This article was first published for U.S. News & World Report, under the title “Time for a Tea Party of the Left”.
President Obama takes his base for granted on issues like the Bush tax cuts, Plan B, and the economy
Here we are at the beginning of Pres. Obama’s reelection and what do we find? The Bush tax cuts that, back in 2008, candidate Obama pledged he’d fight to repeal, but which as president he extended. Considering not extending them began as his base position, three years into his first term it’s not too much to ask how Democrats allowed themselves to get twisted into this policy pretzel.
That’s exactly where Obama’s got his Democratic and progressive base, which has absolutely no resemblance to the Tea Party, who began challenging the Republican establishment back during George W. Bush’s term. The efforts finally ended up making history in 2010, with state legislatures across the country went Republican. It started an assault on the middle class, unions, as well as a war on women’s freedoms that ended up turning Wisconsin and Ohio upside down, but boy did it change the debate.
Now Newt Gingrich, once a speaker of the House, is running on an anti-establishment, anti-Washington platform spouting Tea Party populism as the new change message. In South Carolina, Newt sang the Tea Party’s tune and the right wing base rewarded him with a win, leaving the establishment mouths agape.
Where’s the Democratic version of the Tea Party? You’d think after Obama’s anti-progressive economics, foreign policy, and adoption of Bush antiterrorism policies (though to a more methodically lethal, anti-progressive effect), the Democratic base would have taken the Tea Party template and run with it by now.
Obama got away with the healthcare plan, which was bargained behind closed doors with private insurance and drug companies, manifesting a product that hasn’t kept costs down. He negotiated with himself, as he did on the stimulus, instead of using the majority he had in Congress to press the case for a public option that would have tackled healthcare costs, our biggest foe. It was never considered.
When Obama recently decided not to relax restrictions on the emergency contraceptive Plan B, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi gave him a pass, while the Colorado Democratic Rep. Diana DeGette, a member of the so called “Pro-Choice Caucus,” stated she was “disappointed.” There are never any repercussions for such decisions on the left, while repercussions have defined the Tea Party and its power on the right.
Understand that Plan B has nothing to do with abortion. It simply makes a female’s womb inhospitable for implantation and has been found absolutely safe by the F.D.A. However, as an ode to independents in an election season, Obama made a decision that any Republican would have made.
But not to worry, a carrot wasn’t far behind. The Department of Health and Human Services recently announced that universal contraceptive coverage will now be part of every employer healthcare plan, with religious-affiliated hospitals and institutions getting a one-year delay to comply. It could have been done earlier, but an election year is prime time.
During the debate around Bowles-Simpson, entitlement “reform” was broached first by Obama, with cost-of-living increases on Social Security being considered by the White House. That this would hit women hardest and put them in poverty was evidently missed by the administration. It was scuttled when all hell broke loose.
There wasn’t a woman in the room during the debt ceiling debate, a time when entitlement “reforms” were being considered. Pelosi was only added after women’s groups held a conference call and writers started complaining.
Obama also cut home heating assistance for the poor at a time when the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy are in place.
During Obama’s first term, he’s sucked on the straw of cutting the deficit, while ignoring Democratic economics. The bully pulpit for progressive economics wasn’t used until re-election season, when he took to the stage at Osawatamie, Kan., channeling the Occupy Wall Street message while launching his 2012 campaign.
There’s the latest action on the Keystone XL Pipeline, at least a short-term win, but it’s not like he came out with gusto against it. Obama said no for now then blamed the Republicans for not giving him enough time to consider the environmental impact. Activists from the grass roots to Robert Redford applauded. We don’t even know if it’s a definite decision.
The Democratic base has a passive-aggressive relationship with Obama that resembles a dysfunctional love affair. He has all the power and the base has absolutely none, unless you count the gay and lesbian contingent which was as good a model as the Tea Party on how to get it done. It’s not that progressives couldn’t have power; it’s that they refuse to wield any.
So they cannot pressure Obama at election time because he knows his Democratic base will be there. After all, they’re not the Tea Party. It doesn’t matter if they’re unhappy, all that matters is he’s got their vote and he knows it.
I’ll be fifty-one years old this month. For the first time in my life since I was eighteen, I won’t be voting for The Money Party candidate running for president who wears the label of Democrat. (I won’t be voting for the candidate from the other wing of The Money Party either.) I am no longer the base. What I have come to realize is that I never really was. What I really turned out to be was a patsy.
I’m not sure exactly the point in time at which it happened (if in fact it was a single point rather than just some path along the continuum), but the Democratic wing of The Money Party has turned out to be…well…a wing of The Money Party. Egg on my face for believing that the modern Democratic Party was anything but that.
My grandparents were FDR Democrats, and Truman Democrats, and LBJ Democrats. Certainly the Democratic Party of those days served powerful interests and money, but the Democratic Party of those days also served the people and seemed aware that serving the people was a fundamental part of maintaining an order that made all that money and all those powerful interests possible. (You hear shades of this when Elizabeth Warren speaks. That’s the Democratic Party she seems to believe still exists. It doesn’t. Isolated pols who believe those things, sure. But that party? Gone.)
My vote may not count, but vote I will. Obama however will not get it. The scales are fallen from my eyes. I see. I see. I see.
Where’s the Democratic version of the Tea Party? Look in the mirror Taylor. The extreme right and the extreme left both have a deeply rooted hatred of President Obama. The only difference is that the right thinks Obama has gone too far and the left thinks Obama hasn’t gone far enough. The only other difference is that low IQ predicts greater prejudice through right-wing ideology and low intergroup contact. I’ll grant you that extreme leftisits have a much higher IQ than the right wing homophobes, xenophobes, islamophobes, misogynists, racist and anti-science creationists and climate deniers.
http://pss.sagepub.com/content…
Wonderfully thorough and yet concise compilation. Makes it all so very clear how royally screwed we really are.
Not to be redundant with Romberry’s comments, but it may be a huge mistake to assume the “base’ will be there. Like Romberry, this patsy will not be voting for Obama again.
I don’t think this is too fine a point, but no one brings up now what was being said as the healthcare debacle staggered to the finish line. We started with “healthcare reform.” But in the midst of the legislating/arm-twisting/deal-making/selling-out phase, the term “health insurance reform” became the mantra. If no one else remembers it, I do. The key to the whole thing was the individual mandate, which is a creation of a captive clientele for insurance companies. It would all be a joke if there wasn’t so much damage being inflicted upon American society. It was re-spun back to ‘healthcare reform” afterwards in a troubling Orwellian twist.
It is disengenuous and cynical as hell for the pols to keep giving the American voter the choice between crap or merde, then blaming the system itself on the voters. “The voters keep putting these people in office, etc.” The Democratic Party has become quite adept at selling the stuff they keep stepping in.
I think many of us remember the very rapid move from “heatlh care” to “health insurance,” and have continued talking about it. But with everything else, I also think it gets lost, and I’m glad to see it explicitly mentioned. Thanks for that.
Ms. Arnold: To clarify, when I point out that this flip-flop “healthcare” to “insurance” and back again, I specifically was thinking of the “media” who rarely even look outside their sandbox.
Those of you on this site, including most commentors, understand this. Sadly, the Pavlovian responses engineered by the Sunday talking heads continues to anethestize the electorate. Sorry for any confusion.
The Two Party Front for the Oligarchy sees no reason to change they way they’ve always done it. We’re well into the latest version of the game in which it is assumed voters will once again play their assigned role. Whatever the results of the voting, the Republican and Democrat Electeds will shift as needed, and big business will go on as usual.
Romberry – can certainly understand your frustration. No doubt the democratic base is taken for granted . We get plenty of attention during a democratic primary but are inevitably shoved aside once the democratic candidate pivots and moves to the center during a general election. And this President has been particularly disappointing - during the debt ceiling debacle, he worked harder to appease the Tea Party crowd than to satisfy his base. And for exactly the reason Taylor states – he assumes (probably correctly) that the base will continue to support him.
I don’t like being taken for granted and it’s particularly frustrating to be assigned less relevance than the crazy Tea Party and other right wing portions of the electorate. But these groups seem to be much more passionate, organized and vocal than the left. Still, considering the bigger picture – i.e. Supreme Court nominations, etc., I will absolutely support the president despite some frustration. I do appreciate his intelligence. He would never, unlike Perry, Bachmann, Palin, embarrass us in that regard. And I’m hopeful that given a second term he will be less timid about making some real progress on progressive issues.
Off topic~
Anyone who is interested Andrea Mitchell is having someone from Komen on …MSNBC very soon.
Mitchell did very well…what a load of crap.
Just called McCaskill’s St. Louis office to encourage her to get on the list of Senators who are protesting the Komen decision via a letter.Getting ready to call DC office.
Let’s see…this is my takeaway from the Mitchell – Nancy Brinker (CEO of Komen) interview:
blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, BS-BS-BS-BS blah, blah, blah, blah…deny..deny..More BS..deny..deny….BS-BS-BS-BS blah, blah, blah, blah
I think that the Democratic party is too fractured issue-wise to form an effective TEA party of it’s own. Without a unifying issue, there is nothing for people to rally behind, this incidentally is the problem with OWS, no unifying message.
“this incidentally is the problem with OWS, no unifying message.”
Only to the deaf, dishonest, ideologs or to stupid to understand what they have said time after time.
OH, that’s right…it IS pathetic widdlw troll isn’t it.
So what is the unifying message of OWS?
Maybe it’s the lump that you got on your head when the police officer hit you with the baton during the anti-war protests, but it is seems that you are unable to make any kind of argument when you want to refute one of the postings here. In this case, you might write something like, ‘Only to the deaf, dishonest, ideologs or to stupid to understand what they have said time after time which is (fill in unifying message)’. Failure to do so leasds one to deduce that there is no unifying message, that you are unable to refute the point so that you are reduced to the same tired insults that you resort to day after day because you are unable to debate the point in any reasonable manner.
“In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory,[2] extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking readers into an emotional response[3] or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.”
My comment is related to the discussion, while yours is accurately described by the passage above and yet, you think that I’m the troll. I really think that you should get that lump checked out.
secularhumanizinevoluter 02 February 2012 at 9:35 pm
Secularh – You know I appreciate your unique brand of commenting, but please don’t start labeling people “trolls.”
I want viewpoints from all sides in the comments. That’s important.
Please up your game a bit, because you are more than capable of taking people on humorously, but on the issue at hand.
Plus, it is a basic problem of numbers for the revolutionaries. Obama beat McCain 53-46. So, Barry starts out Round #2 with 7% of the vote to squander. For years on end, self-identified liberals consistently comes in around 20-21%. Based on my unscientific research reading lefty blog comments, I would venture to say Villagers still outnumber Firebaggers handily….at least 2 to 1. Given that, Obama can either cut loose the FBs to hold the indies for the win or go the other way. Given that Team Obama has shown a natural prediliction for hippie-punching, the former route just seems to fit their style better.
If Obamots have basically accepted George Bush foreign policy, Eric Holder lack of ethics and Tim Geithner financial stewardship for 3 years running without losing any electoral allegiance for Barry, there is NO liberal call to arms in existence that is going to put the whole 20% solidly behind a write-in campaign.
They actually might have a better chance cutting a deal with Paulites and libertarians to push what common ground they could find there.
You have a very casual acquaintance with mathematics, I’m afraid. Obama has at most seven percent of the vote to squander. Anyone voters who switch from voting Democratic to Republican (or whatever the number two party ends up being) count double.
As for your conclusion, though, you may be right. I don’t see a whole lot of liberals being that upset. I think this just proves that most liberals aren’t nearly as smart as they like to tell themselves they are.