these things. Could it be that the President and his party did not try, or try hard enough to tell them?
Danny Goldberg made a similar point in The Nation:
Almost half of the public is either misinformed or subject to unanswered right wing narratives. If I believed that there was a chance of Sharia law being imposed in the United States I too would be gravely concerned. If I believed that most Europeans and Canadians had inferior health care to that of average Americans, I too would be against health care reform. If I believed that man-made global warning did not exist or that there were nothing we could do about it and that environmental efforts were responsible for unemployment I'd be against cap and trade. If I believed that prisoner abuse would make my family significantly less likely to be killed by terrorists, my thinking about torture would be different. And if I believed that the problems with the economy had been caused by too much government instead of too little, that my personal freedom was threatened by the government instead of large corporations, I'd probably be in a tea party supporter and a Republican.
Goldberg calls for less reliance on polling and focus groups and more reliance on "inspired intuition" to restore progressivism.
The real question is how we do this without the active collaboration of a Democratic president who is fast becoming more albatross than ally.
I am not one of those who believes that Republican missteps will save us -- that the Republicans will be disabled by divisions between the far right that now controls the party and the very far right represented by newly elected Tea Party militants. Let's get real: The Republican Party and the Tea Party are essentially the same party. There will be skirmishes, but the Republican leadership will keep its eye on the ball--of destroying Obama.
Nor am I especially hopeful that Obama will metamorphose into Harry Truman any time soon.
If politics continues on its present course, about the best one might expect for 2012 is that the Republicans will nominate such a nut-case that Obama will stagger to re-election. But unless he is re-elected with a mandate to carry out drastically different policies, we can anticipate continued economic pain and continuing drift of the electorate to the right.
So what is the alternative?
My audacious hope is that progressives can move from disillusion to action and offer the kind of political movement and counter-narrative that the President should have been leading.
I doubt that it makes sense to run a left candidate against Obama in 2012. The history of these efforts is one of failure that only weakened the Democratic nominee, whether we recall Ted Kennedy's doomed primary challenge to incumbent Jimmy Carter in 1980, or Ralph Nader's run in 2000.
The closest that the progressive movement came to realizing this strategy was of course in 1968, when Lyndon Johnson decided to abdicate in the face of mass protest. But in that tumultuous year, we had a surfeit of anti-war candidates and a real movement. Even so, we ended up with Richard Nixon. This year, it is hard to think of a plausible candidate (Howard Dean? Russ Feingold?) who could unseat Obama without further weakening the Democrats in the general election.
So our task is to step into the leadership vacuum that Obama has left, and fashion a compelling narrative about who and what are destroying America. Our movement needs the passion and single mindedness of the Tea Party movement, and it helps that we have reality on our side. If we do our jobs, we can move public opinion, discredit the right, and elect progressives to office. Even Barack Obama might embrace us, if only as a last resort.
Robert Kuttner is co-editor of The American Prospect and a senior fellow at Demos. His latest book is "A Presidency in Peril".
Robert Kuttner: What Now for the Democrats?
Robert Stavins and Richard Schmalensee: Renewable Irony
 |
 |
|
| Obama | Romney | |
|---|---|---|
| Electoral Votes (270 to win) |
332 | 206 |
| Obama | Romney | |
|---|---|---|
| Total | 65,899,660 | 60,932,152 |
| Percent | 51.1% | 47.2% |
| Democrats* | Republicans | |
|---|---|---|
| Current Senate | 53 | 47 |
| Seats gained or lost | +2 | -2 |
| New Total | 55 | 45 |
| Democrats | Republicans | |
|---|---|---|
| Seats won | 201 | 234 |
It is time for the President and his party to stop this farce taking place at the needless expense of social security, medicare, and medicaid (the latter being the one benefit that the working and most middle class elderly must seek if and when nursing home care is essential in their lives) by taking away the more than $400 billion in annual government subsidies of the rich and corporate elite and eliminating the $260 billion of waste and fraud in the defense and medicare budgets.
That’s more than a half-trillion dollars every year which adds up to more than $5 trillion dollars in 10 years and the primary and most manageable source of our unacceptable level of federal debt and deficits that the Congress should be acting upon to reduce income taxes on working and most middle class families and to make social security, medicare, and medicaid solvent.
The theory of cutting off the liberal base to please the center-right should be termed Emanuelism, after its leading proponent. The President has adopted this strategy, and as the 2010 elections show, it simply will not work.
• Obama lobbied for public option, did not cave industry. Lieberman threatened to join the GOP filibuster unless public option was removed.
• EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson announced the agency finalized its finding that greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, pose a threat to human health and welfare, allowing EPA to begin regulating greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants, factories and major industrial polluters, although the precise details of that regulation have yet to be worked out. "The threat is real," said Jackson. "If we don't act to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, the planet we will leave to the future will be very different than the one we know today."
http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1946095,00.html#ixzz15ykMC8fR
Jackson's announcement was the final step in a response that has been nearly three years in the making — since April 2007, when the Supreme Court ruled in Massachusetts v. EPA that the Clean Air Act gives the EPA the authority to regulate emissions of greenhouse gases, if they are indeed a threat to human health and welfare. At the time, the court directed the agency to review the latest science on climate change in order to make a determination
Read more: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1946095,00.html#ixzz15ykCJEHg
• Passed preliminary healthcare reform, GOP suing.
• Extended benefits to same-sex partners of federal employees, called for repeal of DOMA and DADT
• Withdrawal of three-fourths troops from Iraq on schedule.
• Phased out F-22 and other costly outdated weapons systems.
• Removed restrictions on stem-cell research, GOP suing.
• Funded broadband Internet for K-12 schools.
• $789 billion economic stimulus, including tax cuts and rebates for lower income earners only.
• $100 billion into national infrastructure and transportation.
• $60 billion for renewable and clean energy.
• Rescued US financial industry, which repaid most TARP with interest.
• Ended US water-boarding policy.
• Rescued US auto industry
• New consumer protections from credit card industry predators.
• Increased military pay and benefits.
• Reengaged in diplomacy.
• Established new cyber security office.
• Ended no-bid defense contracts.
• Appointed first Latina to Supreme Court.
• Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act - equal pay for equal work for women.
• Nuclear arms deal with Russia reducing both arsenals by a third.
• Global nuclear nonproliferation initiative.
• Passed Hate Crimes Prevention Act
• Passed sweeping financial regulation
• Extended unemployment benefits to 2 million long-term unemployed
Even conceding the validity of the dot points for the sake of argument, they still fall short of the progressive, transformational president and Democratic party that were so badly needed at this historical juncture, and who so many hoped for during President Obama's inspiring 2008 campaign.
The Democratic party is repeating history, fighting more amongst ourselves than with GOP, unable to agree to disagree on anything, and not even focused on what GOP victory means to progressives—not merely defeat but more trickle up economics and right-wing ideology. Instead, Kuttner implores us to save progressives from Obama. That, as my friends already know, is the moral equivalent of driving a school bus off a cliff because you were distracted.
In 1980, Carter was leading Reagan initially. Ted Kennedy ran against Carter’s incumbency, Carter lost. The Dems divided after Johnson announced he would not run, and a somewhat radical left George McGovern ran and lost in a titanic landslide. Most think Al Gore was defeated by Bush because of Florida and the Supreme Court, which is technically correct. But Dems who disliked Gore voted for Ralph Nader; if a little more than half of those Nader votes had gone to Gore, the electoral vote would have been a near landslide margin for Gore; we got Bush. Bush lost Florida to Gore by 537 votes. Ralph Nader’s vote count in Florida was 97,421. Do the math. The Supreme Court would never have been involved, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi's and tens of thousands of our soldiers would not have been needlessly fraudulently killed or maimed for life for the sake of big oil.
There are substantive differences between GOP and Dems, and our real choices are either we become ideological and fragmented, or we accommodate our differences with compromise, and unite against the ideological right which declared its "culture wars" almost three decades ago, and which they continue to wage today along with their "class warfare." Voting matters, it matters who we vote for, and it matters who we don't vote for.
Kennedy would have won.
When the Republicans don't negotiate in good faith, stop trying.
Democrats have been entirely too polite. They need to cut their losses and move on.
The University Party would be nothing more than a kegger.
Yes, the government can certainly spend money faster than the electorate, but can it spend it more wisely? What is needed is a massive tax cut and a reduction is government spending. Disposable income will increase followed by growth in real GDP followed by growth in local, state, and federal government revenue. Not to mention less government debt and lowering of the unemployment rate. Stop raising the federal debt ceiling and get to work.
From where I sit, the biggest problem for Dems is the hyperbolic criticism from progressives which is directed more at Obama than the GOP.
A Bloomberg National Poll conducted Oct. 24-26 found that by a two-to-one margin, likely voters in the Nov. 2 midterm elections thought taxes had gone up under the Obama administration, when in fact, Obama cut taxes by $240 billion since taking office.
http://www .businessw eek.com/ne ws/2010-10 -29/poll-s hows-voter s-don-t-kn ow-gdp-gre w-with-tax -cuts.html
That sounds like a large tax cut to me. I hope you say "thank you" to Obama.
What Mr. Kuttner, like many of his liberal colleagues fail to realize......perhaps just cannot bring themselves to admit, is that this not a country that will not embrace PROGRESSIVSM the way Mr. Kuttner and other liberals think they will.
If Mr. Kuttner and others of like mind were right, this past election would have been a referendum on the Republicans who, despite no real power, were villified as being obstructionists. If Mr. Kuttner and others of like mind were right, MORE DEMOCRATS would have been elected, not a 60+ seat loss in the House and nearly 700 in State legistatures nationwide.
Mr. Kuttner and others of like mind were right about anything, we would not be stumbling along as a nation as we are.
1. Dem policy is often compromised to death, which weakens its effectiveness.
2. A great deal of the public sees compromised, centrist, to center-right policy as "liberal", when it is far from it.
3. Republicans capitalize on the ineffectiveness of watered down policy to endlessly bash "liberals", despite the fact that liberals have been out of power since roughly the early 70s in America.
Obama and the Dems put "bipartisanship" above all other things, it seemed, and pushed policies that had recently been embraced by the GOP, like Cap and Trade (a conservative idea) and HCR (based on Dole and Romney policies). The Stim package was watered down to placate conservadems and the right in general. Wall Street reform was also watered down for the same reason.
If Americans could actually see real lefty government in action, it would love it. But it hasn't since LBJ, really. For the last thirty years, especially, it's been Reaganomics, from both parties.
People are pizzed off at the results. That's why the Dems were thrown out. They wouldn't have been if the Dems had fought the right courageously, and gone all out in support of liberal beliefs and policies. They ran from them instead.
The ONLY compromise in Obamacare was not a flat out single payer system, which would be even LESS popular than what we will get, a massive government subsidy program that will be massively expensive, and do NOTHING to actually lower costs and increase quality.
As far as the Stimulus goes........to think somehow that if only was BIGGER, it would have been BETTER is also absurd without any economic basis whatsoever. It just would have been an even larger bill for little/no return.
As far as the the financial "reform" package.....the only way it could have been more "lefty" would have been to flat out END all private financial entities. As it stands, the regulatory control the government has granted itself is without PRECEDENT.
And, your comment that: "If Americans could actually see real lefty government in action, it would love it." also proves my point.
Clearly, you don't get it either cuchlan.
Now it's the Left's turn to wallow in ideological self-delusion - and boy, are you guys doing a fine job of it. If the Dems had gone "all-out" as you say, there would be NO Democrats in congress.
Boy, you mindless partisan types just can't take it when you're rejected can you? You just can't handle it. You keep clinging pathetically to this asinine notion that only if you had done MORE of what the voters rejected you for - and done it HARDER- everything would have been fine.
keep believing that, and see where it gets you.
If every progressive who is registered Democrat changed their registration to Peace and Freedom Party, Green Party, or even better, Socialist Workers' Party, that one act would convince them not to tack further to the right, and in time for them to change course before 2012. Then, if the Dems get the hint, it's an easy matter to change your registration back in order to support all the progressive candidates the party would be fielding for 2012. Or whomever is most progressive.
the only hope is for the progressives to expand their base w/ some sort of outreach. progressives and/or liberals are too small a minority to carry an election. we can help swing one away from republicans, but we cannot carry an election by ourselves.
There is a direct connection between the loss of liberal identification and politicians who have run from the word. That loss has accelerated in response to politicians turning their back on the working class, labor, the environment, etc.
The only way to change the public perception of liberalism/progressivism, etc. is for politicians to actually govern from the left. It's not going to happen unless we get true "change" and they stop trying to be Republican-Lite.
He's been a total disaster for the Democratic Party and for the progressive side of politics.
There is no need for us to follow him over the cliff anymore. The sooner left-leaning voters find an alternative Democrat to support in the 2012 Democratic Primary the better off we'll be and the Democratic Party will be too.
exactly, he serves as a cork in the bottle for progressive change.. he prevents it, he's occupying the spot that we need a true champion of our cause in.. and nerfing it. The problem with this party is pelosi reed nelson lincoln leiberman and obama. they sabotage the fight for progressive reform. (fringe lunitic for siding with majority of americans on public option. spinning against his own base RESULT: .. i will vote for palen before i vote for obama's scam again.)