The liberals ’ lament: What’s wrong wit h Obama?

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The liberals’ lament: What’s wrong with Obama?
9 March 2010

The first week of March has seen a number of commentaries in the
American media, mainly from liberal pundits, worrying over the
declining public standing of President Obama and the growing signs of
disarray in the Democratic Party.

Typical is the column in Sunday’s New York Times by Frank Rich, who
writes that the problem facing Obama is that “there is no consistent,
clear message to unite all that he is trying to do.”

“Obama needs to articulate a substantive belief system that’s built
from his bedrock convictions,” Rich advises. “That he hasn’t done so
can be attributed to his ingrained distrust of appearing partisan or,
worse, a knee-jerk ‘liberal.’”

Similar laments have come from the Times’ economic columnist Paul
Krugman, E. J. Dionne of the Washington Post and other commentators
who have deplored the failure of the administration to rally popular
support. Dionne warned last month that if Obama and the Democrats
continued on the current path, “they’ll be washed out by a tidal wave”
in the November congressional elections.

The underlying premise of this opinionating is that Obama heads a
progressive administration that suffers from a “communication problem”
and is somehow unable to explain the benefits of its policies to the
American public.

Obama does not, however, suffer from a failure to communicate. He
heads a right-wing, big business administration whose policies and
performance are rapidly dispelling the popular illusions that
accompanied his runaway election victory only 16 months ago.

Working people have seen the bailout of Wall Street and the continuing
slide in jobs and living standards. They understand that when the
administration speaks of cutting health care costs, it will be the
elderly and the lower-paid who will pay the price. They have heard
Obama praise the firing of public school teachers in Rhode Island,
while not a banker or speculator has been held accountable for the
worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

They have seen Obama continue the Bush administration’s assault on
democratic rights, including military tribunals, indefinite detention
without trial, rendition and assassination—the full panoply of the
Bush “war on terror.” Sunday’s New York Times carried a full-page ad
from the American Civil Liberties Union, appropriately showing the
face of Obama morphing into that of Bush.

In foreign policy, the public has seen Obama, who postured as an
opponent of war when a candidate, don the mantle of commander-in-chief
with a vengeance, escalating the war in Afghanistan with the dispatch
of 30,000 additional US troops and a doubling of missile strikes into
Pakistan, and continuing the US occupation of Iraq, with nearly 90,000
troops still in that country, 14 months after Obama’s inauguration.

Such a record can be defended as “progressive” only on the basis of
the complacent perspective of upper-middle-class liberals who are
indifferent to the colossal impact of the economic crisis on working
people and bloody destruction in Iraq and Afghanistan.

They see Obama through the rosy prism of the rise in their stock
market portfolios. This week marks the anniversary of the stock market
bottom, and the 4,000-point rise in the Dow Jones Industrial Average
since then is proof enough to this privileged layer that the Obama
administration’s policies have “worked.”

The inversion of reality is particularly apparent on the health care
question, where the liberal pundits suggest that the Obama
administration is on the brink of engineering a great social advance,
like Social Security in the 1930s and Medicare and Medicaid in the
1960s. At the same time, they are forced to admit that the bills
adopted by the Senate and House are deeply unpopular, and that the
Democrats are likely to pay a price in the November congressional vote.

The liberals don’t ask the obvious question: if the health care reform
plan is a progressive reform that will benefit the American people,
why do its right-wing opponents, like Senate Minority Leader Mitch
McConnell on Sunday, vow to turn every House and Senate campaign this
year into a referendum on Obamacare?

Roosevelt did not pay a price at the polls for the passage of the
Social Security Act. On the contrary, the bill was enormously popular
and the program that it established led to a significant improvement
in the living conditions of millions of elderly people. Medicare and
Medicaid won similar public support, and remain the only enduring
social reform enacted in the 1960s, guaranteeing the elderly access to
decent medical care for more than a generation.

If the Obama health care plan is unpopular, it is not because of the
White House’s failure to communicate, or the ravings about “death
panels” and “socialized medicine” from the Republican right. It is
because the American public has seen through the rather threadbare
rhetorical fig leaf of “reform,” and correctly identified the
essential purpose of the legislation as cost-cutting, with the working
class and the elderly to pay the price.

Within the straitjacket of the US two-party system, the only
alternative to the right-wing, anti-working-class policies of the
Democratic Party is the even more right-wing policies of the
Republicans. That is why the central task facing all working people
and youth who want to oppose the policies of social reaction and war,
advocated by both big business parties, is the building of an
independent mass political movement from below.

This political movement must be based on a socialist and
internationalist program, rejecting American imperialist domination of
the globe and capitalist domination of America. All working people and
youth who want to take this road of independent political struggle
should make plans to attend the Emergency Conference on the Social
Crisis and War, called by the Socialist Equality Party, to be held
April 17-18 in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Patrick Martin

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/mar2010/pers-m09.shtml

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