A day after Senate Democrats kill Byron Dorgan’s non-importation amendment in order to preserve the administration’s back-door deal with Big Pharma, the indispensable Glenn Greenwald takes the Obama administration to task for the final Senate product on health care, which, suffice to say, is looking pretty far afield from the House bill. (And all the while, the bought and paid for Joe Lieberman grins like the Cheshire Cat.)
I was going to wait until year-in-review post week to put this up, but now’s as good a time as any: From civil liberties to this Senate health care fiasco, it’s hard to think of any arena where this administration’s first year hasn’t been a tremendous disappointment. (Regarding the former: I didn’t mention this here earlier, but the brazen audacity of this passage from the president’s war-is-peace Nobel Prize speech made me blanch: “We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. And we honor — we honor those ideals by upholding them not when it’s easy, but when it is hard.” Uh, your Justice Department is not upholding them, remember? Is the president even aware of his own civil liberties record?)
Anyway, I keep being reminded of this line from my Obama endorsement of January 2008: “There’s a possibility — maybe even a strong possibility — that he’ll end up a Tommy Carcetti-like president: a well-meaning reformer outmatched and buffeted to and fro by the entrenched forces arrayed against him.” Well, welcome to the Carcetti presidency, y’all. The only surprise so far for many of us is in how little he’s actually even tried to enact meaningful reforms. But I guess once the president surrounded himself with the exact same GOP-lite people we’d spent months trying to defeat in the Democratic primary, the writing should have been on the wall. This will not be change we can believe in. A New Day is not dawning. And the president is not really with us — We’re going to have to do the heavy lifting for reform next year without him.
It has not been an encouraging first year. I wonder what West Wing box sets are going for eBay?
I think my final breaking point with giving Obama any benefit of the doubt was enduring the cruel Medicare buy-in offer-and-snatchback ritual, having it executed by Joe fucking Lieberman of all people, and having Obama’s people then praise Lieberman publicly while sending out Rahm to tell the media that the base can go fuck themselves.
The coup de gras was then getting a barrage of Facebook/email messages the day after all of this went down urging me to unite against the evil dissident blogger elements within the party that would dare imperil the President’s precious health care legislation. Uh, I am the evil dissident blogger elements of the party. And I wanted very badly to give you assholes the benefit of the doubt!
To receive this reactionary message through the exact same channels where just a year ago the same people were urging me to unite to change politics as usual, come together to solve our problems, Change America, yadda yadda yadda was one of those scales falling from eyes moments. I feel like a schmuck for falling for any of that, but that tiny bit of me that still wants to believe won out… and really, that’s the part of me that keeps me passionately engaged in politics at all, so it’s not like I can just extinguish that and go full-cynical and still stay this engaged. I gather I’m probably not alone on that front, and what does that say for the prospects for party activism and organizing and all that in the coming years? They had a generational opportunity with the movement they built around Obama, and they’ve just blithely tossed it aside in the name of going back to the oh-so-successful 90’s DLC model. I know the political environment is awful right now, but the total acquiescence to it on the part of people who had the talent and capacity and public mandate to do better is just craven and inexcusable. I thought we were working to fix some of that awfulness. I thought that huge primary effort meant something. I was evidently seriously wrong on that front.
But, these people can fuck right the hell off. I’m eating their shit sandwich, isn’t that enough? They’re not going to get me to email all my friends about how good it tastes or to deny that it’s a shit sandwich at all. They’re also not getting any of my time and money next cycle. Insofar as I have any, it’s going directly to progressive candidates of my choosing, many of whom are hopefully primarying some of these dolts who are merrily deficit-hawking when we have 10% unemployment and probably 20% underemployment.
And yeah, I’ve been doing a little bit of West Wing wallowing of my own lately. *sigh*
Well-put as always, j.dunn. The OFA e-mails were definitely a badly-timed and ill-thought-out eff-you to the very same folks who sweat blood and tears to get Obama elected.
Sad that it’s come to this. Like I said in the post, I guess the writing was on the wall when we saw Obama’s Cabinet picks. Clinton? Geithner? Summers? Rahm? Rahm in particular rankles — the guy is a classic DLC rain-maker. Takes credit for the rain (say, for example, the anti-Dubya backlash in 2006), then blames the lefties when it doesn’t.