From: Julio Huato http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/08/02/1002524/-Why-I-am-not-disillusioned-with-Barack-Obama
^^^^^ CB: What a sensible, objective assessment of Obama. Interesting observations about the left in Chicago in the last 25 years. Here a very non-idiotic passage: The Morning After Leftwing activists with a flair for history used to debate whether Obama would be another Lincoln or another Roosevelt, those transformational presidents who guided the USA through its darkest hours. People discussed how the Left could pressure him so that he could beat the economic royalists at their game. Lincoln had the abolitionists to push him. Roosevelt had the labor rebels doing the same. But if anyone thought the American Left would have a strategy and hit the ground running on Day 2 of the Obama Presidency, they were in for bitter disappointment. Maybe it was the hangover from all of the inspirational speeches and the emotional roller coaster of the campaign. In any event, the American Left was flopped out on the couch with its party hat still on & plastic champagne glasses littering the floor. This was obvious during the health care debacle. The American Left was caught flatfooted, picked off base like a bush leaguer who had been mistakenly promoted to the majors. For all of their money, the best that the health care industry and their allies could do was mobilize a few thousand screaming mimi’s to go and shout incoherence at the TV cameras. But where was the Left? Did the American Left seriously think that they could have a revolution in health care without actually making that revolution? The Left finally did mobilize for health care reform, too little and too late. The media war was won by the Rightwing who threw armed tea parties in celebration. When Obama took single payer off the table and used the public option as bait, he was sending the Left a message. Sorry, your name’s not on the guest list. Come back when you’re older, kid. You’re fired. You see Obama was organizing different communities now: Wall Street, the Pentagon, Corporate America, the intelligence community, our far flung but increasingly threadbare imperial empire, our nervous allies and our potential economic foes. There were deals to broker and horses to be traded, but the lessons he learned on the streets of Chicago would all come into play. What kind of clout could the American Left bring to this table? Zero. It’s small size and its divided leaderless nature just didn’t make the cut. It was not all the Left’s fault though. The abolitionists of Lincoln’s time had a civil war with which to pressure Lincoln to free the slaves. The labor rebels of Roosevelt’s time had sit-downs, general strikes and at least the threat of proletarian revolution to get Roosevelt’s attention. They got their place at the table because they had real clout. ^^^^^^^ CB: Or the Civil Rights movement driving LBJ. There is no social issue sufficiently burning today to energize radical reforms. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
