You are doing a piss poor job of convincing progressives to reelect Obama.
I
believed you guys were actually Republican trolls until I heard the
same words coming out of the mouths of top Obama aides and in only
slightly milder form out of the mouths of the president and VP himself.
Does that persuade you and make you want to keep reading?
I didn't think so.
So
why do you repeatedly insult the progressive majority of Democrats to try to keep them in the Obama tent?
I am not 100% pleased with Obama, but I will be voting for him again.
Your efforts mostly make me feel like an idiot for doing so.
If you sincerely want to help Obama win reelection, here's some tips that might help you warm up the base.
Enough
with the insults. You know what I'm talking about--calling anyone who
criticizes Obama from the left ''far left'' (going as far as to say we
are as bad as the far right), ''the professional left,'' ''hopeless
idealists,'' and perhaps most aggravatingly ''Obama haters.'' That last
one is just fucking lazy. You borrowed it from the Bush PR team.
Stop being crybabies. When you come to a discussion board, expect that people are going to
criticize your guy as well as praise him. If you want undiluted praise,
go to Obama's campaign website. If you come to a site like this expect
to have to defend some of his actions and do so as if talking to your
peers not your children.
Retire some of these talking points:
- You don't understand the process--it requires compromise.
Actually, we understand that perfectly well. What we don't understand
is why the president we elected to pursue Democratic policies gives
away half the pie before negotiations even start and then gives up even
more to make a deal. That would make some kind of sense once
Republicans took over the House, but Obama did this even when Democrats
had majorities in both chambers. Either honestly explain why he did
this or just leave it alone.
Most of us also notice that this
isn't the way the GOP negotiates, regardless of whether they hold the
White House or either chamber of Congress. They start with proposals
that are clearly conservative, excoriate the Democrats, and then
grudgingly compromise at the end of negotiations (and sometimes not
even then).
- Obama has to be president of ALL Americans.
Again, this one is an insult to our intelligence. We understand that he
has to be president of ALL Americans, but we hold elections to decide
what policies we want our president pursue. A solid majority of
Americans thought they elected a Democratic president, not one who
rarely mentions the name of his own party and blames it as much as the
opposition that blocks everything and tries to destroy popular,
effective programs, and not one who thinks every proposal has to
include at least 50% Republican content. The Republicans certainly
don't play that way when they take office, and even if they did, that
would mean our vote would be meaningless since either party would do
the same thing. With just the Democrats doing it, we essentially have a
choice being 100% GOP policies or just 50% plus, which is barely a
choice at all. So stow this shit.
- Any Republican will be WORSE.
progressives seem to know this better than you or Obama does. If they
are so bad, stop agreeing with them and letting them set the agenda, as
your points about process and bipartisanship prove.
- Obama will be more progressive in his second term.
Maybe FDR did that, but no president in my lifetime has. Bill Clinton
was doing well to hold onto office and like Obama agreed with the GOP
policies far too often. For good or ill, you have to run on what Obama
has actually done (and not just the nice things he has said or will say
during the campaign.
That brings me to the one thing
you guys do well, the list of Obama's accomplishments. Even your
presentation there has room for improvement though.
- Edit the list for a progressive audience.
The catfood commission, the Afghanistan surge, and certainly the recent
debt ceiling deal are not things you want to brag about with a
progressive audience.
- Emphasize the radical and confrontational rather than incremental and bipartisan.
So for example with health care reform, instead of talking about the
market based exchanges and ''cost controls,'' the latter meaning
controlling costs for insurance companies, talk about what the reform
did to help the average American and bring insurance companies and big
pharma to heel.
- Give it to people in chunks instead of the big dump.
Focus especially on progressive moves that aren't getting a lot of MSM
coverage, like working to get Medicare Part D to negotiate drug prices.
There
are a couple of points that you also avoid mentioning, like why Obama
started with an economic team that included so many of the architects
of our financial collapse, and why he lets firms like Goldman Sachs
pick their regulators instead of picking their cellmates in the Federal
pen.
Another area where you need to address progressive concerns
is K-12 education. I'm glad Obama gave schools money to keep them from
laying off teachers, but a lot of us who care about kids have trouble
trusting him on this issue when he hired an education secretary who
right wingers praise for his union-busting, mass firing of teachers,
emphasis on repetitive standardized testing and privatized charter
schools, all ''reforms'' backed by billionaire dilettantes rather than
trained educators.
The problem with Obama's approach to Wall
St, education, trade, and other aspects of foreign policy is that it is
top down rather than bottom up--he appears to talk to almost
exclusively the wealthy and largely does what they ask, rather than
looking at the wishes of average Americans, who would like to see Wall
Street subject to the rule of law and suffer the same kind of
consequences a middle class or poor person would if they intentionally
caused as much damage, and would like to have safe public schools that
borrow the best practices of private schools, rather than privatizing
public schools so our tax dollars can be siphoned off in profits and
teachers treated like interchangeable burger flippers.
You must
address these concerns if you want to get progressives in the tent, and
address them in the way that Bruno Bettelheim laid out in his essay
''The Victim.'' He told about how as a concentration camp inmate he
needed to get an SS guard's approval to get medical treatment for
frostbite. He had to make his case to someone who had no sympathy, all
the power, and a gun. So far, you guys have been arguing more like the
guard than the inmate.
