Obama (and Biden) Have No Clue About What's Bothering
Their Political Base

by Rabbi Michael Lerner

Huffington Post

September 28, 2010

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rabbi-michael-lerner/obama-and-biden-have-no-c_b_742647.html

Shortly before the California Democratic primary in
2008, the San Francisco Chronicle invited me to write a
short article explaining why I, chair of the interfaith
Network of Spiritual Progressives, was supporting
Barack Obama. Like most other progressive activists, I
understood that a president is limited in what s/he can
accomplish in limiting the power of America's economic
and political elites and in restraining the
military-industrial complex, the pharmaceutical and
health care profiteers, the oil industry's relentless
destruction of the environment, or the selfishness and
materialism that had become the hallmark of Wall Street
and increasingly the "common sense" that was conveyed
by the media and advertising into the consciousness of
many Americans.

But what a president can do is to challenge the ideas
of the powerful and rally those who have become aware
that the current system is not only destructive to the
future of the planet, but also to the possibility of
constructing lives that have a sense of higher meaning
than accumulating money and things, or building
families and friendships that are about love and not
dominated by the self-interest "what's in it for me"
consciousness of the capitalist marketplace.

President Obama is now traveling the country seeking to
rebuild the enthusiasm he generated in 2008, and seems
clueless as to why it is not there. And the Democrats
who followed his lead seem similarly clueless. They
imagine that we, their political base, must have had
unreasonable expectations that somehow a Democratic
majority in Congress and a Democratic president could
overcome the Republican party of "no" and the powerful
institutional constraints built up over many decades.
So they try to explain to us why they failed to pass
the legislation that we, their political base, would
have wanted.

It's easier to believe that their liberal and
progressive base is naive than to acknowledge that we
are not alienated for their failure to pass appropriate
legislation, but for their failure to fight for such
legislation. And our upset with Obama is not that he
didn't accomplish what he couldn't accomplish, but that
he didn't do the one thing he could do: consistently
speak the truth, tell us and the country what was
really happening in the corridors of power and what the
constraints are that he was facing.

It's one thing to make compromises after you've
struggled for something you believe in, another to make
the compromises without ever trying. Liberals and
progressives had already been deeply disillusioned
after the Democratic sweep of Congress in 2006,
continued to fund the war in Iraq despite overwhelming
popular opposition to that war. So when Obama entered
the primaries and spent much of his time distinguishing
himself from Sen. Clinton on precisely the grounds that
he had opposed the war from the beginning, he gave his
base the impression that he would be a leader who would
challenge the war makers. Similarly, when he challenged
the selfishness and materialism that pervaded Wall
Street, we felt we had a candidate who would be willing
to speak truth to power.

So what happened? Massive bailouts for Wall Street while
almost nothing for the millions of unemployed or those
losing their homes to avaricious financial lenders;
escalation of the war in Afghanistan and leaving 50,000
troops as "advisors" in Iraq; refusing to consider a "public
option" for health care and supporting a plan that forces
tens of millions of people to buy health insurance without
putting any restraints on insurance companies' continuing
escalations of the amount we have to pay for health care;
repression against immigrants; allowing continued drilling
in the oceans for oil even after the Gulf disaster, and
substituting the empty promise of "cap and trade" for the
tax on carbons that is the only plausible way to reduce
carbon emissions; refusal to punish those engaged in torture
in the US intelligence community; and the list goes on.

The president has a bully pulpit that could have rallied the
American public to an alternative worldview. Reagan did that
while facing a hostile Democratic Congress; Roosevelt did
that while facing a hostile Republican Congress-and that is
what made them the most significant presidents of the 20th
century.

Many of us will vote Democratic in November, despite all
this. But don't expect us to be able to rally others when
the best we can say is that the Democrats and their national
leader are better than the plausible alternatives. That is
not a rallying cry likely to produce many votes or move us
beyond our deep disappointments. And many others, feeling
humiliated at allowing themselves to have opened to the hope
Obama elicited, now find themselves either totally
uninterested in politics or wishing to strike back at the
Democrats for making fools of those who trusted. Obama and
the Democrats remain clueless.

[Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun Magazine and
author of 11 books, most recently a national best-seller The
Left Hand of God: Taking Back our Country from the Religious
Right ( Harper, 2006).]

===

Another version of this article appeared in the SF 
Chronicle:

Barack Obama has no clue why the left is upset

by Michael Lerner

SFGate.com
San Francisco Chronicle

September 29, 2010

http://articles.sfgate.com/2010-09-29/opinion/24102164_1_barack-obama-health-care-health-insurance

===

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