We have let Obama down (Clancy Sigal | The Guardian)

[struggle4progress]

<This is worth a read but is rather uneven and often inaccurate on details: the take-home message should be the big picture, which the author gets right, and not the details, which the author often gets wrong>

When Obama came into office with a mandate for change, the left sat back and waited. Instead, we should have mobilised

Clancy Sigal
Sunday 14 February 2010 16.00 GMT

... Howard Zinn, the historian-activist who before his recent death was probably the wisest mind on the US left, told us he was not disappointed in Obama because he never expected much in the absence of a national movement to push him in a good direction. Zinn – a lifelong student of the American abolitionist, labour, civil rights, feminist and gay rights movements – preached that real change "will have to work its way from the bottom up" ...

... FDR's good angel, his wife Eleanor, constantly reported to him about just how bad it was in the real world of the Great Depression. But Roosevelt told Eleanor and anyone else who came to him with demands for progressive change: "OK, you've convinced me. Now go out and put pressure on me."

That's where we've let Obama down. We on the American left – in a dysfunctional marriage with a bought-and-paid-for Democratic party, tamed by leechlike dependence on "non-profit" liberal foundations themselves funded by corporations, a women's movement obsessed by the abortion issue, a gay movement fixed on gay marriage – simply aren't up to the job. We have not backed up Obama with a serious antiwar movement (there isn't any), and our Big Labour is too weak to fight for itself, let alone for the rest of us. Grassroots activism still exists, but during the 2008 presidential campaign we slipped into the habit of allowing ourselves to be used purely as fundraising vehicles. Fundraising is no substitute for hell raising ...

Obama came into office with a mandate for change. That should have been our signal not to sit back and wait for him to deliver but to mobilise to make sure he followed through. Instead, we relaxed our "Chicago muscle", the hard volunteer work that elected him. And I started my self-satisfying, ultimately pointless OBAMA BETRAYAL file ...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/feb/12/barack-obama-change-left

[Double T]

1. When 'Eleanor' is telling BO that childhood obesity is a national security threat..........

while American jobs continue to be outsourced to foreign slave wage nations, it truly shows that our do nothing congress and wh are completely out of touch with our seriously declining national security threat economic world. china has passed Japan as the number 2 economy in the world and WE are next on china's list. There are no excuses for the failings of our 'leadership' on both sides of the aisle and only when the perpetrators are removed from office in November of 2010 and 2012 will there be any hope for real change.

[vegiegals]

2. Many on the Left have put pressure on Obama, So why blame the Left?

[QC]

4. Because it's either blame the Left or blame Obama,

and we know that his devotées would never, ever do that, do the administration's failures must be blamed on the Dirty Fucking Hippies.

[vegiegals]

5. For a moment that reason slipped by me. Thanks, you are right.

[QC]

7. You were probably just too busy applying patchouli and singing The Internationale

to make the connection.

It's a mistake anyone could have made.

[roseBudd]

16. POTUS is but a bully pulpit and a veto pen

It's not pressure on Obama, that was needed, it was the grassroots bringing the rest of the country along, so he would have a mandate like FDR.

[QC]

3. If you didn't nag me so much I wouldn't have to hit you! n/t

[peace13]

6. Aaa.... I don't know about that.

After a hands on campaign where it appeared the everyday American helped make the neighbor to neighbor philosophy a success, Americans were requested to meet with friends and put their ideas on health care down on paper and send them to Obama. We put hours into our meeting and setting our ideas down on paper. We prepared the package and sent it to DC. I am sure that our ideas and the ones that other American volunteers sent to DC were nothing like the proposed health care legislation that has come from our elected officials.

The little guy actually has a job if she/he is lucky. We can't keep donating our time to have the product be ignored. There are bills to pay and work to be done to keep fuel in the car and the house warm and 'food on our families'. Congress sits in a warm house with health care and retirement plan in place for life. Go figure. The way I see it, the volunteers of America have tried to work with and for Obama but at some point reality has to set in. Just like in real life, Daddy ain't coming home and we are gonna have to hunker down and nail the tarp on the roof ourselves.

Obama should not ask volunteers to work together and fill out forms to provide him with valuable information if he intends to ignore it. He is going to have to show us the money before we sit down to our next neighborhood meeting to discuss the next topic of the day. I am beside myself wondering what that would actually be. Banking laws that we can believe in? Election funding made simple? Or maybe the next neighbor to neighbor topic should be, 'How to feed your family on $5 dollars a day'. That would get the people out.

[roseBudd]

9. I went to Change For America meetings after the election. As a group we were...

all over the map, with things that were not remotely doable. The group met a total of two times. It was a waste.

The thing that was doable, advocating for Obama and the progressive agenda by writing LTEs and posting comments refuting the smears & lies on MSM sites, were of no interest to the activists, that could not come up with one doable community project.

In the mean time one r***** with a FaceBook account launched the death panels salvo heard round the world

[peace13]

12. I hear what you are saying.

Our focus group on health care was a pretty good group. It was pretty depressing to hear about the health care that each of us had or didn't have. Our report was pretty detailed but you get the feeling that those things went in a dung pile somewhere. I am totally opposed to wasting people's time and I think that some of that was a waste.I am sure that you worked your butt off during the campaign as we did. We opened our home to house Obama volunteers for several months. It is pretty frustrating that the powers that be expect that level of commitment right on through. We still have jobs and are trying to put food on the family. I hear what you are saying about the letters to the editor. Thanks.

[roseBudd]

15. I don't spend much time on DU posting anymore, because my MSM posting is more productive...

I am writing for the moderate lurkers.

The beckerheads I mock and pwn are but my foil. I write everyday. A few before work, a couple on my lunchbreak, several after I get home.

All you need is a computer and an internet connection.

Oh and I do it in a swing state.

Send me a PM and I will invite you to my secret group.

[roseBudd]

8. I agree, it had to come from the ground up, most of us have neither the know how or time to become

true activists.

Phone banking, and walk listing are needed during a campaign, but true activism requires more than a list and a script

[bemildred]

10. Well I like Clancy Sigal, but I think he is a bit premature here.

It's still the first year of Obama's first term. But he has a good point, I've made it myself, Obama and the Congress will do what we make them do.

[bkozumplik]

11. "its still the first year of Obama's first term"

You dont have to wait an arbitrary number of years into the future to see which way the wind has blown the past year.

Whatever it is you think, the rest of the country is done waiting on the guy to deliver what he said he would deliver, and unless he changes himself a lot, they are not going to give him a second term.

[bemildred]

13. With predictive skills like yours, I would expect you to be playing the stock market

rather than annoying us libruls here.

[bkozumplik]

17. I'm a proud liberal

And yes, I play the stock market as well.
He's been in office a year, you dont need to look ahead to see how things are going now, and have been going the past year.

Has he been leading from the left? strong foreign policy? strong fiscal policy? strong what? anything?
Answer me, you know it all, what is he strong about?

right, I thought as much. Nothing.
Beer summits and holding republican hands. Thats what he's been strong at.

tool.

[bemildred]

18. I thought you were ignoring me now?

Is your word worth nothing?

[bkozumplik]

19. oh I see someone replied but I have them set to ignored now

how sad.

[Caretha]

14. Michelle = Eleanor?

Maybe it's not that "we the people" have "let Obama down"....what I get from your post is that it takes an "Eleanor".

I have an Eleanor story,... and so do a lot of people from that era, and Eleanor made a lot of stuff happen.

So, just because Obama is tone deaf doesn't mean the American people aren't vocalizing. Your artical says to me that Michelle ain't no Eleanor, and President's are and can be tone deaf. It doesn't mean we aren't yelling at the top of our lungs, it means they aren't listening. That is very disheartening.