The Chris Moeller Archives

Any 'Hope' left?

You would think that anybody who had such low expectations for a progressive Barack Obama presidency would be incapable of feeling as disillusioned as I feel exactly one year after his election to office. In virtually every respect, 2009 has felt like a Year Nine of the George W. Bush White House:

-The Iraqi occupation is still a nightmare for the U.S. military and for Iraqis.

-The situation in Afghanistan is about to worsen as the president prepares to escalate.

-The reckless mismanagers of Wall Street have taken a potful of no-strings-attached bailouts, running in the trillions of dollars, but Main Street is still being neglected, and more and more homeowners are choosing to simply walk away from their mortgages, if they haven't already defaulted.

-Obama and his 'snake-in-the-grass' chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel are working to gut the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, passed to protect consumers in the wake of the Enron and Worldcom scandals.

-Single-payer health insurance, a safety net for each citizen in nearly every other country in the West, remains a pipe dream for Americans as the president promotes a health care initiative that would act as a bailout, in effect, for health insurance companies. He's even gone soft on the public option of late.

-Despite Democratic control over both houses of Congress, he has not led with action on climate change, labor and trade agreement reform, or gay rights.

The people spoke yesterday, and the evidence is that Obama is losing fast politically. The "bipartisanship"-focused, centrist Democrats were once again pummeled-- in governorship races in Virginia and New Jersey. Their wishy-washy fig leaves of reform are being rejected for the big-business-approved economic Band-Aids that they are. The young Obama voters that were going to change the world have gone back to their Facebook, their Hollywood escapism, and to burying themselves in their jobs, trying not to lose their employer-provided health care.

The policy on Afghanistan, as one example, has left Obama open to punishing attacks by Republicans, who should really have no credibility in offering advice on the war. They accuse the president of trying to "manage" the war, rather than to win it. Of course, the war is utterly unwinnable, but Obama endures the body blows because it's clear to all that he is trying to manage it politically when the U.S. military should be out of Afghanistan entirely.

Has Obama broken many of his campaign promises? Not many that I can recall (the glaring exceptions being the issues of military commissions, private defense contractors, and state secrets). For the most part, we're getting the president that Barack Obama promised he would be, the one that had been validated in advance of the campaign by the Washington establishment. He promised a bipartisan, "centrist" government, and this is that product we're seeing now in all its glory-- compromise proposals in which only one side compromises, and a Republican/Blue Dog Democrat opposition so intense, so bought and paid for by special interests, that it was hellbent on opposing the president regardless of whether his agenda turned out to be a radical one or a moderate one.

The outlook for the nation isn't rosy on the one-year anniversary of Obama's historic election, but it will look even worse as we reach the two-year pole if Obama doesn't make a radical shift leftward in his outlook and agenda. If he refuses, the blood will be in the water and November of '10 promises to usher in a right-wing revolt in the midterm elections that will make the Gingrich Revolution of 1994 look like child's play.

posted by CM @ 6:34 PM