I knew this mid-term election was going to be a disaster and it has been. With it Barack Obama fails at the leader of the Democratic Party in a way that few others have. With his failure in two off-year elections, lost by the failure of discouraged, dispirited Democrats to come out he and the Democratic Party establishment have run the experiment of governing from the center-right and showing what a loser that is for the party that is supposed to be the alternative of that political position. I will note that Obama went from 2008, being given one of the strongest hands any Democrat has ever been given, to this notable defeat after failing to learn anything from the "2010 shellacking".
In the context of their times, Barack Obama may be the least progressive Democratic president since Grover Cleveland, if not from before that. His council has always been with the banking class, the business class, the capitulationist insiders, the Washington-Ivy Leaguer establishment which brought down other Democratic administrations, as I mentioned the other week, Lyndon Johnson's. His ability to rouse himself when it is HIS job on the line is in contrast to what he does when it comes to producing results for THE PEOPLE WHO GAVE THEIR VOTES TO HIM TO GIVE HIM THE JOB INSTEAD OF THE VERY PEOPLE HE HAS CONTINUALLY SOUGHT TO PLEASE.
I believe that the habit Barack Obama showed at Harvard Law of making deals with conservative Republicans to ensure his advancement over more genuinely liberal competitors, the habit which made him popular with Republicans in the Illinois Senate are what he counted on to continue doing in the presidency. But the game was a different one once he raced to the top carrying their baton. Once he was president there was nothing for them to gain by not attacking him every way they could, the most obvious of those were by harnessing the racism of their natural constituents. It is rather remarkable that a jock like Obama didn't realize it was an entirely new ball game with entirely different rules once he was president. He doesn't seem to have learned that yet. He will not learn it.
What can we do? I'm sure I'll have ideas beyond those I've concentrated on recently, NEVER SUPPORTING AN IVY LEAGUE CLASS GOLDEN BOY FOR THE DEMOCRATIC NOMINATION EVER AGAIN, first and foremost. I would include looking at the primary-caucus system which has produce the line of ineffective candidates and sell-out presidents we have suffered under. The presidents it has produced has been entirely worse than those produced under the older systems, replete with corruption as those were. We still have corruption, though thanks to the Supreme Court and the ACLU, it is a different and more insidious corruption. I would love to see Iowa and New Hampshire demoted from their position. We have little to nothing to lose from changing their ability to knock off more promising candidates.
The ability for us to do anything much with fixing the constitution which is geared to or which gets worked to produce the massive corruption, rubber stamped by judges and justices even as the foetid carcass is put on sale for consumption, is limited. In my state a run-off election for the two top vote getters might, might have saved us from having the worst governor in our modern history get in with a minority of the vote. Thanks Eliot Cutler, Harvard grad, millionaire, spoiler candidate, thanks Green party spoilers in other places, or so I understand. You are the Republicans' best friends.
Also, intrinsic to the failure of Barack Obama's politics is his thinking which is typical of jocks and others for whom only those they deem winners really matter. It is a habit of thought that is so ingrained that it is the name of one of his major and worst policies, "The Race To The Top". In it he not only proves his utter and complete lack of understanding of the reason for being of the public education system but of his utter lack of understanding of the concept of democracy. In a democracy the losers are equal in rights, equal in needs, equal in all ways to those who work the system and take advantage of the position they started out from to win. Oligarchy, aristocracy, monarchy, despotism, those are what is produced by a government which is concentrated on rewarding "the winners", democracy is not about that. It rejects that ranking of worth or it is no democracy. If the Democratic Party, even if it manages to elect someone with the margin that it gave Obama, with the Congress it gave Obama in 2008, does not govern FOR THE PEOPLE, The People will notice and they will not be roused in sufficient numbers to come out in off year elections.
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