Features » November 19, 2008

Mandate for Change

Voters’ message to Obama: think big

By David Sirota

President-elect Barack Obama waves to his supporters after his victory speech in Chicago’s Grant Park on Nov. 4.

As McCain doubled down on the right’s economic catechism, Obama surged. Capturing traditional Gipper territories like Colorado, Indiana and Virginia, the Rooseveltian Socialist beat out Reagan Reincarnate.

What do we do now?”

That’s the question Bill McKay (Robert Redford), ponders in The Candidate (1972). He won the presidency, promising “a better way.” After Nov. 4, America is asking Democrats the same haunting question.

These are heady times for the party of Thomas Jefferson, Franklin D. Roosevelt and, now, President-elect Barack Obama. Only a few years ago, Democrats were almost relegated to permanent minority status by a “Mission Accomplished” sign and an ass in a flight suit.

But since President Bush’s 2004 re-election, Democrats have gained at least 50 House seats, 12 Senate seats, seven state houses and seven governorships.

Republicans used the threat of “socialism” to turn the 2008 campaign into a referendum on conservatism. The result? Democrats notched their highest percentage of the popular vote since 1964—when Lyndon B. Johnson won in one of the most lopsided elections in U.S. history.

After two years and more than half a billion dollars worth of ads, the pulverizing election came down to a steel-cage match that pitted rivals against each other—and not Immigrants versus Natives, Americans versus Foreigners or Whites versus Blacks. Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama made the race’s final weeks a proxy war between two presidential icons who still loom large: Ronald Reagan and Franklin Roosevelt.

McCain promised to follow Reagan, “in his tradition and in his footsteps.” He vilified Obama as a 1930s-era “socialist” looking to “redistribute wealth.”

Obama countered by invoking Roosevelt’s speeches and depicting the financial meltdown as “the final verdict” on McCain’s “failed philosophy” (that is, Reaganism).

Mind you, neither candidate fully personified these predecessors. Obama’s moderate record is not FDR’s quasi-socialism, and McCain renounced some of his Reagan-inspired dogma.

And each had their inconsistencies. Obama criticized the “failed philosophy” of Reagan conservatism, while infusing some of his own tax prescriptions with such conservatism. McCain, for his part, attacked Obama’s “socialism” after voting for the bank bailout bill—the most aggressive market intervention by government in contemporary American history.

But all that was less significant than how the duo framed the election. They both effectively said that a vote for McCain is a vote to continue Reagan’s trickle-down tax cuts and free-market fundamentalism, and a vote for Obama is a vote to resurrect Roosevelt’s regulations and redistributions. And because this choice was made so clear—because voters knew exactly what they were voting for—Obama, with his 6 percent margin of victory in the popular vote, has a huge mandate to implement his progressive vision.

That’s why conservatives are so worried.

They understand cause and effect: As McCain doubled down on the right’s economic catechism, Obama surged. Capturing traditional Gipper territories like Colorado, Indiana and Virginia, the Rooseveltian Socialist beat out Reagan Reincarnate.

Yet to this, conservatives responded with a pre-emptive “nah, nah, can’t hear you!”

They contended that despite the Obama victory, this is still a center-right nation. Indeed, this poll-tested term—”center-right nation”—has become one of the Punditburo’s most ubiquitous Orwellian buzzwords.

From a Newsweek cover story by conservative dittohead Jon Meacham to a Wall Street Journal screed by former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan to a Politico.com diatribe by former Rudy Giuliani aide John Avlon, the “center-right nation” phrase was parroted with the discipline of Cuba’s Ministry of Information.

According to a Lexis-Nexis search of news articles and transcripts, “center-right nation” became the talking point du jour in the lead up to Election Day.

But is there any proof that America is a center-right nation? Republicans cite polls that show more Americans call themselves conservative than liberal. While that data point certainly measures brand name, those same surveys undermine the right’s larger argument because they show majorities support progressive positions on most economic issues.

Because the Bush era finely tuned America’s BS detector, repetition and revisionism can no longer cloak reality.

Great responsibility

Prior to the election, The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder wrote that because the Republicans have “run against the very idea of progressive politics,” a McCain loss in such an ideologically polarized contest means that “Democrats can justifiably claim that conservatism itself has been rejected.”

Obama talks of forming a bipartisan cabinet, but his election wasn’t a public cry for milquetoast government-by-blue-ribbon-commission. It was, as community organizer Deepak Bhargava puts it, an ideological mandate that created “an opening for transformational, progressive change.”

This opening is predicated on Democrats possessing the kind of great power that Spider-Man creator Stan Lee warns comes with “great responsibility”—a political euphemism for high expectations.

While the party gained in strength, it lost a GOP scapegoat that once justified Democratic hyper-caution (read: inaction). On the huge issues—whether re-regulating Wall Street, reforming trade, solving the healthcare emergency or ending the Iraq War—America demands success, and Democrats in 2009 will have no one to blame for failure but themselves. After all, with 349 electoral votes (as In These Times went to press), a President Obama cannot credibly claim he lacks the political capital to legislatively steamroll a humiliated Republican Party and its remaining senators.

The same goes for Democrats at all governmental levels. Meeting expectations requires them to champion far-reaching—dare we say, radical—solutions.

That was always this election’s unspoken theme. Despite lipsticked pigs, Joe the Plumber and Superbowl-sized candidate events, the 2008 campaign pivoted on a single, hope-flavored choice: America had to decide between continued conservative rule and a progressive agenda as far-reaching as the crises we face. McCain himself said, “The American people have spoken, and they have spoken clearly.”

To rise to that call, Democrats will have to abandon their worst habits.

They must, for instance, acknowledge the progressive mandate the voters demanded, rather than downplay expectations like Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) did immediately after the election. “This is not a mandate for a political party or an ideology,” he fearfully told reporters.

They might also consider retiring the Innocent Bystander Fable—the dishonest storyline that claims they cannot change anything. Democrats cited the fable as the reason the Iraq War continued following the 2006 election—expecting Americans to ignore Congress’ authority to halt war funding.

In late October, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) lamented: “There’s not much we can do” to amend the failed bank bailout. Such continued mendacity will metastasize from boringly banal lies into scathing punch-lines on late-night comedy shows.

Most importantly, Democrats will need to ignore revisionists who say President Clinton’s early foibles prove the failure of “governing in a way that is, or seems, skewed to the left,” as the Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus claims.

The true story is far different — and more foreboding.

Recounting the real history to Politico.com, a Republican lobbyist noted that Clinton tacked right, “co-opt[ing] a portion of the business community” and championing conservative policies like the North American Free Trade Agreement, and thereby demoralized his base, helping Republicans take Congress.

The success of Obama’s two-year campaign highlights America’s disdain for precisely that kind of invertebracy and triangulation. This election first saw voters reject Clinton-style incrementalism, and then scorn McCain’s Reaganism. That means the Democrats best answer to Bill McKay’s question “what do we do now?” is a similarly simple answer: Go big.

That is not merely the better way — it is the only way.

Obama has a mandate for the kind of “direct, vigorous action” Roosevelt called for in his 1933 inaugural address. Should a President Obama try to capitalize on it, he will have nothing to fear but fear itself.

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• Reader Comments

  Beautiful!

  Go Big how?

  Intentions materialize realities; my intentions are materializing these words; your intention, o reader my Reader, keeps you passing your eyes over them.

  Whose intentions are now materializing a tsunami of hate?

  NO1 told all these people to do all these hateful things.  NO1 is speaking, and you are hearing.

  Re: the myths with which Fear-Mongers, both Right and Left, are jacking us again; McClellan’s “manipulating the media narrative.”

  Watch McCain’s concession.  At the mere mention of Obama, the crowd starts booing, doing violence even to his name.

  He holds out a hand to tamp down the hate realized by his hate-filled lies about Obama’s faith, patriotism, and person. 

  “The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.”  Goering was right.

  Propagandists use words in only a mechanical fashion, shooting message pellets at targets with the violent intention of forcing changes in behavior as they desire.

  Compare Message Force Multipliers to snipers: Hide intentions; shoot mouths off; kill just as directly as pulling a trigger.

  Whoever acted on the intention, to jack the election, must now be held accountable for the foreseeable and abundantly predicted effects. Command responsibility was established at Nuremberg.

  The Democratic Party has gotten what it asked for: power.  Whose power?  Aye, now here’s the rub.

  JL isn’t the only war-monger being recycled.

  http://www.democracynow.org/2008/11/17/obama_taps_ex_cia_officials_tied

  “NPR attributed Obama’s reversal on FISA and telecom immunity to ...relying on the advice of John Brennan, an emphatic supporter of these policies.”

  “Jami Miscik was…the Deputy Director of Intelligence during the run-up to the war and in the immediate postwar period. That was a period of politicized intelligence. That was a period of the corruption of the process. That was a period when all analytic trade craft, all of the rules of analytic trade craft were ignored….”

  “And now, for Obama to turn around, put Jami Miscik back in the CIA in transition and Brennan in the transition process, ... you know, you have to wonder, who is Obama relying on for advice on the Washington community?.. [O]bviously, he’s listening to the wrong people.” [End Dn!]

  http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/110708c.html
  Ray McGovern has seen presidents be propagandized with “the particular brand of ‘shock and awe’ that can be induced by ostensibly sexy intelligence to color reactions of briefees, including presidents. [He has] seen it happen.”

  http://www.democracynow.org/2008/7/30/house_speaker_nancy_pelosi_defends_her<
  Nancy “No Impeachment” Pelosi:  “If somebody had a crime that the President had committed, that would be a different story….”

  Kucinich, your response?

  “I certainly want to direct her attention to the thirty-five articles of impeachment that I presented, which assert quite directly that crimes have been committed….” [End DN!]

  Do we have a democratic republic, or feudalism?

  “[F]eudalism.. is the relation between lords and the peasants who worked their own land and that of the lord. The peasants owed labour service to the lords, who provided military protection and also had extensive police, judicial, and other rights over the peasants… In this view, feudalism came to encompass all aspects of social organization and was characterized as a system that was both oppressive and hierarchical…[It] involves the exchange of allegiance for a grant of land (fief) between two people, usually men, of noble status.” [Ency Brit 2008]

  Congress and its committees are ours, not fiefs of either party.  We, the People, are sovereign here, not the tools of governance.

  We are realizing NO1’s intentions from within.

  Posted by knowbuddhau on Nov 19, 2008 at 4:18 PM

  The “change” promised by Obama is nothing more than cosmetics. Listen to experts like Webster Tarpley, Jerome Corsi, Larry Pratt and others discuss the real Obama. They are free MP3 downloads at http://drop.io/Summerbird

  Posted by Stargod on Nov 20, 2008 at 11:44 AM

  Thanks for the link Stargod.  With all due respect,
  I listen to Obama when I want to hear the real real Obama.  The “who’s the real Obama?” gambit was overdone before the election was over, IMO.

  I am concerned with our next president’s intentions.  Looks to me like he’s either being, or about to be, run like any other asset by the same fiends who’ve been jacking us into this Waste Land, and sticking us with the bill, for centuries now.

  There are some among us, who think they know how to machine us into Being aware of this we share: our shared Becoming.

  “From its late 17th century inception in modern form, science has strongly privileged the reductionist mode of thought that breaks overt complexity into constituent parts and then tries to explain the totality by the properties of these parts and simple interactions fully predictable from the parts. (“Analysis” literally means to dissolve into basic parts). The reductionist method works triumphantly for simple systems — predicting eclipses or the motion of planets (but not the histories of their complex surfaces), for example. But once again — and when will we ever learn? — we fell victim to hubris, as we imagined that, in discovering how to unlock some systems, we had found the key for the conquest of all natural phenomena. Will Parsifal ever learn that only humility (and a plurality of strategies for explanation) can locate the Holy Grail?

  The collapse of the doctrine of one gene for one protein, and one direction of causal flow from basic codes to elaborate totality, marks the failure of reductionism for the complex system that we call biology — and for two major reasons.

  First, the key to complexity is not more genes, but more combinations and interactions generated by fewer units of code — and many of these interactions (as emergent properties, to use the technical jargon) must be explained at the level of their appearance, for they cannot be predicted from the separate underlying parts alone. So organisms must be explained as organisms, and not as a summation of genes.

  Second, the unique contingencies of history, not the laws of physics, set many properties of complex biological systems….[End SJG http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/19/opinion/19GOUL.html?pagewanted=2&ei=5070&a amp;en=eec9b1271e4b19eb&ex=1227330000]

  
  Scott McClellan, with a phrase drained of all Life, calls it “manipulating the media narrative,” as if war-mongering lies had no consequences for the reality-based community.  As if any words could be said from the behind the insignia of office, and that makes it all better.

  Rumsfeld used a machine to sign the death letters, the letters to families of the ones he and his followers killed on false pretenses.  Is there nothing in Rumsfeld?

  There is nothing alive in the reductive Newtonian mechanism that now dominates American thinking and is passing itself off as psychology.  We imprison and torture our detainees in our approaching them as mere machines.

  John McCain’s slip is painfully apt: “My fellow prisoners….”

  The science of the mind being practiced at our black sites, and the showrooms at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, is a weaponized monstrosity, an abuse of being human by its founding assumptions.  By modelling itself after physics; by basing itself on the absolutely isolated ppoint particle; modern psychology collapses our psyches into quantum singulatiies of pain; cellf-imprisoning us in cellves of our own mistaken making.

  Isolation and psycho-religio attacks, Stargod, are the hallmarks of the Bush-APA Torture Doctrine.  Any1 who denies that obvious pattern obtained during the last election will answer to NO1.

  Now, all we need is NO1 to assert OUR authority over OUR government.  WE are sovereign here, not the tools of governance.  BushRoveCheneyCo has that reversed.

  Any1 seen NO1, we need NO1 front-and-0center, please, paging

  Posted by knowbuddhau on Nov 20, 2008 at 4:25 PM

  Cyclops, I’m looking at you, pal, have you seen d’oh! my bad, that was ‘no man.’  Here comes Some1 now.

  Here!

  I am

  NO1 (and so are you, o reader my Reader!  that’s the Good News)

  Posted by knowbuddhau on Nov 20, 2008 at 4:52 PM

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