No one should have been under any illusion that Obama was a movement progressive, or a social democrat or any of the things the right has said he is. I wish he was. Well actually, if he really was, he never would have been elected in the first place. But it's not about him. Again, it's about the playing field we live under while we, as progressives, Socialists etc, fight for a more just society.
Do we want to have these struggles under an actively hostile regime ala George Bush and Tom Delay in 2005 when they were actively trying to turn Social Security into a private accounts, appointing Sam Alito to the Supreme Court and on and on or under an infuriatingly moderate President where we have at least been able to achieve.......
Health Reform : raising medicaid eligibility to %133 of poverty and providing subsidies to people under %400 of poverty, giving 30 million people access to health coverage. No, it's not single payer or even a public option but it will dramatically affect the ability of millions of people to have access to care. Even without a public option, it's a miracle this ever got passed, and if it is repealed, it could be decades before there is another chance to do anything. In the meantime, while we wait for the perfect solution, people will suffer and die.
repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell
Hate Crimes Legislation
Consumer Protection Bureo created
pro labor members appointed to the National Labor Relations Board as recess appointments
over Republican fillibuster threats (this is huge and everyone seems to forget it or not know about it)
Sonya Sotomayor and Elena Kagen
the list goes on. But now for the bad news. Obama has not been able to raise taxes on high earners and has just now agreed to a debt bill that will pull money out of the economy when we need it most to spur growth. Additionally, the stimulus was far too small. It did save us from a worse depression, but it's drying up now and the economy is stalling. In many cases, it's easy to see how this could have been avoided, but could it? Olympia Snowe demanded a smaller stimulus in exchange for her vote to break a filibuster and I can't see how they were going to get any better of a deal to raise the debt ceiling through congress without risking economic catastrophe. Even if The President had invoked the 14th Amendment, that would have sparked it's own crisis. As far as the tax cuts. The smart thing would have been for Democrats to pass an extension of the Bush tax cuts early on when they were in control that would have decoupled them, so that the tax cuts for the wealthy expired say this year while those for the middle class were extended much further, allowing Obama to simply veto an extension of high end tax cuts this year.
They didn't do that and here we are. The prospects for Obama's re-election look very shaky at this point. The prospect of total Republican control of government in 2013 is too terrifying to really wrap ones mind around. The GOP of today makes the GOP of Bush look reasonable in comparison. In the event of Obama's defeat, we will be looking at the repeal of Health Reform, the privatization of Medicare, total destruction of labor rights, the replacement of Ruth Bader Ginsburg with a Scalia type on the Supreme Court, renewed attacks on LGBT rights, the list goes on.
That is not the playing field the left wants to be fighting on in 2013. So let's work to elect more progressives to congress who will challenge Obama, let's defeat Scott Walkers union busting state Senators in Wisconsin next week, let's fight for single payer legislation in states, and let's do everything we can to see that Obama is re elected next year so we have his administration to push and protest for the things we want as opposed to seeing everything progressives have fought for in the last 50 years decimated.
