Joan Walsh: How the Democrats shellacked themselves (Obama must now "decide what he stands for")

[highplainsdem]

http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/joan_walsh/politics/2010/11/07/2010_elections/index.html


Please read the full op-ed piece, not just the four paragraphs below.

Sunday, Nov 7, 2010 22:06 ET
How the Democrats shellacked themselves
The party has been caving to the wealthy since the Carter administration. Will anyone stand up for the rest of us?
By Joan Walsh


-snip-

The smart money may be on Obama caving to the GOP, as he did when Republicans demanded a smaller-than-needed stimulus, healthcare reform without a public option or curbs on industry profits, financial reform without a ban on banks' gambling with federally insured money -- and then delivered few or no votes for the watered-down result, anyway. I still believe Obama can stick to his guns, realizing that he's living through a depressing hazing ritual for Democratic presidents -- being stuck cleaning up after a Republican bacchanal -- and refuse to budge.

Why? Because the alternative -- Obama caving -- is unthinkable, politically. It would extend the last 30 years of class warfare -- the rich against the rest of us -- indefinitely. It would doom the Democrats for the foreseeable future. And it could throw the country back into the recession from which it's barely recovered, since paying more money to the uber-rich would make spending on jobs or any other kind of recovery measures almost impossible.

-snip-

No doubt the White House is thinking hard again about how to activate the forces it marshaled in 2008, as it gears up for 2012. That's opportunism, sure -- the president wants to get reelected -- but it means there's opportunity. The only hope for a Democratic resurgence in the near-term is for Barack Obama, who still has enormous political capital, to decide what he stands for. Is he looking to reverse the dangerous trends of economic inequality that are corroding "Our Banana Republic," as Nicholas Kristof terms our new plutocracy? Or will he tinker around the edges, ceding to the wealthy the right to control the economy by controlling politics, rigging the game of taxation, labor law, business regulation and spending on social support, so the big winners keep on winning at the expense of most of the rest of us?

Overreaching by Republicans, cronyism and corruption; the orgy of tax cutting and deregulation that led to the Wall Street meltdown -- the conditions that led Obama and Democrats to control the White House and Congress were the kind of conditions that, in earlier generations, led to periods of political and social renewal, where reformers stood up to robber barons and capitalist overlords and made them cease the carnage. The Gilded Age gave us the Progressive Era; the Depression yielded the New Deal, and that approach to blunting capitalism's sharp edges and expanding opportunity persisted, ironically, through the Nixon administration. Obama and the Democrats had an epochal opportunity to change the terms of the political debate and begin another era of renewal in 2008, and they haven't managed it yet. They still have a chance, but the window is closing, and voters are losing faith that Democrats are up to solving the nation's problem. How Obama handles the GOP's tax challenge could determine his party's fortunes, and the country's, for many years to come.

[scarletwoman]

1. I think the WH is incapable of getting it. I have no faith at all that Obama won't cave.

He's already said he won't mind if he's a one term president. I just think he has no stomach for fighting for anything -- not for himself OR for us.

sw

[treestar]

2. The voters chose the republicans

Can we quit with the "caving" crap already?

[JamesA1102]

4. True if the majority of people keep voting against their own

economic interests, their is little the rest of us can do to stop it.

[David__77]

3. It's not "caving" if it wasn't a held position to begin with.

The point is that the Democratic Party is not a progressive political party - it's a centrist, neo-liberal party with a progressive contingent.

[Xicano]

5. My favorite Joe Walsh song! Oh wait.....you meant Joan.

Nevertheless.. Ha ha!



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NU3lsz5yoU

[mzmolly]

6. I'll add to the list of great Joe Walsh songs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6lOOFJ8vb8 ;)

[mzmolly]

7. Joan Walsh is always diplomatic and

on point. K and R for a fantastic article. I hope the White House will take note.

[pa28]

8. Great piece that zeroed in on the main problem. The old social contracts are being broken.

Americans grew up on the idea, like religious dogma, that each generation would be wealthier than their parents. If you worked hard and followed the rules you would be guaranteed a good lifestyle. If you graduated from high school you would never be poor and with a college degree you were made and could expect a lifetime of middle class bliss. Thirty years of tax and trade policy eroded the whole thing and one day the curtain lifted to reveal it was all gone.

IMO if you want to find the root of current teabagger anger look no further.

Democrats have not only failed to call this out they have been knowingly complicit and the result is voter alienation and misdirected hostility.

Unfortunately for us the Republicans happen to be much better at channeling uninformed rage than Democrats. Even more unfortunately Democrats failed in their duty to swing the pendulum back from the extreme right when we were handed a historic mandate to do so.

I'm not too much of a pessimist to think it's too late. Obama will win back support if he decides to be a Kagemusha here and acts like a mountain of principle rather than blowing around in the wind as a figure of weakness and compromise.

[Catherina]

9. Rec'd

"When one side breaks the social contract, and the other side makes a virtue of never calling them out on it, the liar always wins. When it becomes 'uncivil' to call out liars, lying becomes free."

[highplainsdem]

12. Exactly. Everyone should read the Rick Perlstein piece Walsh is quoting there,

"How Obama Enables Rush" -

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-11-06/obamas-tax-cut-how-rush-limbaugh-misled-the-country/

We live in a mendocracy.

As in: rule by liars.

Political scientists are going crazy crunching the numbers to uncover the skeleton key to understanding the Republican victory last Tuesday.

But the only number that matters is the one demonstrating that by a two-to-one margin likely voters thought their taxes had gone up, when, for almost all of them, they had actually gone down. Republican politicians, and conservative commentators, told them Barack Obama was a tax-mad lunatic. They lied. The mainstream media did not do their job and correct them. The White House was too polite—"civil," just like Obama promised—to say much. So people believed the lie. From this all else follows.

-snip-

[Raine]

10. TOTALLY on point nt

[me b zola]

11. K&R