In the light of recent polling that suggests the voting public has turned on the Democratic Party, we’re beginning to see the complete separation of the truly dedicated Obama kool-aid drinkers from reality. It’s both hilarious and kind of sad.
There’s an old saw that, amongst Republicans, Conservatism can’t fail; rather, you can only fail Conservatism. In other words, since the cause, the ideology, is perfect and right and just, any of its failures in the real world must be a symptom that you can ascribe to its imperfect followers.
A similar phenomenon can be witnessed with the Catholic Church, where its defenders will readily condemn individual, low-level offenders while holding the institution which shuttled pedophiles from one community to the next blameless. It’s not the Church’s fault, or the fault of its powerful leaders; they were merely coping as best they could with the failures of others. Catholicism can’t fail, you can only fail Catholicism.
Now, however, as we enter into Obama’s second year, and Democratic fortunes head for the basement, we can see the same phenomenon occuring amongst Obama supporters. Obama hasn’t failed, they argue; rather, considering the cruel and unjust universe he lives in, he’s doing a fantastic job. We, the inconstant, overly demanding liberals, have failed him, been too demanding and selfish.
Just take this recent example from John Cole:
When the President was elected and this congress took office, we were losing over half a million jobs a month. Now, we are gaining jobs.
In the past year and a half, they’ve stabilized the banks, the economy, and the major car companies, they passed health care reform that adds thirty million people and cuts the deficit long term while getting rid of the worst abuses of the insurance companies, extended the solvency of Medicare for a decade, we’re drawing down troops in Iraq, we are making progress with green energy, there has not been one successful terrorist attack on American soil, we’ve just signed a nuclear arms reduction treaty and re-examined our use of nuclear weapons and we are making great progress on the global stage. Hell, the DOW is up over 3,000 since we got rid of the bums. Personally, we’re getting a road paved near me that was a disaster, and it is being paid for with stimulus money. We’re gonna put some people to work and have a nice paved road! And Obama and company did it all without getting blowjobs from interns.
And we’re going to reward them by kicking a lot of them out of office. We’re a really stupid country.
It’s difficult to know where to begin with such a distorted view of reality.
First, we’re gaining jobs? Not really. We’re not even keeping pace with the growth of the population, and the job numbers are continually revised downward after being released because, as anyone who’s even trying to pay attention has noticed, the models used for unemployment have been off for some time, painting an overly rosy picture. (This is hardly an Obama administration failure alone, of course; all administrations share incentives to understate unemployment).
We’ve stabilized the banks, the economy, the car companies? Not a frikkin chance. The banks haven’t had any meaningful regulation applied to them over a year after they almost destroyed western civilization. Other than Bernie Madoff, whose fraud had nothing in particular to do with the economic collapse, nobody’s really gone to jail either. The CRE collapse is looming, and the FDIC is gobbling banks at a prodigious pace. That’s stable?
As for the economy, you’re shitting me. We have 9.7% unemployment; close to 20%, if you count those forced into part time work out of desperation, or those who’ve given up in despair. That’s not stable, that’s apocalyptic.
The car companies? Yeah. They’re doing just great. A private company is truly ‘stable’ when it’s mostly owned by the government and kept afloat largely as an inefficient public employment program. And an industry is in great shape when it depends on the government writing checks and trashing its older products to generate sales.
The health care thing is such a farce it doesn’t need to be covered much here. 30 million people don’t get healthcare, and anyone who says so is a twit or a liar; some get Medicaid, some are shoved onto a private insurance exchange and forced to buy coverage, whether they can afford it or not, from the same killers and parasites that crashed the system to start with, with or without subsidies which are in all cases too small.
Oh, and the Exchange they’re going on is a guaranteed failure at containing costs. Added bonus, the model for the national, Obamacare plan in Massachusetts just imploded. Even in better days, when it made for a Potempkin village of health care, 20% of the population had to go without medical care due to the costs. Yeah, that’s great health coverage there.
We’re ‘drawing down troops in Iraq’. Wow! If we weren’t escalating in Afghanistan that might mean something. Trading one hopeless war for another doesn’t strike me as significant progress.
Green energy progress is an interesting concept, since China has leapfrogged us completely in a lot of green tech, and now it looks like Chinese companies may get to build our limited high speed rail and a lot of our green power too. That’s change we can believe in.
The nukes stuff… eh. I dunno. We still have silly plans for a ‘nuclear missile shield’, we’re still edging toward blowing the hell out of Iran for kinda, sorta, maybe someday being able to make a bomb. Our position on nuclear weapons is too schizophrenic for me to applaud. If we actually cut down on the number we have to pay to maintain, that’s ok. Hardly revolutionary, but ok. If we do so while continuing to stir up trouble and give every nation on the planet a really good REASON to build nukes (nothing else stops us from invading their countries at will, or killing their citizens with Predator drones, right?)… that’s not so hot.
The DOW being up is meaningless. It’s a casino, and they can play by whatever rules they want, create any result they please. If you tell me that your favorite blackjack table is really ‘lucky’ tonight, it’s the same thing. All an illusion designed so that the house, or in this case Wall Street, can take your money. The only way to ‘win’ is not to play.
(What ‘bums’ did we get ‘rid of’, anyway? The ones that retired on our life savings, or the ones that made a lifetime’s worth of money in one bonus payment for helping to con Grannies out of their homes?)
So the big list of Obama achievements cited by Cole really comes down to: a slightly saner nuclear policy, and a paved road.
Whee.
Seeing the glass as half-full is one thing, but this is ridiculous. We have an economy in utter and fantastic ruin, while the criminals, yes, criminals, who wrecked our nation walk rich and free. We have a broken military engaged in an endless game of whack-a-mole against the nebulous forces of ‘Terrorism’, being escalated in one country as we de-escalate in another. The DOW is up, which just means that more of our retirement money is going to line the pockets of Wall Street traders. An incredibly shitty, deeply flawed health INSURANCE bill was passed, which is guaranteed to fail, designed by the same fantastist/hack that designed the Massachusetts house of cards, though the actual legislation was written instead by a Wellpoint VP.
Oh, and we’re watering down the already too weak to work climate change bill in the fairy-tale hopes of getting a bipartisan bill. Instead of, you know, anything that might work.
None of these criticisms even remotely addresses Obama’s godawful record on human rights, on civil liberties, on allowing the many war criminals and torturers of the Bush administration to walk completely free. John Yoo is teaching classes instead of writing letters from prison, while Obama’s pitbull Rahm works to do away with two hundred years of due process so he can be BFF with Lindsey fucking Graham.
At times like these I’m reminded a lot of something Ian Welsh wrote for FDL, back in 2008, and revisited on his site recently:
Sometimes the world doesn’t grade us on a curve. You need to jump a fence, and you can’t. You need to climb a rock face, and you aren’t good enough. You’re running away from a bear, and you don’t run fast enough. And now you’re dead. You wanted to get into a good grad school, but you don’t have the grades or test scores. You’re in a fight, and the other guy wins, and you wind up on the ground and he puts the boots to you and you’re crippled for life. You tried “your best”, but you lost and you’re going to pay the price for losing for the rest of your life. Maybe you lost because he fought dirty, and you’d rather take a chance of being crippled for life than kick someone in the balls. Maybe you lost because he trained harder than you, and you’d rather go have a drink with your friends.
Or maybe you needed to pay for health care, and you didn’t have the money, and someone you loved died. And they died because you didn’t have the money, and because your country didn’t have universal health care. And maybe you always worked as hard as you could, and you campaigned for health care with all your heart. It doesn’t matter, your child, your wife, your husband—they’re still dead. Your best wasn’t good enough.
Now this is where America is. This is the real world.
…
That’s just the way it’s going to be. Because while there are no problems that America has that America can’t fix, there also appear to be no problems America has that America is willing to fix properly. And it doesn’t matter why. It just doesn’t matter. The bear doesn’t care why you couldn’t run fast enough when it mauls you to death. When the economy finally goes into full bore collapse, when all the bills come due and everyone decides to stop paying Americans to consume, it won’t matter why Americans thought they could suspend the economic laws of gravity forever and live beyond their means for decades.
It just won’t matter. You can either do what it takes to fix the problems or you can’t. If it’s true that you can’t, then I quite seriously, sadly, and with utmost sincerity suggest that you either start learning how to survive in a societal meltdown, or you get out, or you hope that your number comes up in the next few years so you don’t have to pay the bill that comes due when people think they can live in fantasy land, on credit, forever.
America elected Barack Obama. He’ll have, essentially, two chances to fix things. He’s failing the first one already, with his botched stimulus bill and that’s going to be disastrous. If he fails the second one, that’ll be catastrophe.
We’re witnessing that second failure now. This healthcare bill, and the entire year he spent slaving away on it, is a complete and utter loss. A blow to American values, to liberty, in favor of corporate rent-seeking private insurance scumbags. His political capital is mostly spent, his chance to do something dramatic to pull us out of our decline before the next wave of financial skullduggery buries us all but lost.
As Ian says, the ‘why’ doesn’t matter. Not one fucking bit. It doesn’t matter if he did it out of a naive, kumbaya, go-along-to-get-along strategy with the Republicans, trying to curry favor, to be civil, to win people over. It doesn’t matter if these mistakes were made out of some misguided neoliberal ideology, or if they were a calculated step toward some conception of progress, the ‘best’ we could achieve now. It doesn’t matter if the Democrat-run Senate is an utter cesspool of narcissism and graft, being paid very handsomely to thwart any real progrss. None of that matters.
Here’s what matters: We have a broken economy, a broken military, an utterly shattered health care system, a sickly, aging, exhausted population and a planet teetering on the verge of ecological collapse. We have obvious solutions to our problems that we have not, and perhaps cannot, take, and the reasons, aka the excuses for inaction, are both tedious and irrelevant. Obama inherited a ton of problems; no shit. He also helped create a ton of others, and has personally done more damage to the Constitution than Nixon ever dreamed.
The failure is manifest. Life isn’t grading us on a curve. We don’t get bonus points because 20-something percent of our country is clinically insane and would vote Sarah Palin for Empress of Conservaland.
And neither should President Obama.
