The progressive case against Obama 

From Salon.com, bigtime liberal blogger, Democratic activist, and former Nader-hater Matt Stoller, comes out against Obama from the left:

At some point soon, we will face yet another moment where the elites say, “Do what we want or there will be a meltdown.” Do we have enough people on our side willing to collectively say “do what we want or there will be a global meltdown”? This election is a good mechanism to train people in the willingness to say that and mean it. That is, the reason to advocate for a third-party candidate is to build the civic muscles willing to say no to the establishment in a crisis moment we all know is coming. Right now, the liberal establishment is teaching its people that letting malevolent political elites do what they want is not only the right path, it is the only path. Anything other than that is dubbed an affront to common decency. Just telling the truth is considered beyond rude.

More here.

Of course, I am in full agreement on the motivation here.  That is, Obama really is a representative of the corporate state, the chosen savior of the capitalist system by a large chunk of Big Business America, a President who says nice things to liberals, but at the same time moves our nation ever towards corporate dominance.  Indeed, I've railed away about exactly this for years now.  And, as you know, I've certainly taken Stoller's advice on this on more than one occasion: Nader, or whoever, won't ever actually win, but voting for an insurgent candidate, when enough people do it, definitely rattles the establishment cage.  Thus far, doing so hasn't done much more than piss people off, causing stupid Democrats to blame third party voters for lost elections.  But a concerted effort over the years could have some payoff.  Maybe.  At the very least, it's nice to vote my conscience, instead of that awful pragmatic keep-the-GOP-at-bay shit that always means losing ground, anyway.

But I'm not sure I understand Stoller's take in this essay.  He seems to be riffing on Naomi Klein's sense of "disaster capitalism" somehow.  And, at this point, invoking such a concept isn't such a bad idea: the last decade's worth of American history very neatly proves Klein's thesis that when calamity strikes, power brokers lick their lips.  But how on earth can advocating for the Green Party candidate, or whoever, be a sort of dry run for the next national crisis?  He just doesn't explain the mechanics of what seems to be an interesting idea.  I mean, I'm all for telling Democrats to go to hell, but unless you can make them hurt, there's just no need for them to listen.  I don't fund their campaigns.  So I'm irrelevant.

As Democrats have been saying about their near non-relationship with labor unions for decades, "where else are they going to go?"

In the end, it's nice to see someone who once despised Nader voters come to his senses: the Democrats will not reverse their path left to their own devices.  But I need some more explanation of his sense of third party insurgency as training for the next crisis.  If he's got a good game, and he is, after all, an activist, then maybe I'll join up.  But this year, I'm voting for Obama.  Just because I feel like it.

In the long run, it doesn't make a difference one way or the other.

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