| Yesterday the figures were 35% strong approval, 29% strong disapproval, 56% total approval, and 43% total disapproval. Why are the numbers thus? I can only guess that it represents the far more accurate reflection of public disapproval with Obama's continuing shift to the far right. Obviously some of the disapproval numbers are coming from extreme right-wingers (the ditto-head segment). We cannot, however, discount the growing number of left-wingers outraged by the dashing of their hopes by the new president.
For those who insist on doubting the president's right-wing extremism, in spite of all evidence attesting to his ideological beliefs, I must point out that his positions on everything from continuing and amplifying the Bush regime's system of torture, war-making, destruction of civil rights, and lawlessness to dismantling safety net programs and writing blank checks to Wall Street can hardly be called left-wing.
Consider the following, posted on Just Politics:
Politico - President Barack Obama firmly resists ideological labels, but at the end of a private meeting with a group of moderate Democrats on, he offered a statement of solidarity. "I am a New Democrat," he told the New Democrat Coalition, according to two sources at the White House session. . . The self-descriptions are striking given Obama's usual caution in being identified with any wing of his often-fractious party. He largely avoided the Democratic Leadership Council . . . As recently as last week, he steadfastly refused to define his governing philosophy. . .
Bruce Dixon, Black Agenda Report - Back in 1984 and 1988 the Rev. Jesse Jackson's presidential campaigns scared the living daylights out of the white Democratic Party establishment. What frightened the good old white boys in charge of the Democratic Party most wasn't Jackson's poetic oratory or the color of his face. It was the middle and end of the Reagan era, and tens of millions of Americans, including white ones, were ready and eager for a deep and thoroughgoing change in the nation's politics
...
New Democrats supported the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and continual increases in the military budget. They all supported the bailout, and uphold No Child Left Behind and favor the gradual dismantling and privatization of public education in the US which NCLB set in motion. New Democrats are tepid at best on the Employee Free Choice Act. . .
And despite the fact that single payer health care would create 2.6 million new jobs and cover all the uninsured while costing no more than the present and profoundly broken health care system, New Democrats prefer a healthy private insurance sector to a healthy population. . .
New Democrats favor throwing trillions at banks to "revive" the economy, but are willing to cut or gut Social Security. All these policy positions, and the New Democrat label itself are the heritage of the Democratic Leadership Council, with which Obama was briefly affiliated early in his career, but forced to disavow. Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, a leading New Democrat in the Congress, has always been a stalwart of the Democratic Leadership Council. Emmanuel used corporate campaign cash to run pro-war Democrats against antiwar Democrats in 2006 and 2008.
The Democratic Leadership Council has always been "Republicans-lite," a pack of corporate funded Trojan Horses inside the Democratic Party responsible to their funders, and not to the Democratic Party's base. Now President Obama has assumed his place, as the leader of that pack.
According to The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza:
"The DLC's way of doing politics, of trying to blur the differences between us and Republicans, gave us a Republican majority, eight years of George W. Bush and little hope for victory," said Markos Moulitsas, founder of Daily Kos and a leading voice in the Net roots.
And that's exactly what we have under Obama: more DLC politicking, which looks increasingly likely to cost Democrats dearly going into next year's midterm elections. Should we lose the House, count on Republicans to Whitewater Obama over the Tony Rezko scandal, further weakening him and setting up a probable victory in 2012. If history is repeating itself, and I am horrifyingly confident that it is, then the few cosmetic changes now being made by Obama are going to be undone by the time he leaves office, and we'll end up right back where we were in January 2001.
The questions we need to ask ourselves are, "Can we afford to repeat the mistakes of the 1990s by allowing Obama to continue Clintonizing everything he touches, exceeding the worst crimes of the Bush-Cheney era in the process?" and "What can we do to end this and force a complete 180-degree turn to the left?" The first answer, obviously, is an emphatic "NO." The answers to the second question have to start materializing, and quickly, before it's too late. |
