Salon: When a party flirts with suicide

[tblue37]

9. Obama *is* the Democratic candidate, regardless of whom the Republicans nominate.

Are you suggesting that we should not vote for the Democratic candidate (which would, of course, lead to the election of whichever awful candidate the Republicans finally nominate)?

Yes, Obama sometimes is not as liberal as one would wish, but I still think a lot of that has to do with the mess he inherited and obstructionism not just by Republicans, but also by supposed Democrats and that idiot Lieberman.

I do wish Obama would use the bully pulpit more effectively to push more liberal policies, and I also wish he would start from a better position rather than giving too much away at the beginning of a negotiation.

Nevertheless, he has accomplished quite a lot, and he will accomplish even more if we give him a stronger, more liberal Democratic majority in both houses (not that skimpy 59.5 in the Senate (Franken wasn’t seated for a long time) that included Lieberman and a lot of DINOs).

I would like to point out, too, that the LBJ you excoriate also signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which he helped push through Congress, and the Great Society programs that he deserves much of the credit for have done a lot for a lot of people.

LBJ and Obama are not the enemy, no matter how much some people might try to push the meme that they are. They are on our side, but not perfect and not perfectly effective.

Eric Alterman has a wonderful book, Kabuki Politics in which he describes the institutionalized aspects of our political system that make real change away from 1%-er goals toward 99%-er goals nearly impossible to achieve, even when a president really tries hard to achieve what the people of the 99% want. The answer is not to immediately cut our guy off at the knees when he doesn't give us what we want, but rather to elect more and more liberals at the lower levels (state and local), and to pack the two houses of congress with real liberals.

That takes time and effort. The right wing didn't win overnight. They played a long game, a decades-long game, to get where they are now. Even Ron Paul takes a long view. He knows he won't be president. He knows he can't even get media attention, no matter how well he does. But he also knows that he is starting a movement that will bear fruit in time.

We also need to take the long view and stop throwing away our best guy just because he is the best we have now, not the best we could possibly have if things were better in general. I would rather have someone like Dean, Clark, Grayson, Warren, or any one of a number of other true liberals shaping our policies--but my guess is that if we did have someone like that, he or she would be hamstrung by the system and its entrenched powers, and thus not able to do any better than Obama has done. In fact, most would probably not do as much as he has for us, simply because he is playing the long game.

Furthermore, the USSC is the reason why Citizens United is allowed to deform our politics even worse than it was before--and the next president will appoint at least 2 or 3 USSC justices. It is absolutely essential that we have no more like Roberts, Alito, Scalia, Thomas on the USSC, so it is absolutely essential that Obama be re-elected. He is the only possible candidate to defeat whomever the Republicans nominate, so it is just wrong, wrong, wrong to strongly suggest that people shouldn't vote for him because LBJ escalated the Vietnam War. There are no other available choices: the next president will be Obama, or it will be some RW Republican yahoo who will appoint more like those guys to the USSC.

If we want someone more progressive than Obama to run and to have any chance of winning, then we must look to the future and lay the groundwork for such an outcome, the way Dean laid the groundwork for a nationwide race by contesting all 50 states, even though the Democratic establishment fought him tooth and nail over that plan and then rolled it back as much as they could as soon as they got rid of him as chairman. Abandoning our only presidential candidate in this cycle, as you seem to be suggesting, would not help us one iota in this cycle, but it would set us back enormously in terms of what we might achieve in future cycles.