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For What It's Worth
By David Glenn Cox
It is abundantly clear all across the political spectrum of America that there is something terribly wrong going on in America. The conservative movement has run out its tether; they have lost mainstream America. They stand accused in the docket, or should be, accused of doing the very things which their movement has long been against: massive government spending, nation building and expanding the federal bureaucracy.
They are guilty and stand naked before the public; their only option is to point and say, “It was those other conservatives, I’m mavericky!” This is what happens when the machinery of a political ideology crashes to the ground. The survivors stumble from the wreckage to claim that they were not the pilot and should not be held responsible.
In 1980, when conservatism was all the rage, Democrats and those on the left found themselves completely ostracized by the voters. They, too, crawled from the wreckage to argue, “I’m a Democrat but I’m a conservative Democrat,” which was in fact code for “I’m not really a Democrat at all but a less conservative conservative.” Bill Clinton was elected as a “New Democrat,” a less conservative conservative Democrat. The public was tired after two Reagan terms and one Bush term and wanted something different, but not too different.
This leaves us with one shattered political ideology and one obscured political ideology. We have a generation of Democratic voters who have little appreciation for the difference between political left and the political right. I’ve said it before but all of the true liberals in Congress could ride to work in one minivan, and the true conservatives could follow behind them in a cab.
The difference between Barack Obama and Harry Reid to Franklin Roosevelt or Harry Truman is no greater than the distance between Dick Cheney and Abraham Lincoln. The right exploits this by calling Obama a Socialist and compares him to Mao Zedong! Most of the public don’t understand how totally outrageous a remark this is. Democrats in Congress call themselves progressives yet vote for war appropriations and against single payer health care. Why, Bill Clinton’s welfare reform would have been vetoed by Richard Nixon.
Our economic woes rival the Great Depression, yet the press prefers to call it the worst economy in over seven decades. They count heavily on the public’s inability to count backwards, yet it was during the worst economy in seven decades that FDR proposed Social Security. It was in the worst economy in over seven decades that FDR proposed the minimum wage and the forty-hour work week and time and a half for overtime. We also got the legal right for workers to organize a union and to collectively bargain.
Barack Obama ran on a Democratic progressive mantle, but now as he sits in the big chair he remained silent as the Democratic senators from Wal-Mart gutted the employee free choice act. In 1948, Harry Truman desegregated the armed forces by executive order, no ifs or maybes but a direct order to the military to do it. Truman’s views on civil rights had split the Democratic Party. The Southern Democrats (Dixiecrats) demanded a softened civil rights plank in the platform. Truman not only told them no, but hell no! The Southern delegations threatened a walkout if the plank was approved in the platform.
When the platform was approved and the walkout began, Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey ordered the band to play “Happy Days Are Here Again,” the Democratic anthem. Humphrey waved goodbye from the podium to the Southerners and encouraged the floor to wave goodbye as well. The liberals in the Democratic Party would not be held hostage by the bigots who only claimed to be Democrats to get elected.
We have a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress, but President Obama’s health care speech offered no more than a 5% public option. Senator Reid's plan has a 3% public option, or as Dennis Kucinich put it, “If this is the best we can do, then our best isn’t good enough and we have to ask some hard questions about our political system: such as Health Care or Insurance Care? Government of the people or a government of the corporations?”
We have two wars going on, and despite the pull back in Iraq, a quiet war is still a war. We elected a Democratic House, and Senate, and President, and we now have appropriations to expand the military, to expand our activities in Pakistan and increase our forces in Afghanistan. During the reign of George the lesser, the left was active in anti-war politics. Where did everyone go? Aren’t the men still dying? Aren’t the innocent civilians still dying? Is it all just a game where we’ve got a Democrat in office now so the principle of an unjust war no longer matters?
President Obama saluted the returned dead at Dover Air Force Base, but instead should be saluting the return of live service people by the planeload. Less we forget, this was a Republican agenda, pushed, pulled and prodded by a Republican White House. The same White House which pushed fear and lies down our throats for the purpose of starting a war for raw materials and geopolitical strategy. So, now we have Democrats in control and they propose a plan of full speed ahead?
Jimmy Carter achieved the only peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state, and the Republicans called him weak. Is that what Democrats fear today? Being called weak? So we continue to pour blood and treasure down a hole so as to look macho? Hamid Karzai is a fraud; the government in Iraq are bought-and-paid-for quislings. The President of Iraq earns twenty-five times the salary of the President of the United States. Members of the Iraqi Parliament earn one million dollars per month; quislings don’t come cheap. The so-called rising in Iraq is nothing more than the payment of protection money to tribal chiefs, a protection racket to not fire on US troops.
The election of Barack Obama was due to a brilliant campaign but also due to the rejection by the American electorate of the Republicans and their conservative ideas. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney destroyed the Republican Party. When they speak publicly now, few care and fewer still listen. But the administration of Barack Obama has not renounced the Patriot Act, and they supported the Bush banking bailout. They even kept George W. Bush’s last Defense Secretary. Think about that for a second, Donald Rumsfeld's successor works in the Obama cabinet. The Treasury Secretary worked on Wall Street just as Hank Paulson once did. Rather than void contracts for drilling in environmentally sensitive areas, as Bill Clinton once did, the Obama administration claims that their hands are tied and lets the drilling move forward.
The issues of the day will not wait for consensus. Record numbers of Americans face long-term unemployment. The Commerce Department reports that 60% of the jobs lost will never return; these workers' careers are finished. Rather than any sort of government assistance, they are referred to as a lagging indicator of recovery. Benign neglect, maybe if we ignore them they will go away.
The greatest danger to the success or failure of the Obama administration is not from Republican talk show hosts, and it is not from the Republicans in Congress; it is the Republican policies of the administration itself. We see a public disenchantment all across the political spectrum not because of the failure of Republicans, but because of the failure of Democrats to be Democrats.
Abe Lincoln once said, “You can fool some of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” Republican policies have brought us to where we are now. How can sane people believe that they can bring us back to prosperity?
As Franklin Roosevelt said in his first inaugural address, “This nation demands action and action now!”
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