DEMOCRATS: THEY'RE NOT ON YOUR SIDE

From Glenn Greenwald via AlterNet:

Why Do We Assume Obama's Actually Trying to Enact a Progressive Agenda?

That's why I experience such cognitive dissonance when I read all of these laments from liberal pundits that Obama isn't pursuing the right negotiating tactics, that he's not being as shrewd as he should be. He's pursuing exactly the right negotiating tactics and is being extremely shrewd -- he just doesn't want the same results that these liberal pundits want and which they like to imagine the President wants, too. He's not trying to prevent budget cuts or entitlement reforms; he wants exactly those things because of how politically beneficial they are to him -- to say nothing of whether he agrees with them on the merits.

When I first began blogging five years ago, I used to write posts like that all the time. I'd lament that Democrats weren't more effectively opposing Bush/Cheney National Security State policies or defending civil liberties. I'd attribute those failures to poor strategizing or a lack of political courage and write post after post urging them to adopt better tactics to enable better outcomes or be more politically "strong." But then I realized that they weren't poor tacticians getting stuck with results they hated. They simply weren't interested in generating the same outcomes as the ones I wanted.

It wasn't that they eagerly wished to defeat these Bush policies but just couldn't figure out how to do it. The opposite was true: they were content to acquiesce to those policies, if not outright supportive of them, because they perceived no political advantage in doing anything else. Many of them supported those policies on the merits while many others were perfectly content with their continuation. So I stopped trying to give them tactical advice on how to achieve outcomes they didn't really want to achieve, and stopped attributing their failures to oppose these policies to bad strategizing or political cowardice. Instead, I simply accepted that these were the outcomes they most wanted, that Democratic Party officials on the whole -- obviously with some exceptions -- weren't working toward the outcomes I had originally assumed (and which they often claimed). Once you accept that reality, events in Washington make far more sense.

More here.

Very good advice embedded in the excerpt above: don't listen to what politicians say; rather, watch what they do. And by that measure, it is quite clear, and has been for a long time, that the Democrats are no longer on your side. In this case, "your" includes working people, people of color, immigrants, and of course, liberals, you know, the people everybody thinks are represented by the Democrats. I mean, sure, listen to what they say, if only to compare it to what they're actually doing. But don't believe it unless their deeds match their words.

And Greenwald is right. Politics start making sense when you completely throw out the rhetoric. To be fair, however, as he observes elsewhere in his essay, rhetoric and action are sometimes one and the same, like when Reagan used his presidential bully pulpit powers to literally change the conventional wisdom about national politics. But Obama hasn't done this, and neither has his party. They produce some bluster and invective from time to time, to be sure, but in the long run, it's all weak, amounting to nothing.

For instance, I'm fully of the belief that the Democrats could have gotten a single payer health care plan passed, you know, real health care for everybody. Obama could have taken to the airwaves and returned to the campaign trail, for months, and pounded away at the need for such a plan. Against this backdrop, Pelosi could have brought in conservative Democrats in the House with carrots and sticks, and the Senate could have passed a rule change taking out the Republican filibuster, which means that all they would have needed was a simple fifty one vote majority. I mean, it wouldn't have been a gimme, but it was certainly within reach. The ball was already rolling; everybody already hated the insurance companies, including giant corporations, like GM and others, that have to deal with them. A single payer coalition of powerful interests could have been easily assembled. It would have been a nasty fight, indeed, but winnable for sure.

But it didn't happen. Instead, Obama brokered backroom deals with the insurance and pharmaceutical industries before congressional debate even started, before a single bill had even been drafted. The Democrats started with a Republican friendly bill, essentially using Mitt Romney's plan for Massachusetts, and then started compromising even that away to the most hardcore of conservative Republicans, getting nothing in return. Instead of pounding the bully pulpit relentlessly, the Tea Party arose, and with it myths about "death panels" and "socialism" and fear-mongering about Medicare, which is hilariously ironic because the Republicans want to kill Medicare, not save it.

This is how the Democrats function in the 21st century: talk liberal, but act conservative. Ralph Nader has been frantically warning us about this for over a decade, but for some reason he remains Democrat enemy number one, just for being a real liberal.

Face it, the Democrats are not on your side. In fact, the only people on your side is...you.

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