September 4, 2010 archive

Mr. Unpopular

How Barack Obama Became Mr. Unpopular

Michael Scherer, Sept. 02, 2010, Time.com

A couple of weeks back and a dozen miles west of Elkhart, hundreds gathered in another school gym – except this time it was for a job fair. With the local unemployment rate above 12% and rising again this summer, about a third of the employer display tables stood empty. Julie Griffin, who voted for Obama in ’08, sat down at the room’s edge, well dressed and discouraged. After 23 years as a payroll administrator at a local RV plant, she got laid off 18 months ago. “Really, what has he been doing?” she said when I asked about Obama’s efforts to help people like her. “I guess I don’t know what he is doing.”

This shift in perception – from Obama as political savior to Obama as creature of Washington – can be seen elsewhere. When Obama arrived in office in January ’09, his Gallup approval rating stood at 68%, a high for a newly elected leader not seen since John Kennedy in 1961. Today Obama’s job approval has been hovering in the mid-40s, which means that at least 1 in 4 Americans has changed his or her mind. The plunge has been particularly dramatic among independents, whites and those under age 30. With midterm elections just nine weeks off, instead of the generational transformation some Democrats predicted after 2008, the President’s party teeters on the brink of a broad setback in November, including the possible loss of both houses of Congress. By a 10-point margin, people say they will vote for Republicans over Democrats in Congress, the largest such gap ever recorded by Gallup.

Mr. Unpopular in MSM

How Barack Obama Became Mr. Unpopular

Michael Scherer, Sept. 02, 2010, Time Magazine

A couple of weeks back and a dozen miles west of Elkhart, hundreds gathered in another school gym – except this time it was for a job fair. With the local unemployment rate above 12% and rising again this summer, about a third of the employer display tables stood empty. Julie Griffin, who voted for Obama in ’08, sat down at the room’s edge, well dressed and discouraged. After 23 years as a payroll administrator at a local RV plant, she got laid off 18 months ago. “Really, what has he been doing?” she said when I asked about Obama’s efforts to help people like her. “I guess I don’t know what he is doing.”

[snip]

This shift in perception – from Obama as political savior to Obama as creature of Washington – can be seen elsewhere. When Obama arrived in office in January ’09, his Gallup approval rating stood at 68%, a high for a newly elected leader not seen since John Kennedy in 1961. Today Obama’s job approval has been hovering in the mid-40s, which means that at least 1 in 4 Americans has changed his or her mind. The plunge has been particularly dramatic among independents, whites and those under age 30. With midterm elections just nine weeks off, instead of the generational transformation some Democrats predicted after 2008, the President’s party teeters on the brink of a broad setback in November, including the possible loss of both houses of Congress. By a 10-point margin, people say they will vote for Republicans over Democrats in Congress, the largest such gap ever recorded by Gallup.

White House aides explain this change as a largely inevitable reflection of the cycles of history. Midterms are almost always bad for first-term Presidents, and worse in hard times. “The public is rightly frustrated and angry with the economy,” says Dan Pfeiffer, Obama’s communications director, explaining the White House line. “There is no small tactical shift we could have made at any point that would have solved that problem.” In more confiding moments, aides admit that the peak of Obama’s popularity may have been inflated, a fleeting result of elation at the prospect of change and national pride in electing the first African-American President. As one White House aide puts it, “It was sort of fake.”

But while these explanations may be valid, they are also incomplete. A sense of disappointment, bordering on betrayal, has been growing across the country, especially in moderate states like Indiana, where people now openly say they didn’t quite understand the President they voted for in 2008. The fear most often expressed is that Obama is taking the country somewhere they don’t want to go. “We bought what he said. He offered a lot of hope,” says Fred Ferlic, an Obama voter and orthopedic surgeon in South Bend who has since soured on his choice. Ferlic talks about the messy compromises in health care reform, his sense of an inhospitable business climate and the growth of government spending under Obama. “He’s trying to Europeanize us, and the Europeans are going the other way,” continues Ferlic, a former Democratic campaign donor who plans to vote Republican this year. “The entire American spirit is being broken.”

Open Martian

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Where the Battle Really Is in American Electoral Politics

For those manning the barricades at DailyKos, fending off the DLC and OFA hordes, it’s been a tough couple of weeks.  Horrible news arrives on a daily basis about the latest betrayal by the Administration, Congressional Democrats or the party apparatus, but discussion of these outrages is blocked or at least blunted by well orchestrated legions of loyalists.

Cassiodorus referred me yesterday to a link about “democratic centralism,” a Leninist, top-down approach to political organization that brooks no dissent once the majority has made a decision.  He noted the mind-numbing consistency of the loyalists’ message:

  1. Praise Obama.

  2. Cite Obama’s big resume.

  3. Denounce all of Obama’s critics.

All this has made me even more skeptical about the value of conventional politics in the United States, and confirmed my view that the Democratic Party is worthless.

What’s interesting is how the same thing is taking place in the Republican Party.  A Naked Capitalism link led me to David Frum’s lament about purges taking place in Republican think tanks.  Frum himself was a victim earlier in the year when he was fired by AEI, but today he’s writing about Cato purges:

The summer’s biggest inside-Washington story was the abrupt and simultaneous departure of co-authors Brink Lindsey and Will Wilkinson from the Cato Institute.

Lindsey was Cato’s vice president for research; Wilkinson a Cato scholar. They were working together on a book arguing for a new political approach fusing libertarianism and liberalism – a concept that Cato has previously endorsed on issues like drug control, foreign policy, and sexual freedom.

Frum then despairs about the effects of these purges on Republican policy initiatives should they gain the majority in either the House or Senate:

Right-of-center think tanks claim to do objective research that can be trusted by all policy players, regardless of point of view. They boast that they care about ideas, not parties or personalities. They aspire to set a broader agenda for the right, in lieu of the narrow demands of K Street special interests.

These claims look increasingly false. The right-of-center world is poorer for the dessication of the institutions that used to act as the right’s brains.

We are likely soon to have a Republican majority in the House of Representatives, maybe the U.S. Senate too. And what will that majority do? The answer seems to be: They have not a clue. Unlike the Republican House and Senate majorities of 1994, unlike the Republican Senate majority of 1980, these new majorities will arrive with only slogans for a policy agenda. After staging a for-the-record vote against Obamacare, and after re-enacting the Bush tax cuts, it will be policy mission accomplished.

There’s little other policy inventory, because the think tanks have not done their proper work. Without a think tank agenda, the new majority will rapidly decline into a brokerage service for K Street.

What we see are the two major political parties both engaging in an intense effort to purge those interested in policy, those who dissent from party political strategies and those who care more about ideology or principle than loyalty.

The rationale for the purges given by the parties’ leadership and its spokespersons to party members is that a great battle for the future of the nation, if not Western Civilization, lies ahead.  Only if “we” win can the world remain safe for the “middle class” or the “free market,” for LGBTs or Christians, for African Americans or whites, for freedom of religion or a Christian nation.

Of course, nothing could be further from the truth.  The policies of the two parties are indistinguishable because, as Frum points out, the source for policy for both parties is the same: K Street as it symbolizes the international, Capitalist Corporatocracy.  Imagine that you have arrived from Mars and been told a little about the history of the Democratic and Republican parties and the ideologies around which they supposedly coalesce.  Then consider how you would answer if you were asked which of the following enacted programs, foreign policy, military strategies and legislation were supported by which party:

Medicare Part D

2010 Health Insurance Reform

Iraq surge

Afghanistan surge

No Child Left Behind

Gramm-Leach

Telecom Deregulation

Welfare “reform”

It is all but impossible to identify any of these as distinctively Republican or Democratic because the ideological and policy distinctions between the parties, minimal as they were in the pre-Reagan, pre-DLC period, have now shrunk to almost zero.  Note that you were asked only about those things that actually became law or were adopted as policy by the Executive branch, not those things that were advocated by either party but never enacted.  Republicans have benefited from the support of the Christian Right, but what part of the Christian Right’s agenda has ever become law?  At most, they have seen a little tinkering around the edges of abortion restrictions, some of which did not survive court challenges, something fully expected by the Republicans who enacted the bills.  Democrats have made many promises to Labor over the past two decades.  What of it has ever become law?  Immigration issues are treated similarly by both parties.  Each party panders to different interest groups, but the status quo that satisfies elites, is carefully maintained.

Both parties tell their members that absolute party loyalty is required because the effects of losing to “the other side” would be so catastrophic.  Yet it is all but impossible to determine substantive differences between what is enacted by Republicans when they are in power from what Democrats do when they are in control.

The two parties do differ greatly in how they portray themselves and each other to the general public.  Republicans are consistent in their internal and external messages.  They tell both their membership and the wider electorate that Democrats are traitorous socialists who must be defeated and defeated completely.  The Democrats, however, are completely inconsistent.  They send out internal messages to their own members that Republicans constitute a grave threat to constitutional democracy, peace and the rights of minorities, but they follow a policy of reconciliation and bipartisanship when dealing with the opponents in Congress or in the press.  It’s no wonder that the two parties are often compared to the Globetrotters/Generals “competition” where one team is masterful and always victorious while the other is a perennial weakling and loser.  The only difference is that there are times when the public is so dissatisfied with how things are going that the “loser” party must step up, absorb the “throw-the-bums-out” votes of the majority and assume power for a while.  Once in power, however, they immediately revert to their Generals’ schtick and prove as ineffective and bumbling as ever.

If there is any battle left in electoral policy, any hope for change, it lies either in the emergence of third parties or in the battle for control within the existing major parties.  Inter-party politics, if confined to the Republicans and Democrats, is meaningless.  The behavior of the Obama Administration has confirmed that once and for all for anyone on the Left, just as the behavior of the Bush Administration confirmed it for conservatives like Frum and Bartlett.

The are several questions that Leftists need to ask themselves.  How they answer those questions will determine how they focus their individual energies in the coming hard times.  That Leftists answer these questions in different ways is not a bad thing, however.  There’s nothing wrong with concentrating energies in different venues if we do so in solidarity with one another and with strategies that complement each other’s efforts.

The questions:

1) Do you believe conventional electoral politics at any level offers any opportunities for change in the coming decade?

2) Do you believe conventional politics at the national level offers any opportunities for change in the coming decade?

3) If you answered “yes” to #1 and/or #2, do you believe that third party efforts or a takeover of existing Democratic Party structures offers better opportunities?

Depending on how those questions sort us out, we could find people working for change in a number of different ways:

1) organizing communities to become more humane, green, resilient and self-reliant and eschewing party politics altogether;

2) working to take over the local Democratic Party with the goal of preservingimproving public transportation and education;

3) building a regional third party movement to run a economic populist against a Blue Dog Democrat and a Lunatic Republican in a southern Congressional district;

4) coordinating a national movement to change the Democratic Party rules for nominating a Presidential candidate.

Ironically, even DailyKos can be used a tool in some of these efforts because the FAQs explicitly call for the site to be an “anti-Establishment” force in the Democratic Party.

Any effort to re-build a Left in this country must begin with the acknowledgment that the “competition” between the two major parties has no substance.  It even matters little to the party elites because they benefit as long as they play their designated role.  It is mere distraction, a way to absorb the ever growing dissatisfaction with the American social, economic and political systems.

In my view, there is no definitive answer to those questions posed above.  We can argue about them, but at this point, it may be best just to come up individually with the best answer we can and agree that we can disagree and still be comrades.  If we find that a particular strategy is working, great.  More focus can be placed on it.  If something appears fruitless, it can be abandoned.

One thing is clear.  Continuing to do what most of the Left has been doing is insanity.  

WOW! just WOW.

This morning on my way home from the Italian deli, I stopped in at a corner shop that sells cigarettes, milk, candy – that sort of thing.  Normally, I walk in get what I need and smile at whomever is around.  It’s a place where working class guys hang out and truth to tell, sometimes in the morning you can smell the liquor on their breaths.  But mostly, they stop for awhile to talk to each other and get back in their delivery trucks or construction trucks and move on.

I bought a 99cents bag of potato chips – it’s a real treat.  Salt is not good for me but occasionally I’ll eat a few chips and throw the rest to the birds.  I put a dollar on the counter and the female clerk (certainly not working toward any award for politness) said “That’s a dollar and nine cents, lady.”  (Okay, for one wild moment I forgot I lived in Cook County, Illlnois.) and I said:  “Oh right, got to pay for their Cook County pensions.”  Now there is nothing wrong with government pensions but there are such a slew of stories of how many Cook County employees abuse the system – it’s newspaper worthy at least once a week.  

And what followed was a chorus worthy of spectators at a wrestling match.  Three men in the back started yelling about their years of working and how they expect SS payments.  The woman clerk told me she tore up her voting card, mailed it to the WH and told the President to stick it up (well you know).  Another man grabbed my arm and told me he sure as hell was entitled and spelled the word for me “e.n.t.i.t.l.e.d.” after working since 1970.  The others in the back continued to yell about the Democrats – and some guys standing on the corner came inside and began a riff about government workers.  Now this is a Democratic suburb – a working class suburb, though it is showing signs of moving up and I’m sure the slimy developers will be here soon.  

I talked briefly to the guy who was hanging on to my arm.  He had sketchy information and I shared what I knew.  He was afraid Republicans would win elections because of the SS scare and they’d be worse than what we have now.  And boy did I learn some new words and/or phrases from the guys in the back as to the political class we have now.

All told, there were about 15 guys in there when I left yelling about the system and their SS.  

Okay – here’s what I want to know.  Where the hell is the Democratic Committee of my suburb and the Democratic Party of Cook County talking to its base about what is going on.  Giving them the proper information (if they even get it themselves) – making some sort of “plan.”  A sensible plan to get these people to take the right kind of action – instead of their endless golf outings, cocktail parties and general ennui.  Don’t they get it.  These people need to be educated.  I’ve sent a lot of material to the newspaper here in the hopes that a reporter I was dealing with on another matter would write a column about how it is going to affect our people here – elderly and boomers – and well, everyone.

Most of our elderly couples and women especially own their own homes outright and are making a serious effort to remain there ’til the end.  We are talking about a suburb known for its beautiful old brick bungalows.  That phrase: “They don’t build them like this anymore” – that phrase belongs in our suburb.  I have considered myself would that be considered an “asset” if they do means testing.  And from our Democratic Party here:  crickets.  (Caveat:  our City does do a good job with its older population on many matters but apparently education is not necessary to their way of thinking.)        

“Where America Stands”

With the construction industry in the toilet across all aspects and across the country believe me I know what this country has been ignoring, we have a big problem with doing that on a whole host of issues {like sending military into invading then long occupations and not listening to them thus not caring for many when they return}, for decades should have been at least more than just started to be taken care of {some states and communities did use stimulus monies for just that but once no money preventive maintenance, or replacement, once again stops} as the collapsed economy started and those with the wealth {that’s how most of theirs is made with breaks given on taxes enhanced development packages just to attract companies and much much more} should be main contributors to upgrading our Deteriorating Infrastructure, and it ain’t just bridges and roads!!

Yellow Buses Before Labor Day?

In observing end of summer traditions what do I see?  Brand new school buses?  Before Labor Day?

Docudharma Times Saturday September 4




Saturday’s Headlines:

Blackwater won contracts with web of companies

Fleet of robots designed to clean up oil

USA

U.S. to temper stance on Afghan corruption

Wachovia, Bank of America add fees that ‘certainly won’t be popular’

Europe

Archbishop of York criticises government inaction on sex trafficking

EU austerity policies risk civil war in Greece, warns top German economist Dr Sinn

Middle East

Whisper it, but Netanyahu may just be the man to make history

Hamas condemns ‘direct talks’

Asia

Afghan withdrawal date ’emboldens’ Taliban, US general says

Married to the mob

Africa

Too chicken to change? Satirists taunt Mugabe

Mobile Phone Banking Comes to South Africa. Will It Work?

Late Night Karaoke

Dear God, Please tell us…

…what do we do now?

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m not asking some glittering icon in the sky.  I am asking the deep embedded creative wisdom which resides in every single sentient being, and possibly even in non-sentient beings, although I don’t think there are any beings who are not sentient.

A rock is a rock is a rock, living out it’s individual life span in a manner I cannot possibly pretend to understand.

No.  I am not asking some luminous (or dull) external being what to do.  I am asking us, we humans, in our wisdom, and the kittehs and the many creatures furred, multi-footed, slithering, gill breathing.  I am asking the life wisdom which resides in us all…

…what do we do now?

These times are so difficult, so stagnant, so confusing.  The system seems so locked in, so incapable of change, of reason, of being able to hear anything but it’s time calcified courses of usual and traditional action which only spiral into ever increasing layers of disaster and decay.  So…

…what do we do now?

Follow me in our exploration of a possible leap across the abyss beyond the fold..

Too Corrupt To Fail [Updated]

  After nine years of work, $330 Billion in treasure, and nearly 1,300 American fatalities, bankers might ultimately do to Afghanistan what the Taliban could never accomplish.

 Even as it battles a resurgent and spreading Taliban, the beleaguered government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai is facing a more immediate threat: a run on the country’s largest banks.

  This week, droves of depositors rushed offices of Afghanistan’s Kabul Bank, pulling out their money amid concerns that bank has lost millions of dollars. BBC News broadcast images of Hummers and SUV’s racing to the bank, a troubling sign of growing mistrust for Mr. Karzai’s already heavily criticized government.

Something in the neighborhood of $200 to $300 million in deposits have been withdrawn in just a couple days, about half of all the bank’s assets. If the stampede continues for just a few more days the bank will fail.

 So why is this important? Because the Kabul Bank is what the government uses to pay its teachers, police, and soldiers.

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Random Japan

A DIGITAL WORLD

Computer hackers accessed the databases of eight online Japanese supermarkets and made off with the personal information of thousands of customers.

Google Maps celebrated its fifth anniversary by unveiling a new satellite positioning technology in Tokyo that is said to improve the accuracy of the service.

Don’t look down. The new 41.5-meter high Amarube Bridge in Hyogo Prefecture has opened for use, replacing a 98-year-old span that was known as Japan’s largest iron trestle bridge.

It was reported that local Muslims are dismayed by the lack of graveyard space in Japan, as Islamic principles state they must be buried without cremation.

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