Guest Blog by Lee Goodman: Obama Bombs

by Lee Goodman

As the curtain comes up on the second half of his presidency, Barack Obama will find that many of his supporters, disappointed by his poor performance, left during the intermission. They will not be back.

Where will they go? Anywhere but the Democratic or Republican parties, both of which are seen as hopelessly controlled by corrupt individual and corporate interests. Many will sit out the next election, and perhaps many more elections after that. After two years of making apologies for an ineffective President and clinging to the hope that he would reveal that his spineless capitulation on major issues was actually a strategic step in his master plan, they are finally talking openly about their feelings of having been betrayed.

Having helped elect the nation's first African-American president, many felt obligated and eager to give Obama a fair chance to settle into the job and find a way to overcome whatever lingering racism might impede his efforts. But his lack of dedication to the causes he was elected to champion has finally led his backers to concede that although race should not be a disqualification, neither should it be used to insulate a president from criticism. One can be both an African-American president and a bad president.

Mr. Obama's inexhaustible desire to get along with those who oppose his purported objectives has left progressives doubting that the goals he spoke of during his campaign were ever really close to his heart. Early on, when he realized he could attract vast contributions, he retreated from his pledge to accept only public funding, pretending that the lobbyists and special pleaders who gave him millions of dollars would not expect or receive anything in return. Even as he sought his party's nomination by promising to stop the wars, he interjected into his speeches the violent language of the militarists and said we must kill our enemies. Turning his back on key supporters, he gave a highly visible role in his inauguration to an opponent of civil rights. Relentlessly, he has trodden upon the hopes of those whom he swore to protect. And most recently, while pledging to protect Social Security, he struck a deal that will rob that system of the revenue it needs, paving the way for its collapse. He has outdone Bush by cutting needed taxes that no one was asking to have cut.

There may never have been any reason to expect anything more of Obama. He had an undistinguished career as a state senator, then went on to the U.S. Senate where he did virtually nothing except campaign for President. Once in the White House, he chose as his chief of staff a bully who had no desire to put the nation's or the president's interests above his own and an attorney general who is now harassing the very individuals who carried the banners of peace and justice under which Obama once paraded.

On his journey towards failure, Obama also had help - lots of it - within his own party. Instead of challenging him when he rejected their counsel, they played the loyal hacks. Misunderstanding their constitutional duty to be a co-equal branch of government, they mostly deferred to his limp plans. Taking the president and Democratic congress together, there was not enough backbone to support even a moderately strong policy.

The role the Republicans played deserves no more than a passing comment. They sabotaged their own country.

The situation is not hopeless, but progressives have some very difficult choices to make. First, they will have to decide whether they even want to bother working for the change that Obama preached about but did not try to deliver. To bring about this change, they will have to find new ways of doing things, and they can expect the entrenched powers to resist their efforts. They will have to struggle mightily and be willing to take personal risks, just to lay the groundwork for reforms that many of them will not see in their lifetimes. They will have to understand that the phrase of the Declaration of Independence, “when in the course of human events,” which led to a momentous revolution more than two hundred thirty years ago, starts with the word “when.” “When” is now.