Multi Medium

On Mindless Partisan Boosterism

Not only is it not okay when our guy does it, it’s actually worse, because he’s supposed to be the one who doesn’t do it.  That’s why he was our guy in the first place.

I will not be an apologist for betrayal, and I will not adjust my core principles based solely on who’s in power.

2 comments May 17th, 2012 at 07:02am Posted by Eli

Obama Now Supports Marriage Equality Needs Support Of Gays For Re-Election

Hooray, Obama now says he’s in favor of marriage equality instead of saying he opposes it.  But as Gawker points out, it’s not going to translate into any kind of positive action, it’s just meaningless lip service (leaving it up to the states does not equal support in any meaningful way) – Obama has simply calculated that he needs to get the LGBT community and their allies off his back and into his wallet before the election.

But make no mistake: Obama “supports” marriage equality like he “supported” the healthcare public option, EFCA, Dawn Johnsen, and Liz Warren – he’ll make tepidly positive statements and nothing else.  What Obama says he supports is meaningless: Always watch what he fights for, and what he doesn’t.

Add comment May 10th, 2012 at 07:52am Posted by Eli

Obama Administration Identifies And Fixes Key Flaw In Unemployment Insurance

The problem is that all of these people are just sitting around and collecting unemployment checks without doing anything to enhance corporate profitability.  But Obama has the solution!

April 20th, 2012 at 07:30am Posted by Eli

Cowardice Or Corporatism? Part 117

Is Obama deathly afraid of conservative attacks on “job-killing regulations” and “the nanny state”, or does he simply agree with them?  Either way, he’s hamstringing his regulators just like his predecessor did.  I particularly like this tidbit about the guy Obama put in charge of regulating the regulators:

Cass R. Sunstein, director of the White House’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, advocates what he calls “libertarian paternalism,” a regulatory philosophy that encourages rather than mandates changes that improve or save lives.

With Democrats like these, who needs Republicans?

April 3rd, 2012 at 11:09am Posted by Eli

The Joy Of Partisanship

One of my biggest disappointments since Obama’s election has been not just Obama’s despicable betrayal of Democratic ideals, but liberals and Democrats’ complete willingness to overlook those ideals simply because he’s nominally a member of the same team.  Conservatives did the exact same thing when Bush was president, but I had really hoped progressives were better than that.

When loyalty trumps principles, those principles become meaningless.  And right now neither party has any recognizable principles other than supreme executive power and blind loyalty to moneyed interests.

March 14th, 2012 at 07:22am Posted by Eli

No One Could Have Anticipated…

Apparently the Republicans are having trouble finding enough women to support their war on women.  I can’t imagine why that might be.

Good thing for Obama and the Democrats that labor unions are a lot more forgiving about supporting people who screw them over repeatedly.

March 12th, 2012 at 07:42am Posted by Eli

Little-Known Facts About Government

Did you know that the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Department is responsible for verifying the authenticity of presidential birth certificates?

[Maricopa County Sheriff Joe] Arpaio on Thursday unveiled preliminary results of an investigation, conducted by members of his volunteer task force, into the authenticity of President Obama’s birth certificate, a controversy driven by the so-called birther movement that has been widely debunked but which remains alive in the eyes of some conservatives.

At a news conference, Arpaio said the probe revealed that there was probable cause to believe Obama’s long-form birth certificate released by the White House in April is a computer-generated forgery. He also said the selective service card completed by Obama in 1980 in Hawaii also was most likely a forgery.

(…)

“I’m not going after Obama,” said Arpaio, who has criticized the president’s administration for cutting off his federal immigration powers and conducting a civil rights investigation of his office. “I’m just doing my job.”

And there you have it.  He wouldn’t say it if it weren’t true, right?

March 2nd, 2012 at 07:46am Posted by Eli

Obama’s Cunning Plan Revealed

Obama’s former budget director Peter Orszag accidentally spills the beans:

A weak labor market, like the one we’ve experienced since the financial crisis in 2008, imposes enormous stress on people. Given the added anxiety created by a weak economy, you might think life expectancy would decline. Oddly, though, during recessions, exactly the opposite tends to happen: Life expectancy rises.

Now we know: Obama’s stimulus was actually a stealth death panel!  Why does Obama hate Grandma so?

February 23rd, 2012 at 07:07am Posted by Eli

The New Birtherism?

This little snippet jumped out at me from a story about how Republicans hate Obama’s decision to defer a decision on the Keystone XL pipeline because he hates America:

February 1st, 2012 at 07:23am Posted by Eli

Something To Look Forward To

In case you were hoping Obama’s latest chief of staff would be an improvement over Rahm and Bill Daley, don’t hold your breath.  The All-Seeing Eye Of Froomkin found this gem from last year:

A former top executive at Citigroup who participated in the deregulation of Wall Street during the Clinton administration and recently was tapped by President Barack Obama for a top White House post told a Senate panel last week that deregulation didn’t lead to the recent financial crisis.

Jacob “Jack” Lew, Obama’s nominee to lead the Office of Management and Budget, the White House agency entrusted with ensuring that federal regulations reflect the president’s agenda, was asked Thursday during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Budget Committee by Sen. Bernie Sanders whether he believed that the “deregulation of Wall Street, pushed by people like Alan Greenspan [and] Robert Rubin, contributed significantly to the disaster we saw on Wall Street.”

Lew, a former OMB chief for President Bill Clinton, told the panel that “the problems in the financial industry preceded deregulation,” and after discussing those issues, added that he didn’t “personally know the extent to which deregulation drove it, but I don’t believe that deregulation was the proximate cause.“

Well, I guess that explains how the resolutely obstructionist GOP allowed him to be confirmed as the head of OMB…

January 10th, 2012 at 11:27am Posted by Eli

Political Channel-Surfing

This ongoing cycle of a new Republican candidate catching fire every month and then abruptly fizzling again, reminds me of nothing so much as the last three elections, which have whiplashed from “throw all the Republican bums out” to “throw all the Democratic bums out”.

It’s like watching someone angrily mashing the remote over and over again in the desperate hope that if they keep clicking long enough they’ll miraculously find a channel that doesn’t suck.

January 4th, 2012 at 11:25am Posted by Eli

Why I Can’t Support Obama

Glenn Greenwald and Taylor Marsh helpfully explain why it is impossible to view Obama as a Democrat in any meaningful way other than “less insane and slightly less awful than the Republican candidates”.

No, I’m not going to support Ron Paul or any of the other Republican candidates, but as Taylor Marsh puts it, “Pres. Obama has helped Democrats deliver a climate that this party has threatened since the ’70s would happen if I didn’t vote for them.”

January 3rd, 2012 at 07:11am Posted by Eli

Bobo Sort Of Gets It?

Amazing.  David Brooks actually acknowledges that Obama really isn’t nearly as anti-business and pro-regulation as Republicans keep claiming he is, and even admits that what regulation there is has not been the cause our chronic high unemployment.

He still seems to think Obama’s imposed too much regulation, just because.  But at least it’s progress of a sort.

December 6th, 2011 at 07:48am Posted by Eli

Fierce Advocate 2.0

Good news, workers!  Obama’s finally got your back!

Obama said he has been accused by Republicans of fomenting class warfare.

“You know what, if asking a millionaire to pay the same tax rate as a plumber makes me a class warrior, a warrior for the working class, I will accept that. I will wear that charge as a badge of honor,” the president said.

Awesome!  I guess that means that Obama will grudgingly implement minor reforms and stop opposing major ones if the working class rises up as one and embarrasses the shit out of him.

(Note: Does not apply to government workers, but they have his “gratitude”)

September 28th, 2011 at 11:37am Posted by Eli

Word Choice Of The Day

Chicago Business makes it sound like Obama’s supporters just got bored and wandered off:

President Barack Obama’s Chicago-based re-election campaign has a hometown problem: the donors and volunteers who have lost interest after launching his run for the White House four years ago.

Obama’s problem isn’t that his supporters have “lost interest,” it’s that they’ve been paying attention.

September 28th, 2011 at 07:36am Posted by Eli

Wanker Of The Day

Barack Obama in 2007:

And understand this: If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain when I’m in the White House, I will put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself, I’ll will walk on that picket line with you as President of the United States of America. Because workers deserve to know that somebody is standing in their corner.

As you will recall, when American workers were denied their right to collectively bargain in Wisconsin, Obama did precisely nothing.  And now…

Barack Obama in 2011:

“Take off your bedroom slippers. Put on your marching shoes,” he said, his voice rising as applause and cheers mounted. “Shake it off. Stop complainin’. Stop grumblin’. Stop cryin’. We are going to press on. We have work to do.”

You have some nerve, Mr. President.  Don’t ask anyone on the left to march with you if you’re not willing to march with them.

September 26th, 2011 at 07:17am Posted by Eli

Obatross

It’s looking more and more like Obama’s going to take congressional Democrats down with him again next year.  But some Democratic consultants still cling to hope (and change):

“I’m glad the election’s not today,” said Democratic pollster Keith Frederick, a veteran of House races. “Every poll shows independents losing their patience for the president. These House elections tend to get nationalized, and there’s no doubt right now that as a referendum on Barack Obama, House Democrats lose.”

I would love to know what makes Frederick think that Obama is going to be more popular in 2012.  If Democrats think the jobs bill is going to be enough to save them, they are sadly mistaken.  Especially after Obama strips it of everything but corporate tax breaks and forces Democrats to vote for it.

September 23rd, 2011 at 11:51am Posted by Eli

Why?

Has Russ Feingold been watching the same Obama I have?

Last week a group of liberal activists and academics, led by consumer advocate Ralph Nader and scholar Cornel West, announced that they were looking for six “recognizable, articulate” candidates to launch a primary bid — not to rip the nomination from Obama’s grasp but to keep him honest on issues like civil rights, consumer protections, labor and foreign policy.

(…)

“I strongly disagree with Ralph Nader. As I’ve said many times before, I believe that re-electing President Obama is an absolute imperative for our economy, our judicial system, for progressives and for our country,” said former Sen. Russ Feingold, who announced recently that he was not running for Wisconsin’s open Senate seat.

Really?  Because Obama has been incompetent on the economy (and frighteningly pro-austerity), downright destructive to progressives, and has all but ignored the judiciary.  More from Feingold:

Now, facing Republican candidates that are bought-and-sold by corporate money, and who want to give more tax breaks to the wealthiest and attack the rights of working Americans, the President is fighting to create jobs and provide economic security for middle class families.

Again, who is Russ talking about?  Obama is almost as much a corporate creature as the Republicans, strong-armed congressional Democrats into extending Bush’s tax cuts for the rich, and has twiddled his thumbs on jobs until just recently.

I’m still not quite at the point where I would say I would prefer a Republican president, but I can’t think of a single persuasive reason why Obama deserves to keep his job.  If we could get a Democratic nominee who might actually be a good president, I’d be all for it.

3 comments September 22nd, 2011 at 08:00am Posted by Eli

Approval And Unemployment

David Axelrod whistles past the graveyard:

Despite what you hear in elite commentary, the President’s support among base voters and in key demographic groups has stayed strong. According to the latest NBC-WSJ poll, Democrats approve of his performance by an 81%-14% margin. That’s stronger than President Clinton’s support among Democrats at this point in his term and, according to Gallup, stronger than any Democratic President dating back to Harry Truman through this point in their presidency.

Well, there’s a couple of problems with that.  One is that the 81% are not exactly enthusiastic in their approval:

Only 48% of Democrats on our most recent national survey said they were ‘very excited’ about voting in 2012. On the survey before that the figure was 49%. Those last two polls are the only times all year the ‘very excited’ number has dipped below 50%.

In 13 polls before August the average level of Democrats ‘very excited’ about voting next year had averaged 57%. It had been as high as 65% and only twice had the number even dipped below 55%.

The other is that since Election Day 2008, the breakdown of party affiliation has gone from 28/37/33 Republican/Independent/Democrat to 28/44/26.  Which kinda suggests to me that Obama just managed to drive 7% of the electorate out of the Democratic Party entirely.  If you add those people back in, then Obama’s approval rating is more like 64% among people who were Democrats when Obama was elected.

Granted, that’s probably an oversimplification, but the shrinkage in Democratic affiliation is almost certainly inflating Obama’s approval rating there, in much the same way that ignoring people who have given up looking for work understates the true scope of unemployment.

1 comment September 17th, 2011 at 04:25pm Posted by Eli

The Source Of All Obama’s Problems Is Revealed!

It was Bill Daley all along!

Never mind that Obama was a lousy president who collaborated with (or at the very least capitulated to) the GOP and frittered away huge congressional majorities long before Bill Daley showed up, or any other little minor details like that…

I think the main reason for the focus on Bill Daley is that he’s not Obama, or Geithner, or Holder, or any of Obama’s other corrupt and/or craven agency heads and cabinet members.  Obama sucked before Bill Daley, and he continues to suck now.  Bill Daley is not the problem, although he is equally clearly not the solution.

September 17th, 2011 at 12:17pm Posted by Eli

Eleventy-Dimensional Chess Strategy Revealed!

I think I have finally figured it out: By co-opting Republican positions on issues like extraction, tax cuts, regulations, and austerity, Obama is forcing the GOP to become more and more insane in order to stay to the right of him as an opposition party, thus making itself less and less appealing to non-crazy voters.

Obama isn’t following the Republicans to the right, he’s pushing them.

1 comment September 8th, 2011 at 11:23am Posted by Eli

HAMP For Unemployment

Looking for another way to give desperate people false hope and pretend to solve the problem while actually just benefiting corporations?  I know!  Let’s let people on unemployment work for free and call it “training”!

August 25th, 2011 at 07:52am Posted by Eli

No Room For Improvement

Ezra Klein explains that Obama couldn’t possibly have done a better job, what with his miniscule majorities in both houses of Congress and all.  I particularly like the part where he suggests that Obama would have been less popular and the 2010 bloodbath would have been worse if Obama had passed an effective stimulus and generally done more to live up to his campaign promises.

Because the American people just hate strong politicians who get results, especially when they don’t act like corporate tools.  That’s why FDR was only able to get elected 4 times.  Well, that and dying.

August 23rd, 2011 at 07:51am Posted by Eli

This Just In

Apparently the teabaggers are basically just rebranded Republican theocrats.  If they’re political independents, it’s only because the Republican Party isn’t sufficiently suffused with right-wing religious fanaticism.

But the joke’s on them, because now they’re even less popular than the religious right, and even atheists and Muslims.  Why, they’re even less popular than Obama’s record on the economy, and that’s saying something.

The Tea Party really is the best hope Obama and the Democrats have next year – that they nominate more unelectable crazies like Sharron Angle, Linda McMahon and Christine O’Donnell, and that voters turn against the teabaggers that they elected last year.  Lesser of two evils is pretty much all they have going for them next year, so they’re going to have to be pretty damn lesser to overcome the enthusiasm gap (who could have predicted that the party that strokes its base would get better turnout than the party that kicks theirs?).

1 comment August 18th, 2011 at 08:08am Posted by Eli

It All Depends On What The Meaning Of The Word “Good” Is…

The NYT recently revived Obama’s old quote from early in his presidency that he would rather be a good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president, in the context of talking about what he has to do to turn his presidency around before he’s up for re-election.  But really, that only makes sense if you buy the premise that he hasn’t been a good president, which can only be properly evaluated if you know what his goals are.

That is the question.  There has been a spate of Obama-evaluating articles and blog posts lately, with the likes of Robert Reich, Drew Westen, Der Spiegel, LAT, and the Wall Street Journal attributing his disappointing presidency to weakness and/or cluelessness, while Matt Stoller, David Sirota, Jamie Galbraith, and, well, me, argue that Obama has been enacting exactly the policies he wants to enact.

There is room for agreement between the two views, however: Regardless of whether Obama is a successful Republican or an unsuccessful Democrat, he has been an absolutely miserable politician who has demoralized his own base, alienated independents, and done nothing to win over Republicans. (Well, actually, he’s done quite a lot to win over Republicans, but none of it has worked.)  And the economy and employment situation is still terrible, although I suppose that could also be considered a matter of perspective – the wealthy are still doing fine, if not better, but the overwhelming majority of the electorate are not feeling very secure.

So is Obama a good president or a mediocre one?  I think the answer mainly depends on how much money you have.  Is he a one-term president or a two-term one?  I think the answer mainly depends on how crazy the Republican nominee is.

1 comment August 11th, 2011 at 07:42am Posted by Eli

Obama’s Secret Weapon Against Mitt Romney: Irony

Yes, Obama’s plan is actually to paint Romney as a phony insincere corporate shill who reverses his position on every issue.

His team really has been studying Karl Rove’s gameplan of attacking opponents with your candidate’s own weaknesses…

August 10th, 2011 at 07:25am Posted by Eli

There’s No One Left To Vote For

Shorter American electorate: WE HATE EVERYBODY.

And really, who can blame them?  Both parties got their shot at running the government, and both parties failed miserably because they cared more about their corporate and wealthy donors than the people they were elected to serve.

There is definitely room for a third party (although it would really be more like a second party at this point), but not if it’s just a corporate “centrist” party positioned between the other two corporate parties.  The only kind of third party that’s going to gain any traction would be a populist one that promises to represent ordinary people instead of corporations and the wealthy.

1 comment August 6th, 2011 at 01:47pm Posted by Eli

The Problem

I agree with a lot of this Peter Daou post, especially about how the right has effectively stepped into and taken advantage of this country’s information and education vacuum, and how the left is hobbled by the lack of any kind of common cause between the progressive movement and the Democratic Party.  But I’m not so sure I buy his diagnosis of the root cause:

On the other side you have the Democratic establishment, political leaders, pollsters and strategists who, by and large, are poll addicts, chronically incapable of taking principled stands, obsessed with appealing to independent voters, hostile to progressive advocates, often just as captive to moneyed interests as their Republican counterparts. Mind-bogglingly, it was the White House and Democratic leadership that worked with BP to ‘disappear’ the Gulf spill, for fear it would harm them in the 2010 midterms. Craven doesn’t begin to describe it.

(…)

As I said previously, faced with a public that holds opposing views, politicians can either change their positions to match the public’s views or change the public’s views to match their positions. Only when Democrats decide to do the latter will America’s rightward shift be halted or reversed.

I believe that Obama and most of the Democrats are actually Republicans masquerading as weak Democrats, and all the poll-driven, center-chasing wimpiness is camouflage to make their pro-corporate policies look like some kind of pragmatic (albeit misguided) centrism rather than the corrupt sellout that they actually are.

On a related note, I think it’s hilarious that the White House keeps complaining that progressives aren’t doing a good enough job of selling the American people on the Satan sandwiches they keep offering up, when the real problem is that we can’t convince the White House to stop making them.

3 comments August 4th, 2011 at 07:53am Posted by Eli

This Is What Happens When You’re Not Paying Attention

You say clueless, ridiculous things like this:

Republicans will still be able to refuse to raise taxes. But if they do, it won’t matter. The only way they can succeed in keeping taxes from rising is if the Obama administration and the Democrats stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them to extend the Bush tax cuts.

Srsly?  Did you not see what happened last December???

August 1st, 2011 at 11:27am Posted by Eli

The Only Winners And Losers Who Really Matter

If you want to understand how Washington thinks and why our government and media are so worthless, just read this repellent column by the WaPo’s Chris Cillizza, toting up “The debt-ceiling deal… winners and losers.”

In the winning column, he lists Mitch McConnell, the Tea Party, Obama, the Congressional Budget Office, Grover Norquist, and – I’m not kidding – David Wu.

In the losing column, he lists Congress, the Gang Of Six, commissions, and liberals.

Missing from either list: The economy or the American people.  Just like they were missing from all the political calculations and posturing by Obama and the Tea Party, who collaborated to produce a terrible deal that will make the country weaker and maybe even increase the debt it was supposed to reduce.

You also have to love this little snippet of DLC-style conventional wisdom:

But remember that Obama’s target constituency in 2012 is not his base but rather independent and moderate voters. And those fence-sitters love compromise in almost any form.

Yep, there’s nothing independents and moderates love more than politicians with no convictions at all (I personally believe Obama is a strong Republican masquerading as a weak Democrat, but the appearance is the same).  And of course they always turn out in droves, not like a motivated Democratic base would.

I understand that most politicians – and much of the media who cover them – are corrupt, shallow, self-centered creatures, and it’s folly to expect them to always put the good of the country first.  But couldn’t they at least think about it a little bit?

August 1st, 2011 at 07:49am Posted by Eli