The GOP leadership has been crystal clear that their prime directive is defeating you in 2012. Of course that is why they cry about deficit reduction more often than my four-year-old cries about leaky juice boxes. Of course that is why they say absolutely nothing at all about the jobless part of this so far jobless recovery. It is not in their best interest that Americans get back to work. So why, Mr. President, do you sometimes seem to play their game by their rules?
The longer the GOP can distract the administration, make it react to their ludicrous and ultimately halfhearted and damn near arbitrary proposed budget cuts, the less time the president will have to convince the electorate that he is serious about job creation. The GOP realizes that the election will not be won on the size of the deficit but on the length of the lines at the unemployment office. With still eighteen months before the next election the GOP is already trying to run out the clock.
The most maddening part of all this is that the administration sometimes seems to be letting them. How do you reconcile gearing up for the nation's new "Sputnik moment" the president spoke of in the State of the Union, his first clear and compelling effort since being elected to articulate a vision for a bold American future, with Depression-era police and teacher layoffs and crumbling roads? Yes he does talk about infrastructure and he did recently offer to help strapped states continue paying unemployment benefits. But keeping the unemployed and their families from temporarily starving to death, -- while noble -- is a goal far short of retraining them to compete in a new space race.
What depresses me and what I feel depresses many other democrats and independents is that I don't feel that the country's fate is in the hands of the Democrats we elected. I personally haven't felt this way since some time late in the health-care debate. Apart from that brief flurry at year's end, the messages, the agenda, the victors have seemed the GOP.
I had chosen to forget the heaviness in my heart that I felt during the Bush years, but the way one network, Fox, and their very small band of Tea Party foot soldiers took control of the GOP and from there control of the entire national debate has been so brilliantly seamless and so complete that some days I feel like I'm back partying like it's 2004.
The gross distortion of priorities reminds me of the way the Mercator projection distorted for centuries the way we viewed the earth. If you remember from high school geography, the Mercator projections are those flat maps of the world where Greenland looks as large as Africa even though Africa's actually 14 times bigger and Finland is stretched out like taffy. The Fox map of the world, the one they report from, has budget deficits and Islam as vast continents dwarfing tiny islands like the unemployed, the environment or predatory banking practices. Their map is unrecognizable to those of us actually living, working or looking for work on this planet. Sometimes, at my most depressed, I feel that the Democrats and the White House continue reading off that twisted and useless map, somehow having forgotten that it will get us nowhere.
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Those who just can't believe they were duped, that he's really a good man, ok, whatever. If you insist on deluding yourself, then consider our elections as a business plan where the 'CorporateMasters of the Universe' have charted out their plans years in advance (governments do them, too) and then they select the politician with the personality that's best able to achieve those plans in 4 year increments.
If you want to l!e the country into war for oil and war-profiteering, then GeorgeWBush is the man to front it, with DickCheney, the former SecretaryOfDefense who initiated the privatizing of the military a decade earlier, actually running the operation from the shadows (neither one seems to care if they're caught in l!es, are h8ted, and if history judges them harshly).
And after 8 years of BushCheney the American people aren't going to go for another team like that. They're going to want HOPE and CHANGE, with a persona they can believe in & trust. BarackObama. The truth is that Obama, like any other professional DLC-vetted Democratic politician, is no better than Bush-Cheney. Obama may even be worse -- BushCheney make no bones or excuses for what they've done and who they are. Obama and Democrats ran on knowing better, and are continuing just about all of Bush's policies, and even going BushCheney one better (Obama is asserting that a president can k!ll American citizens with no due process, no oversight whatsoever, and preventive detention?!?! Pure Kafka).
Obama's 'most ardent admirers' just like the packaging better. I'm not talking skin color, although that may be a factor for some of them; I'm talking about how a 'D' after the name is a brand they trust believe and trust in, despite the fact that it's the same 'soap' (product).
Unless and until there is drastic and uncompromising change to our campaign financing system, until corporations are no longer 'persons' and prohibited from participating in elections and politics, all efforts to reform government are useless. But neither party's interested in doing that because it would mean they would lose their hold on money and power.
Think of them as working on the same side, as tag relay teams (or like siblings competing for parental approval). 'Good cop/bad cop'. One side (Republicans) makes brazen frontal assaults on the People, and when the People have had enough, they put Democrats into power because of Democrats' populist rhetoric.
Once in power, Democrats consolidate Republicans' gains from previous years, continue on with Republican policies but renamed, with new advertising campaigns. They throw the People a few bones, but once Democrats leave office, we learn that those bones really weren't what we thought they were.
Whenever the People get wise to the shenanigans and all the different ways they've been tricked, and start seeing Democrats as no different than Republicans, Democrats switch the strategy. They invent new reasons for failing to achieve the People's business.
Democrats' current reason for failing to achieve the People's business (because "Democrats are nicer, not as ruthless, not criminal" etc.) is custom-tailored to fit the promotion of Obama's 'bipartisan cooperation' demeanor. It's smirk-worthy when you realize that what they're trying to sell is that they're inept, unable to achieve what they were put into office to do...And their ineptitude, like that's somehow "a good thing".
If the Bush years taught us anything, it's that anyone can sell anything to Americans, if you're stolid and relentless in your sales pitch and tactics. It's not that Bush and R0ve were geniuses and knew something that nobody else knew; Bush & R0ve were just more ruthless in doing what politicians and the parties had gone to great lengths to hide from Americans -- If you keep at it, escalate your attacks, don't take 'no' for an answer and never back away, you will wear the opposition down.
Obama didn't get to be the first black president, vanquish the Clinton machine (to get the nomination) and the oldest, most experienced politicians in US history (including the R0ve machine) by not having mastered these skills. Nor do Democratic politicians (more incumbents than ever, in office longer) not know how to do it. How do you think Democrats managed to keep impeaching Bush and Cheney off the table, have us still reelecting them and not marching on Washington with torches and pitchforks?
Obama and Democrats know how to do it -- They don't want to do it.
The trick for them has been to keep the many different populist groups believing that they really do support our issues, but they're merely inept. And to get us to keep voting for them despite their failure to achieve our alleged shared objectives.
Getting Democratic voters (and Obama's 'most ardent supporters') to understand that Democratic politicians have been taking us all for suckers and patsies is the most immediate problem and the challenge.
That lead us, both you and I to the understanding that jobs are just a play word unless both parties fear losing their absolute power in Washington DC.
If the American people put the American Party into Washington in 2013 after the 2012 elections, growth in America would start. If not you will continue to see great presentations of hardships and great statements on how it can't be done. But if the American Party is in Congress and the White House you will see a positive growth attitude for America.
why do you pull your punches?
Example, "So why, Mr. President, do you sometimes seem to play their game by their rules? " ...You seem to think there was a moment when he _didn't_ play their game via their rules... And when you write, "I feel that the Democrats and the White House continue reading off that twisted and useless map, somehow having forgotten that it will get us nowhere." you appear to be suggesting that they at one time knew that it would get us nowhere... I haven't seen Democrats have that kind of understanding since Tip Oneal was Speaker.
BTW, I share your sentiments. We "on the left" (I'm a centrist who is now perceived as "far left") need to compell that ONLY true progressives are on the ballot in general elections across the nation - that is, we have to fight HARD in the primaries - as otherwise we're stacking the ranks of the Democratic party with what are, actually, Republicans, like Obama.
Now the American culture is back to the neo-fuedal oligarchy system of Europe, where a certain few are above the law, like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, and serfs are obligated to bail out their their losses even if it means evey last one of them goes hungry and homeless.
The American culture has turned lazy, decadent and cowardess in face of a handful of kleaptocrats that loot and steal everything right in front of you.
The corporate mass-media will only allow pundits and politicians who are ready to defend the looters and blame poor people who had no say-so or voice to inspire the nation to rebuild.
Unfortunately, the answer is not removing any certain politician, per say, for it's like trying to dig your tire out of the mud, you first have to dig out the surrounding mud until you have dry ground.
This means that it's Utopia to believe that the United States and Western Europe can avoid this ongoing general BREAKDOWN-CRISIS so all one can hope for is the Renassaince that follows.
Besides the Anglo-American World Powers has had this coming for a long time, it's surprising to see that they have managed to outlast any empire before them, but like them all; they fall.
The government is bloated with overpaid workers, too many workers, too many departments of, a bloated military budget, etc.!
I’m 67 years old and I see nothing in the administration that is designed to create jobs. When is this going to happen?
I do see a Woodrow Wilson, LBJ, Jimmy Carter and FDR solutions and they didn’t work then and won’t work now!
And, your history is wrong; FDR absolutely got us going again through governmental spending and it DID help pull us out, and WWII finished off the job of getting every American employed.
The key is INVESTMENT instead of just raw spending. All expenditures in our people and infrastructure are good ones. All the rest should go. In particular, we should pull out IMMEDIATELY from our foreign wars.
We need to reinstate tariffs so that they are FAIR. We need FAIR trade agreements, not supposedly "free trade" which is unequal to our businesses and NOT free.
We ALSO need single payer health care to free our businesses from the yoke that EVERY SINGLE ONE of our "first world" competitors have shed - that of providing health care to workers. EVERY business should be behind single payer health care because it eliminates one of their greatest expenditures. AND, this will mean that they can aford to hire more people! And THAT is the real point, isn't it? When we all have a job and are buying things, we are also all providing income to pay our debts and we wouldn't be so broke.
Wake Up!
We're well on our way to being nothing but expendable cannon fodder and burger flippers.
It's a no-win situation for Average Joe—and for true democracy.
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2009/1/28/the-new-black-politics-as-an/
What's good for ALL Americans is NOT good for the rich ( so they think ), and what's good for the rich is DEFINITELY not good for All Americans. As we have seen over the last 30 years.
When they won back Congress in 2006 they fell in line and gave George Bush whatever he wanted.
After the 2008 victories expanded the majority, there was a brief shining moment, from roughly Obama's inauguration until late February with Rick Sanetlli's rant on the floor of the stock exchange.
From then on it has been the GOP on offense and the Dems hiding under the kitchen table hoping the abuser leaves without inflicting more pain.
Everyday, every issue, the GOP speaks with one voice over and over. Even on more left leaning stations, like MSNBC, which may have a greater number of liberal guests, the sound bites and news clips are all GOP all the time.
Why? Because Dems don't think messaging and framing are important. Dems think the messy world of retail politics is beneath them. A statement by Pelosi here, some outrage by Weiner or Schumer there, a momentarily awake Harry Reid here, and that's it.
The media covers the GOP down to the precinct level because these people know the value of face time in pushing their agenda.
Obama, simply, has no bench. Where are the Dem governors and other local officials standing behind him when he speaks, nodding their heads and clapping and emoting over their policies and achievements?