Dr. Steven Jonas - December 1, 2011
The Great Debate on the Left about whether to support
President Obama for re-election had been building already, even before the debt
limit debacle of this past summer, which led directly to the “failure” of the
Special Committee of the Congress. When Chris Christie says that Obama has failed as a leader, he is
absolutely correct (although Christie’s reasons for saying so and mine are
rather different.) As
exemplified by his poll numbers showing increasing dis-satisfaction among
leftists and liberals too, now it is on in full force and will be with us right
up until Election Day, 2012. You can tell from the title of this commentary which side I am on. Except for the election of 1980, when I
supported and actually did some work for John Anderson (until for reasons to
this day entirely unknown to me he finked out right after Labor Day), I have
been a “lesser of the evils” guy. But not this time around.
The arguments on both sides are pretty well-known and I am
not going to retell them here. Neither am I going to go into the details about why I think that the debt limit debacle was a debacle
for our side, except to say that if Grover Norquist and Paul Ryan view it as a
victory, if Mitch McConnell has the biggest smile on his face I have ever seen,
if John Boehner says “I got 98% of what I wanted,” if Nancy Pelosi makes it
very clear that she would have voted against it if she were not Minority
Leader, if 95 House Democrats did vote against it, if respected moderate
left-wing commentators like Bob Scheer and Paul Krugman say that it’s bad
stuff, that’s enough for me.
In previous Commentaries on BuzzFlash@Truthout and
elsewhere, I have made it clear that I understood that Obama was a DLCer from
the git-go. I have also revealed
that on a few occasions, early on, I was taken in by the rhetoric. And he is good at it. But, I am convinced that one has to
take the long view of what is happening to our nation. We might, if we are very, very
fortunate, before the true GOP night descends, squeeze our way out of it. But not with Obama in the White
House. Thus I do have to tell you
that: A) I will not be voting for Obama in 2012 regardless of who the GOP
candidate is; B) admittedly with 20/20 hindsight I now fully believe that over
the long haul our nation would have been better off had McCain won in 2008,
yes, even with that nit-wit of a running mate who was forced upon him.
Why? Well
briefly, as James K. Galbraith has laid out very clearly (1), on issue after
issue Obama has either been following GOP or GOP-lite policies or he has not
been getting into contentious issues, like doing something real about climate
change, by just letting them drop. Why, according to the Richard Mellon Scaife Right-Wing Rag NewsMax (2)
the economist Austen Goolsbee, formerly of the Obama White House and still
consulted by them, recently entertained the author of the infamous “Laffer
Curve,” the basis of the even more infamous “Reaganomics,” otherwise known as
“voodoo economics” (George HW Bush’s term for it before he was offered the
Vice-Presidency by Reagan). The
economic fantasies that this man is still peddling 30 years later, that are
fully responsible for total economic mess we find ourselves in, were given a
respectful listen. And so we
have the outcomes of the GOP policies they have spread all over us since the
Reagan Presidency. At the same
time the GOP is able to blame all the ills of the nation on Obama, as if the
policies were his and/or Democratic ones, not those of the GOP.
But suppose the barons of the Fed and Wall Street had been
able to do just a bit more of their behind-the-scenes legerdemain (which, we
continue to find out, goes on all the time) and had postponed the September 15,
2008 Lehman Brothers meltdown until, let’s say, November 7, 2008. That would have been a couple of days
after the 2008 election and, funnily enough, on the Gregorian calendar the 91st anniversary of the Russian Revolution. As it happened, McCain had overtaken Obama in the polls by mid-September
2008, when the bankruptcy did occur, with the subsequent collapse of the real
estate bubble, the subsequent collapse of the economy, the Paulson/Bush first
bank bailout, and so forth and so on.
But if the collapse had not occurred then, if it had somehow
been postponed until after the election, if McCain had maintained the momentum
that he had had in mid-September, Obama’s best rhetoric to the contrary
notwithstanding the aging cancer survivor might actually have become
President. (And yes, so-and-so
would have been Vice-President.) And so, let’s look at a list of what might have happened in that
alternate reality of a McCain Presidency, comparing it to what has really
happened under the Obama Presidency. Has to be a big difference, no? After all, the (remaining) Obama supporters and the (supposedly defunct)
Democratic Leadership Council (3) tell us so.
Consider, then, if McCain had been elected President: The
war on Afghanistan would have been expanded, with no firm withdrawal date; the
bank bailout would have happened, but with even fewer requirements set for the
banks; the Minerals Management Service of the Department of the Interior would
have been allowed to go on its love-the-oil-industry-let’s-not-do-anything-to-upset-it
way and a huge BP gusher disaster would have occurred in the Gulf of Mexico; Guantanamo
would have stayed open; “Don’t ask/don’t tell” would remain on the books until
now; there would be no real progress on settling the Israel/Palestine problem;
plus, plus, and most importantly plus, given that there would not have even
been the Obama weak-at-the-knees so-called “stimulus package” the economy would
be mired in an even worse massive unemployment/continued export of
jobs/no-growth mess. True, General
Motors and Chrysler would have been allowed to go bankrupt and there would have
been no "health care reform" legislation (otherwise known as the
private “health care” insurance industry subsidy act). But the main features of the Obama
Presidency would have been very much in place, with one big exception: The
Republicans would have been getting the blame for them, as they should, right
into the 2010 elections.
Guess who would not now be speaker of the House. Guess which GOP Front organization you
would have never even heard of. Guess which Minority Leader of which House of Congress might not even
have the 40 votes he would need to continue governing-by-just-saying-no. Guess which wing of which party would
be preparing to take it over for the 2012 elections. And it ain’t the blue dogs. Guess how many state governments wouldn’t be under total GOP
control (starting with Wisconsin and Michigan). Of course, hind-sight is 20/20 and if McCain had won we
would be bemoaning what-might-have-been, given the Obama rhetoric. But what we need to do now is face the
Obama reality.
If the GOP and the Corporate Power it represents are not
stopped soon, our nation is headed for fascism and civil war (4, 5, 6). Obama is only helping to pave the way,
both by his actions and by his inactions. The only way to stop this mad dash to hell is for a truly organized,
mass-based party to be formed by splitting the Democratic Party, just as the
Whig Party was split in the 1850s (7). Yes, it is very unlikely that anything like this will happen in time for
next year’s elections. But if
Obama is re-elected, the GOP/Corporate Power will continue to have their
target-of-blame for the negative outcomes, one after the other, of their very
own policies. They and their
propaganda pets like the Fox”News”Channel and “News”Max will continue to use
that target just as they do now, every day in every way. And then they will roar into the Presidency
in 2016, and good night, USA.
Our only hope is for a truly progressive Democratic party,
with a significant number of elected officials and liberal moneyed interests
being part of it, to rise for the elections of 2014 and 2016, with a true
chance of winning, which it would have. But the only way that can happen is if Obama and the right-wing
Democrats he represents are out of the picture and do not continue to give the
political cover to the Republicans that they just love having. Yes indeed, taking the long historical
view, the lesser of the evils for 2012 is anyone-but-Obama.
An earlier version of this was published on The Planetary
Movement, The Greanville Post and OpEdNews.
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Links:
1. http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/08/08-4
2. http://www.newsmax.com/Headline/laffer-obama-reaganomics-gop/2011/08/10/id/406893?s=al&promo_code=CCF5-1
3. http://www.dlc.org/
4. http://blog.buzzflash.com/jonas/202
5. http://blog.buzzflash.com/jonas/208
6. http://blog.buzzflash.com/print/12913
7. http://blog.buzzflash.com/node/12362