Will Obama Stop Betraying His Progressive Base?

EDITORIALS BY RABBI MICHAEL LERNER S ometime in mid-September 2010, President Obama suddenly discovered that twenty months of governing by capitulation to the very mainstream ideas he campaigned against in 2008 was a losing strategy. But instead of acknowledging his errors, he actedasthoughhisliberalandprogressivebasewere betrayinghim. LikemostprogressiveactivistswhosupportedBarackObama’s campaign, I understood that a president is limited in what she or he can accomplish in reducing the power of America’s economic and political elites. But what a president can do is challenge the ideasofthepowerfulandrallythosewhohavebecomeawareboth that the system is destructive to the future of the planet and that there is an alternative—a possibility of constructing lives with a senseofmeaningbeyondtheaccumulationofmoneyandthings. In frantic activity before the November 2010 midterm election,PresidentObamatraveledthecountryseekingtorebuild theenthusiasmhegeneratedin2008,butheseemedcluelessasto whyitwasnotthere.TheDemocratsinCongresswhofollowedhis lead seemed similarly clueless: they tried to blame our lack of enthusiasm on their inability to pass the legislation that we (their political base) wanted—a desire that they dismissed as unreasonable . Even a Democratic majority in Congress and a Democratic presidentcouldnot,theysuggested,overcometheresistanceofthe Republican Party and the powerful institutional constraints that have been built up over many decades. Then they reminded us thataRepublicanCongresswouldcertainlymakethingsworse. ThereasonprogressivesareupsetwithObamaandtheDemsis not that we held a naive belief about how much he or the Democratic Congress could accomplish, given the fact that the DemocraticmajorityinCongresswasinfactfilledwithcorporateoriented “centrists.” We knew the limitations of this reality—a reality that was created by Rahm Emanuel and Nancy Pelosi, whose supposedly brilliant strategy in 2006 of backing the most conservative possible candidates in Democratic primaries in “swing districts” worked in the sense of giving the Democrats formalcontroloftheHouse.EmanuelandPelosiweremoreinterestedinsecuringpoliticalpowerthaninchangingthedirectionof thecountry.Nottrustingthegrowinganti-warsentimentin2006, they supported candidates who were ideologically pro-business andpro-war,constructingaDemocraticmajorityinCongressthat would back neither anti-war efforts nor the pro-working-andmiddle -classmeasuresthatDemocratshadpromised. By late 2007, liberals and progressives were deeply disturbed that, after the Democratic sweep of Congress in 2006, Congress continued to fund the war in Iraq despite overwhelming popular opposition.SowhenObamaenteredtheprimaries,hecreatedhis base of support in part by fostering the impression that he would challenge the warmakers and in part by speaking against the procorporate and pro–Wall Street ethos of the Bush administration. His famous speech on racism, in which he distinguished himself from his lefty preacher in Chicago, was understood by most progressivestomeanhe ’dchampiontheinterestsofBlacksbutalsoof whites, and he’d do that by avoiding the destructive “political correctness ” rhetoric that has isolated so many progressives in the past thirty years, while still maintaining a progressive core to his policies.Sowhenhechallengedtheselfishnessandmaterialismon Wall Street and explicitly raised everyone’s hopes by making “change” the theme of his campaign, progressives reasonably felt wehadacandidatewhowouldbewillingtospeaktruthtopower. Sowhathappened?First,heappointedEmanuelashisChiefof StaffandsurroundedhimselfwithaWhiteHousecrewthatlacked representatives from the social change movements that brought him electoral success (and this remains true even with the departure of Emanuel and Summers). Then came the sad reversals of direction: He bailed out Wall Street but gave almost nothing to the millions of unemployed or to those losing their homes to After the 2010 Elections Will Obama Stop Betraying His Progressive Base? MANDEL NGAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES Will anything change now that Rahm Emanuel, the supposed “realist,” haslefttheadministration?HereObamahugshisoutgoingWhiteHouse Chief of Staff on October 1, 2010, before Emanuel’s departure to run for mayor of Chicago. N O V E M B E R / D E C E M B E R 2 0 1 0 W W W. T I K K U N . O R G T I K K U N 7 editorial_1:Editorials+Columns 10/12/10 2:39 PM Page 7 EDITORIAL avariciousfinanciallenders.HeescalatedthewarinAfghanistan andleft50,000troopsas“advisers”inIraq,publiclyjustifyinghis reliance on preemptive military force upon receiving an illconceived Nobel Peace Prize. He refused to push for a public option for health care and instead supported a plan that forces tens ofmillionsofpeopletobuyhealthinsurancewithoutputtingany restraints on insurance companies’ continuing escalations of the amount we have to pay. Moreover he agreed to oppose methods to reduce the costs of prescription drugs in return for a promise to slightly reduce the level of drug profits by big pharma. Indeed, the list of reversals seems unending: he pursued repression against illegal immigrants; allowed continued drilling in the oceans for oil even after the Gulf of Mexico disaster and substituted the empty promise of “cap and trade” for the tax on carbons that is...