Why Obama?

I’ll be the first to admit that I did not come into this blogging business as the most politically astute or learned person on the planet.  The idea that I might be is so far from the possibility of reality that the words I just typed hardly belong in the same sentence.  I know that.  However, watching my hopes for the election of a candidate I thought to be most qualified to “inherit” (I’m beginning  to hate that word) the responsibility of guiding the county back on track be bashed, dashed, crashed and gleefully shattered to smithereens by disparate entities on the left and right, seemingly demented in their zeal, has given me an opportunity to learn and grow politically in a way unlikely to have been appreciated before, had it presented itself.  And frankly, I’m sick of it.

All. Of. It.

Each news story, op-ed column, Google search, blog post and talking head garbage spew disguised as informed opinion has added another tidbit of information, often counter to the point the happy yakker thought he/she was making, to the tapestry of my understanding of our nation’s political reality.  It’s enough to make you puke.

It was Barack Obama’s declaration that he was a “New Democrat” that began to pull the wool from my eyes this weekend.  You know how “you know just enough to be dangerous,” as the adults used to tell us when we were kids, and we only slightly, superficially understood?  That’s how I feel now.  My previously determined impressions have not exactly been dramatically altered, rather, a sketchy picture is coming into better focus.

I’ve always known that New Democrats were affiliated with the Democratic Leadership Council, that evil Clintonian institution responsible for giving the world the concept of Third Way “triangulation.”  It never dawned on me before however, how such a concept reflects the same sort of underhanded attempt to institute a UniParty under Democratic cover that Obama advocates.  And by UniParty, I mean just that, though not necessarily a melding of the two parties into one, the complete subsumption of the lesser party works just fine, and allows you to loot the ideas you like while suppressing and discarding those you find unacceptable or inconvenient.   Claiming to be “progressive,” their mission statement is rife with uncomfortably “conservative” concepts, presenting a mishmash of doubletalking bullshit that any thinking person would find hard to swallow whole.  Given the influence of Bill and Hillary Clinton in the founding of the damned thing, it would be only natural for those opposed to the concept in general to then assume that Barack Obama represents something better.  However, their “third way” is his “bipartisanship.”

Obama’s “New Democrat declaration” is the most major “duh!” moment any of us will ever likely experience.  Reading the DLC “Hyde Park Initiative,” or Hillary Clinton’s speech to the DLC in 2005, it’s patently obvious that the both documents were cut and pasted unto my.barackobama.com, slapped atop Howard Dean’s 50 State Strategy, typed into a TelePrompTer, and shoved down the country’s throat at a cost of 3/4 of a billion dollars in blackface.  Which begs the question, why?

If, before Obama threw his hat in the ring, Hillary Clinton was the “inevitable” Democratic candidate, inextricably tied to the philosophy of the DLC, what did the party’s corporate elite need Obama for?  Did they really believe him to be more malleable?  3/4 of a billion dollars more “malleable?”  If they’re both going to implement the same policies, the strategy makes no sense, even if you factor Clinton Derangement Syndrome and Hillary’s supposed “high negatives” into the equation.  After all, the same media assault necessary to catapult an inexperienced, unqualified, unknown quantity into the fray and transform him into a beloved, messianic household name, could have been deployed on Clinton’s behalf, likely with even better results, since she, at least, usually knows what the hell she’s talking about.  Let’s face it, even with all the shit thrown at her that she endured, she still managed to emerge victorious; imagine what might have happened if she had actually had the kind of party and media support Obama did.

Also, if he was a DLC Trojan Horse, why the vicious campaign?  And, why would the Clinton faction fight so hard against his juggernaut?  Why the race-baiting, sexist, ugliness foisted upon the national consciousness?  To whose benefit was that?  Why wouldn’t Clinton just put up a show of a fight and bow out gracefully?   The whole “historic nature” of his candidacy and ultimate presidency is bogus, too, given that a woman POTUS would have been equally earth-shattering.  It all makes no sense.

With only a portion of the resources afforded Obama, financial and media-wise, added to her arsenal, Clinton could have marshaled just as many forces on her side, resulting in just as many downticket Democratic gains.  The argument that the Republicans would have mounted a more vigorous campaign against her is speculative and spurious given that McCain was the presumptive nominee early on, and it’s hardly a given that he would have engendered more of his party’s support as a result.  Besides, with the handicap of George Bush to deal with, any Democrat was almost assured of victory against any Republican they might have faced.

We know that David Axelrod might well have been tapped by Clinton had there been no Obama, he had worked for President Clinton’s and Hillary Clinton’s campaigns, after all.  Even the argument that she didn’t embrace Dean’s 50 State Strategy is insignificant, there’s no reason to assume that the Democratic Party would not, or could not have employed it in conjunction with Clinton’s more traditional approach, thereby increasing the potential effectiveness of both.  If Barack Obama has always been a “New Democrat,” last years presidential campaign makes no sense whatsoever.  If he hasn’t, what’s he trying to hide by claiming to be?

Bill Clinton’s 2000 remarks at the DLC’s Hyde Park Retreat, the Hyde Park Delaration, itself, Hillary Clinton’s 2005 America in 2020 Dream Initiative read like they could have been plastered onto Barack Obama’s Traveling TelePrompTer Crutch, and might well have been, with all their talk of health insurance reform, (including electronic medical records) personal responsibility, public service, stem cell research, etc.  We know for a fact that Barack Obama was not in on formulating these plans back in 1985 when the DLC was founded, or, in 1990 when Chairman Bill Clinton put together the New Orleans Declaration that founder Al From called “a seminal document” that served as “the philosophical foundation for the third way approach.”  Yet, the front page of the DLC website just as proudly claims Obama as their own, as he, surprisingly, recently claimed them.

Wikipedia’s assertion that the Center For American Progress and Howard Dean’s Democracy For America, as well as Daily Kos and MyDD are at odds with DLC’s philosophy is rather simplistic, in my opinion.  They could all be spokes on the same wheel.  Not only that, in many ways, Barack Obama is to the right of either Clinton.  In 2006, Hillary Clinton told Yearly Kos that she helped found the George Soros backed Center For American Progress and Media Matters.  And, while the Soros-backed Democracy Alliance had provided funding to CAP and not the DLC, and Soros himself, along with Media Matters and CAP and their Clinton era staffers have been closely aligned with Obama during his campaign and transition, Hillary’s claims at Kos (August 4, 2007) came a year after the Washington Post (July 17, 2006) story detailing the Soros/Democracy Alliance/CAP connection.  Is she so clueless she didn’t know she had been abandoned?  Had she?  Hillary’s boast comes at about 2:20 in the following clip:

We are certainly better prepared and more focused on, you know, taking our arguments, and making them effective, and disseminating them widely, and really putting together a network, uh, in the blogosphere, in a lot of the new progressive infrastructure, institutions that I helped to start and support like Media Matters and Center for American Progress.

I’ve tried to make sense of all this many times before, notably here, but the new “I’m a New Democrat” happy crappy is really burning my ass.  If Obama is indeed a New Democrat, and has been all along, we’ve all been played for suckers, big time.  And, we still are.   Could Hillary’s reluctance to play into the Obama-Axelrovian “gotcha, silly season” politics they accused her of, and that they seem to delight in, be the problem?  The fratboy pissing contests played out in the media that the the Obministration seems so very fond of, just might not be everybody’s cup of tea, especially considering how stupid they are, no matter how effective the New Obacrats might deem them to be.

Also, while Clinton might not have a problem battling the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy in response, she might not have the stomach for the more pro-active, aggressive media manipulation that’s all the rage with the otherwise vacuous and inefficient New Obama Dems.  In addition to the sort of Joe the Plumber attacks that the Obacracy employed so boyishly against her and Sarah Palin, Rick Santelli, Rush Limbaugh, Jim Cramer and others, with their now-White House, then Chicago headquarters dispatched talking points distributed via paid media talking heads, Begala, Carville and Stephanopoulis, (all former Clintonites) as well as diligently issued email alerts to the Blogger Bully Obots and Alinsky agitators under the guise of donor updates, Obidiots are now implementing Phase Two, according to Politico:

Beginning Sunday, the White House will harness every part of the Democratic Party’s machinery to defend President Obama’s budget and portray Republicans as reflexively political, according to party strategists.

A participant in the planning meetings described the push as a successor to Democrats’ message that Rush Limbaugh is the Republican Party leader. “We have exhausted the use of Rush as an attention-getter,” the official said.

The media manipulation has been especially odious, made moreso by the shameless admission that such tactics are an integral part of the Obministration’s arsenal.  This sort of Astroturfing “governing by the appearance of popular opinion” is a specialty of the Obots, perfected during the campaign, though, not always successful, as in the Pennsylvania primaries, where they wasted millions of dollars employing his vaunted media mojo, only to get soundly spanked.

The Obama grassroots network—now known as Organizing for America, a project of the Democratic National Committee—has launched an e-mail pledge drive on MyBarackObama.com in which supporters sign their e-mail address to the statement: “I support President Obama’s bold approach for renewing America’s economy.”

The pledge drive was announced with a video called “Ready for the Fight.” Plouffe e-mailed supporters over the weekend with a challenge labeled “The next few weeks”: “In the next few weeks we’ll be asking you to do some of the same things we asked of you during the campaign—talking directly to people in your communities about the President’s ideas for long-term prosperity.”

If the ultimate goal was to engage a younger, electorate-expanding  demographic, this sort of iPod, Blackberry, FaceBook-ization of media manipulation might seem cool enough to work for now, but even braindead, KoolAid drunk, basement dwelling, one hand typists grow up sooner or later, and are likely to be pissed off when they realize how much their “style over substance” support of an empty suit wearing Naked Emperor could cost them in the long run.  Too bad the entire Democratic party is now banking on it.

A broad coalition of left-leaning groups is quietly closing ranks into a new coalition, “Unity ‘09,” aimed at helping President Barack Obama push his agenda through Congress.

Conceived at a New York meeting before the November election, two Democrats familiar with the planning said, Unity ‘09 will draw together money and grassroots organizations to pressure lawmakers in their home states to back White House legislation and other progressive causes.

The online-based MoveOn.org is a central player in the nascent organization, but other groups involved in planning Unity ‘09 span a broad spectrum of interests, from the American Civil Liberties Union to the National Council of La Raza to Planned Parenthood, as well as labor unions and environmental groups.

Frankly, the so-called “progressive” agenda espoused by any candidate embracing the DLC/New Democrat agenda concerns me on a lot of levels.  I have real problems with some of  the elements of it, especially those regarding health care, education, housing, so-called “service” and the whole “married with children is the only acceptable lifestyle” stuff.  To be honest, the “tree hugging, let me share your pain, you poor suffering wretch” far left liberals make my ass itch, too.  That being said, overall, the Democratic approach to government is more appealing to me on the whole than the alternative; I just have an even bigger problem with having the elements I don’t like shoved down my throat without grease (yeah, another mixed metaphor, but, hey, what can I say, I like ‘em) or debate, let alone a vote.  Even a marginalized alternate party serves a purpose in our system of government.

And, if his groovy new Facebook Obacrophy of media manipulation is the only thing that Obama brings to the table, it’s not enough to justify somebody’s 3/4 billion dollar investment in him over Hillary.  It just makes me hate him more, and is likely to blow up in his face and bite him in the ass in the future.  Especially if he doesn’t get better, and, a little more subtle, at it.