Despite Major Plans, Obama Taking Softer Stands

[biopowertoday]

Source: nytimes.com




http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/us/politics/19lobby.html?_r=1&hp


April 19, 2009

Despite Major Plans, Obama Taking Softer Stands
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN and JACKIE CALMES

WASHINGTON — President Obama is well known for bold proposals that have raised expectations, but his administration has shown a tendency for compromise and caution, and even a willingness to capitulate on some early initiatives.

It was inevitable that Mr. Obama’s lofty pledge to change the ways of Washington would crash into the realities of governing, including lawmakers anxious to protect their constituents and an army of special-interest lobbyists.

Mr. Obama has not conceded on any major priority. His advisers argue that the concessions to date — on budget items, for instance — are intended to help win the bigger policy fights ahead. But his early willingness to deal or fold has left commentators, and some loyal Democrats, wondering: where’s the fight?

“The thing we still don’t know about him is what he is willing to fight for,” said Leonard Burman, an economist at the Urban Institute and a Treasury Department official in the Clinton administration. “The thing I worry about is that he likes giving good speeches, he likes the adulation and he likes to make people happy.”

So far, he said, “It’s hard to think of a place where he’s taken a really hard position.”..............

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/19/us/politics/19lobby.html?_r=1&hp

[babylonsister]

1. "Mr. Obama has not conceded on any major priority." Non-story, non-issue. nt

[villager]

2. his administration seems to've taken a pretty hard position on killing wolves...

I wish he'd "soften" there...

[dmosh42]

3. I'm getting the feeling that he's going to be a" compromiser."

Or at least he is approaching the issues that way. The biggest item is health care, and if anyone watched any of those meetings of that Obama panel, mostly it seems about "paying for it". In other words, keep the 'for profit mode', and try to fit everyone into that. And I think the reason is he doesn't want to make enemies of the big corporations in the medical field. And most of his other issues involve making hard choices against these big corporations. As far as I know, we're still paying the 18 billion dollar subsidy to "big oil", all the while they're making multi-billion dollar profits. All the crooks and war criminals from the Bush era are still fat and happy. No threats of prosecutions there. But, I'm still hopeful, as his hero, Abe Lincoln, took a while to get his head on straight.

[amacd]

4. Obama failure to address EMPIRE

Obama “taking softer stands”, despite his “big plans” and his famous ‘hope’ for ‘change’, will end badly for very easily understood reasons --- which precisely parallel Bill Clinton’s legacy of failure.

The following was my earlier diagnosis of Clinton’s (and the Democratic Party’s) error in the lead letter to the Boston Globe (Jan. 2001) in response to their 1/19 editorial “Bill Clinton’s Legacy?”:

“Clinton's legacy? It will be as the Neville Chamberlain of the Democratic Party, and for the same reason: that he caved to fascism ---- not the old personalized, nationalist fascism, but a newer ‘friendly fascism’ of global corporate empire.

Clinton tried to triangulate corporate fascism with a slightly friendlier version, which could “feel our pain” while applying it also. He learned too late that you can’t co-opt fascists by applying half their programs for them. They will only grouse and continue to do the second half with rougher hands on the controls.

Clinton has left America without the defense of a democratic party ---- without an opposition party to the rule of global corporate empire.

Clinton, like Chamberlain stepping off the plane, is smiling to the crowd, while waving the death certificate of the Democratic Party, which he has just negotiated.”

My diagnosis is as accurate today as it was then. In fact, today the mortal error of Obama, as a popular liberal Democratic President, is even easier to understand, and more obvious, than it was for the ‘hopes’ of Clinton.

The tragic (and common) flaw of Clinton, and now Obama, was/is, to not level with the American people once elected. To not level about the fight between the American democratic Republic image which we believe in, and the reality of the deadly ruling-elite ‘corporate financial Empire’ that today IS America.

I have no argument with candidate Bill Clinton, nor Obama, avoiding the issue of our deadly cancerous tumor of Empire, in order not to scare people, nor appear radical, and thus be ‘unelectable’. However, as a tragic hero once learned, "the fault is not in the stars but in ourselves", and Obama himself, as president now, has still not chosen to level with the American people --- when in leveling he could now provide the truth, and in doing so cast out that deadly poison of Empire.

And thus this tragic play continues like some kind of absurd “Groundhog Day”, with good-hearted, fox-smart, but weak Democratic presidents continuing to try to be ‘pragmatic’, ‘moderate’, ‘compromising’, ‘triangulating’, and now “taking softer stands”, but being predictably co-opted and beaten down by the groundhog of Empire that “knows one thing well” --- how to rule by dividing and conquering.

Obama needs to level with all the American people about the real battle for control of our indivisible political-economy --- just as our founding fathers did with the people, regarding the inevitable conflict between Empire and democratic Republic.

Obama needs to have the confidence that the vast majority of Americans, who believe in the American dream of democratic self-government but need to understand the danger of a guilefully combined political, economic, social and corporate Empire, will support his goals, the American goals, and the path of ‘hope’ for the world.

Obama also has to have enough “trust in the people” (as FDR said), to be confident that the miniscule minority of elitists and ‘financial royalists’ controlling this ‘corporate financial Empire’ of death, who already know the truth of how power is not democratically shared, will find it more comfortable (and safe) to leave without violence, as the British Empire’s royal governors, royal landholders, royal capitalists, and Royally Chartered Corporations (like the East India Corporation --- which caused the real ‘tea party’) left the new democratic Republic of the United States of America.

Alan MacDonald
Sanford, Maine