The bait-and-switch presidency
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For those of us who consider ourselves true progressives, the Obama administration has been a colossal disappointment. Now, we all understand that it was going to take Barack Obama almost all of his administration to clean up this mess. That was never in question. What is most disconcerting about Obama is that the candidate and the POTUS are two very different animals. The man who spoke out against the lawless practices of the Bush administration and promised “change we can believe in” is not the man occupying the White House. It’s classic bait-and-switch.
The most glaring disappointment is what is being passed off as health care reform. We can lay the blame on Congress, but the fact is that Barack Obama has shown an appalling lack of leadership on this issue. His preoccupation with passing a “bipartisan” measure has taken precedence over the will of the American people. In the final analysis, we didn’t elect this guy to bring bipartisanship to Washington. We elected this POTUS to bring about change and, if the GOP wants to fight it, the American people expect their elected officials to get it done without the GOP. It’s as simple as that. Otherwise, what was the point in seeking a Democratic majority? Here’s a disgusting statistic for you. Max Baucus, the leader in the pathetic attempt to bring about health care reform, has received $3.9 million dollars in donations from the health care industry since 1989. Only three other senators, and Barack Obama himself, have received more. Consider this: All of the members of the so-called Gang of Six working on the health care issue have received above-average contributions from the health care industry. If there’s any one statistic that proves that our election system is poison, this is it.
Prior to Obama’s election, he believed the ‘public option’ was critical to health care reform. It was one of the issues he campaigned on. Suddenly, it isn’t central to health care reform, according to the powers that be. The fact is that any health care bill that passes without a public option is a sham. That isn’t health care reform. The insurance companies will have no competition and, without competition, their performance doesn’t have to improve. The great hue and cry now (primarily from the GOP) is that we can’t afford health care reform. That’s a crock. Let’s see, as of my last tally, the combined monthly tab between Iraq and Afghanistan was about $12 billion per month. We have no issue affording two illegal, ill-planned and destructive wars, but we cannot afford to give every American health care. Let’s try this statistic: We are spending approximately $915 billion dollars on the shadow “war on terror.” Yet we cannot afford health care reform. According to Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina), health coverage is a privilege. If it’s a privilege, it’s one only for the wealthy in America. The fact is that health care is a civil right. No less. It’s disgraceful that we are the only industrialized nation in the world that doesn’t provide health care for all.
When the primary goal of the legislators involved in this debate is preservation of insurance company profits, compassion goes out the window. According to Howard Dean, the Baucus bill is a “$60 billion giveaway to the health insurance industry every year.” He bluntly calls it, “the worst piece of healthcare legislation I’ve seen in 30 years.” In the meantime, while the debate rages on, a Harvard Medical study links lack of insurance coverage to about 45,000 deaths a year. This useless piece of legislation is a far cry from what Ted Kennedy envisioned when he was given the job of reforming health care, but this is not the only area where Obama disappoints.
Barack Obama has continued many of Bush’s most offensive policies. While he vowed during the campaign to end Bush’s use of signing statements, Barack Obama has proven himself adept at them himself. With just about nine months in office under his belt, Obama has issued seven. On another front, Obama deftly eliminated the term “enemy combatants” from his vocabulary, giving the American public the impression that he has reversed Bush’s detention policies. However, just the opposite is true. He has extended the Bush policy of detaining prisoners without charges. In fact, some of his critics claim he has been even more aggressive than George Bush in this area.
Finally, Obama has appointed a number of “czars” to help him consolidate power in the areas of health care, housing, energy and economic policy. In a blow to accountability, these so-called “czars” cannot be called to testify in front of Congress. In spite of his campaign promises to the contrary, Barack Obama has worked to strengthen the powers of the executive branch, and once again we are coming face-to-face with the prospect of an imperial presidency.
Comment by Ivan Hentschel on 18 September 2009:
You have correctly identified the largely presidential symptom of a deeper causality. Obama did not bait and switch, he just baited and did nothing. In a classic case of lousy customer service (and we are the customer), he “over-promised and under-delivered”. One obvious result is that nearly the entire country has now decided to “Bitch and wait”. They bitch about Wall St., a lack of jobs, foreclosures, too many immigrants, high taxes,expensive education, credit card rates, a lack of adequate (or any) health care, indifferent legislators and, under it all, having a black man as president. There are several ways to look at this. The first (spoken clearly by Maureen Dowd (NYT), Jimmy Carter (town hall), Eugene Roninson (WaPo) et. al.), is that the unrest over everything else has unearthed our nation’s long-hidden dirty little secret: we are bigoted (we don’t care much for women) and hugely racist( http://www.alternet.org/story/142630/). Nearly all of the other bitching and complaining is driven by the ugly truth that caucasian white America is overhelmingly terrified of having someone of color be the POTUS. So they irrationally yell and scream (and bitch) about everything else, most of which has been wrong for a very long time and was ignored, looked-over and glossed-over by an America, content to let Bush and Cheney shred the Constitution and pile up the national debt via the military. And the obfuscation is so insidious that when Jimmy Carter call us out on it, the WH soft-peddles it, the moderate democrats deny it and Rush Limbaugh calls Carter a rectal anatomical disorder on the radio (among other embarrassments).
The two-facted reason for this is that the citizenry of the US, just like the government and Obama, THINK TOO SMALL. The libertarians and the conservatives have it largely wrong about the size of government and our taxing structure: it is not too big, our thinking about it is too small and so we make the same old decisions about problem solving we always have and the problems remain. We think too small when we re-elect the same people over and over, who behave the same way,over and over because they/we think too small. And Obama is in over his head,unable to coerce a government of any size to work at all, because he thinks “too small” (using the internet to get elected is not big thinking: it is opportunism)and he is powerless to move a congress which wallows in thinking too small (which we elected by thinking too small), because (and here is the second facet):
As Noam Chomsky puts it (and writers like Naomi Klein confirm), we do not have a two-party system, we have a CORPORATOCRACY, driven by the money and influence of the greed-oriented big businesses and the shareholder corporations of America. And they pay the congressman (like Max Baucus) to contiue to think small and maintain the status quo. Tiny, old, repetitive thinking does not give birth to big, new bold ideas (which we desperately need). And politicians (including the newly elected Obama) and are more concerned with becoming re-elected than they are with performing the tasks for which they elected in the first place.
So we bitch and wait. We are victims of our own complacency, old habits, small thinking, and lack of courage to challenge the status quo, as long as have enough to get by. We are content to let our rights get taken away and/or abused, to allow the conservative mentality to say, “I’ve got mone, screw you”, and happy to get through the day living on Fox News, instant consumer gratification and lousy non-nutritional fast food. And we let the government pacify us with programs like “Cash For Clunkers” (which turns out to be an anti-economic recovery program to benefit Detroit auto makers and finance companies). We are numb from shock and awe (Naomi Klein, again) and live in a perpetual fear of losing even more than we have already. And we are angry and unhappy. We can rant and rave, we can yell and scream , but we cannot innovate. We cannot “think big” or elect anyone who can, either, from all appearances.
The citizenry of America is, at the moment, anti-intellectual, non- analytical, anti-investigative, racially biased, narrow-minded, complacent and unwilling to upset the status quo apple cart because it might be a little difficult or cause some short-term (or long-term) hardships in order to prevent the ship from sinking (which it is).
So we bitch and wait. We paint ugly signs and march about the wrong issues, paint Hitler faces on the president, listen to Glenn Beck and O’Reilly and McConnel and Enzi and let Baucus screw us and keep thinking small and prolonging the misery of doing nothing new. We allow the fear of possible poverty and of any non-white, non-Christian movement to keep us inert: it makes self delusional bitching easier. has anyone simply come out openly and conjectred that Glenn Beck is just plain crazy? I mean,”nuts” as in mentally ill?
Sadly, perhaps Obama has realized that the conundrum and behemoth of old/small political thinking in America is much bigger than he is. So right now, he is doing what every American institution has always done to stay alive and prosper: he is conducting a very aggressive marketing campaign, by being on the television and making speeches every five minutes,in an attempt to prevent us from seeing the real problems of big money and ignore the real manipulations of our corporatocracy. He is pulling an empty delivery wagon down main street. But he is a parade of one and the emporer has no clothes.
As long as we bitch and wait, Obama, Boehner, Pelosi,Wall St., big insurance, big pharma, big energy and the off-shore banks are safe and secure. But we are fooling ourselves: we are really bitching that the system does not work and is failing quickly, and have unkowingly discovered that we can try to blame the failure on a black man (again). And beneath all of that we wait. We wait for a savior or an economic/cultural messiah to save us from everything we brought upon ourselves through our innattention to detail, small thinking and repeated social episodes of uncritical observation. And all we know is that we don’t want that savior to be anything other than white, male, protestant and from Iowa.
Comment by Chief Hypocrite on 21 September 2009:
Deb, my friend, were I an I told you so type, oh, what the heck as Chief Hypocrite I can only be expected to be such “I told you so”.
Either me or one of my other close friends spoke of hearing Obama speaking out of both sides of his mouth, so indeed many independents and those on right voted for him, and many on the left also because of what they heard. And what they heard was double speak, he may be the best out of it, as all politicians practice it. Ultimately, none but his core, his 30% base are going to be happy with him.
On another note, I can not resist pointing out that as a gay, female progressive you will not be labeled a right wing nut homophobic racist, just for expressing the views you just did.
The same words out of my mouth, commented on in words or attitude by any of the MSN and most left of center bloggers,would indeed be so labeled.
I see it and feel it everyday on all MSM TV/Cable outlets and most of the newspapers. My disagreements may be different than yours but just as constitutional (not the Michal Moore constitution of course) and because it is not the political view of the Obama Tankers, they label me as a right wing, hate speech (Jeff Gibbs called me that already) racists.
All because I think we are borrowing too much, protecting unions too much and trying to keep the insurance companies honest with a public option.
A far, far bigger problem is keeping the government, any government honest, and keep them from so fouling up free enterprise, instead of truly spending their time properly in non politically regulating while and passing readable laws that do not conflict with other laws already on the books. You know, thoser impossible to understand, clear as mud, written by and/or for lawyers and/or other special interest groups.
Citizens who want to obey the law but can not read the tea leaves or even understand which leaves apply to them, must punt or are essentially equired to hire an attorney to research a specific, narrow idea, only to be told the courts have not ruled on those conflicts yet so that will be $400.
Further, those who aspire to create jobs, soon learn that if you want to do things right and avoid risk, best advice is “do not start your business” even if you had enough money to spend to “do it right” by the attorneys.
Sloppy and violent free enterprise (similar to nature) brought us to where we are, a wonderfully imperfect place most people in the world dream of experiencing, until they get here and then they want it to be perfect and there is always a politician to promise to pass a law to achieve a narrow perfection, hang the unintended consequences, just donate money and vote for me!
Let us not kill the golden goose especially right now, just as previously backward and poor countries are harnessing free enterprise.
They may well eat our lunch and are not likely to send enough foreign aid to us to pay for the many public options we, meaning every governmental level of benefit creation, pay, perks, pensions are already so over committed, the only think that is certain is that many levels of our government will make the corporate raiders of ld look like Santa Clause.
Putrid Partisans, for goodness sake, wake up.