In this video I, as one of Barack Obama's earliest supporters, lecture him and Senate Democrats on just how pathetic their willingness to "compromise" with Republicans on extending the tax cut for the rich is -- and I offer a different way of characterizing their lack of strength, getting away from the traditional misogynistic terminology.
To win for themselves and the American people, all the President, Harry Reid and the Democrats have to do is force the Senate Republicans actually to filibuster the bill that extends tax cuts for 98 percent of Americans.
If the Democrats don't have the courage to fight for what's right or publicly supported (only 26% of Americans favor extending the cuts for the rich; in fact a majority of Republicans want the cuts for the rich to expire) when they are in a no-lose situation, they are spineless, gutless, and any number of other non-gendered adjectives. But let's stop using language indicating that this makes them like women:
Historian Robert S. McElvaine is Elizabeth Chisholm Professor of Arts & Letters at Millsaps College. His book Eve's Seed: Biology, the Sexes, and the Course of History, upon which his analysis of the use of language of sexual imagery to degrade people is based, is presently out of print.
Follow Robert S. McElvaine on Twitter: www.twitter.com/@BobMcElvaine
www.AnyShinyThing.com, A Blog for Smart Women of a Certain Age
Most of this message is really for the Congressional Democrats who confound me with their refusal to force Republicans to the floor and admit their allegiance to a "corpornation" of, by, and for the rich.
It's not that President Obama lacks a core base of progressive values. But he was a born conciliator - it is literally in his blood. From his earliest days he has worked to bridge seemingly irreconcilable worlds: american and immigrant; black and white; Christian and Muslim; working class and wealthy; highly educated and less-educated; etc. Taking a firm stand politically is, for him, the psychological equivalent of breaking his family apart, of picking sides, of rejecting or being rejecting by someone to whom he is symbolically, if not literally, related.
But it's time to relinquish the child-like fantasy of being able to hold the entire family together and finally be angry with and denounce the absent father(s). It's time to grieve. Then it's time to take care of and stand up for the ones who support you day in and day out, and call out the injustices.
If he wants a second term, he's got less than two years to make a major psychological breakthrough.