Democrats: Two Parties Emerging Under One Roof

Up next for Obama: A looming Democratic divide

By: Jonathan Martin and Maggie Haberman

Progressive America Rising via Politico

January 18, 2013 - As President Barack Obama approaches his second inaugural on Monday, he presides over a party that has largely papered over its divisions for the past four years thanks to the president’s commanding popularity.

But almost as soon as the echo of Obama’s inaugural address fades and he becomes a lame duck, Democrats are going to have to face a central and unresolved question about their political identity: Will they become a center-left, Democratic Leadership Council-by-a-different-name party or return to a populist, left-leaning approach that mirrors their electoral coalition?

(Also on POLITICO: Dems' hard road to House majority)

An immediate answer may come in the entitlement debate and whether Obama and congressional Democrats will agree to any Social Security or Medicare benefit cuts to achieve deficit reduction, said a wide-ranging group of Democratic elected officials and strategists.

“In the short term that’s the flash point,” said longtime Democratic consultant Paul Begala.

But as moderate Republicans become an ever rarer breed and more centrists find a home in the Democratic coalition, the party also must reconcile exactly who they are on a broader panoply of economic issues including Wall Street regulation and public employees. As 2016 grows nearer, and their presidential hopefuls begin openly maneuvering, Democrats must decide whether they want to be principally known as the party of Rahm Emanuel or the party of Elizabeth Warren.

“One of the challenges is how we continue to do the right thing while working with a wide coalition of people, both workers and business,” said Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar.

(PHOTOS: Potential 2016 contenders)

For decades, it was culture that divided Democrats internally as they scrambled to fend off GOP charges of extremism on issues ranging from race to gender to gay rights. But thanks to Bill Clinton nudging the party on matters like welfare reform and to broader cultural shifts in the country, there’s now a consensus on social issues: Democrats overwhelmingly are in agreement on abortion rights, same-sex marriage and immigration reform. And while there may be tensions within the party’s ranks on Capitol Hill on gun control, there’s wide and deep consensus on the issue in statehouses and among the grass roots.

It’s not so much Obama’s policy choices that have reshaped the party as much as it is the rise of the Obama coalition — a largely tolerant amalgam of youth, minorities and women. It’s unthinkable, for example, that any serious Democratic White House contender in 2016 would not toe the party line on such issues. The Republicans are now the ones confronting internal divisions on such cultural matters as they contend with how to appeal to a rapidly changing country.

(Also on POLITICO: Democratic hopefuls see political gain in gun fight)

“The center has moved,” said veteran Democratic strategist Mandy Grunwald.

For Democrats, the gulf is over fiscal and class issues, between their populists and their elites on how to appeal to a broad group of voters while retaining their traditional commitment to those in need. In other words, finding a way forward that represents the interest of their supporters making six (or seven) figures in places like McLean, Va., and Bryn Mawr, Pa., while staying true to middle-class backers in La Crosse, Wis., and doing right by the poor of Albuquerque and Philadelphia.

“The real struggle within the Democratic Party is where you stand on income inequality and whether the government needs to be a part of fixing that problem,” said Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “The demographics that the Democratic Party must attract are the people who need responsive government.”

Moderate Democrats counter that center-versus-left formulations are outdated — while making an emphatic case for pragmatism.

“I know what has been incredibly successful for the party and country: the banner of reform and change,” said Emanuel, adding that there is “no part of the budget that’s immune to reform and change” so long as Democrats don’t abandon their traditional “mission.”

How exactly that mission is defined promises to shape the coming debate over Social Security and Medicare.

The differences in the Democratic coalition are razor sharp. Take the question of whether Obama and Congress should consider raising the eligibility age for future Medicare recipients as a way to find savings.

“That stuff you debate out,” said Emanuel, adding: “I don’t think raising the age of Medicare to 67 is a centrist or a liberal idea.”

But to a progressive stalwart like Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) such an idea isn’t just ill-considered — it’s “morally reprehensible.”

“That is such a Washington, Heritage Foundation construction,” Brown said of raising the eligibility age.

Reminded that some of his own colleagues are open to it, he shot back: “They’re wrong.”

And he wondered, speaking of both Democratic and Republican advocates of such reform, “Do they not ever talk to factory workers, construction workers, people that work in diners?”

Such talk exasperates centrist Democrats like Delaware Gov. Jack Markell, a second-termer who has taken the helm of the National Governors Association.

“I hope we’re the party of math,” said Markell, saying of the eventual costs of Medicare and Social Security: “It doesn’t make any sense to put our head in the sand on this issue.”

The Delawarean called reflexive opposition to structural reform in New Deal and Great Society programs is short-sighted.

“It’s easy to try to take the populist approach,” he said. “But in the long run not sustainable. The sooner we figure that out the better.”

Matt Bennett, a top official at the centrist group Third Way, said there’s a pragmatic case for Democrats to embrace entitlement reform now.

“It’s insane to not try to do a big deal right now because every minute you wait the deal gets worse,” said Bennett. “Do we really want to turn over entitlement reform to Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio? Because let’s face it [Republicans] have a 50 percent chance of being president. The same party rarely gets third terms. Why gamble instead of having President Obama cut this deal?”

Even Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor and 2004 White House hopeful, a progressive on some issues, said it makes sense for Democrats to act now on entitlements.

“I would advise [Obama] to go ahead with changing the entitlements because if we do it’s going to be much better than if the Republicans do it,” Dean said, “If you’re willing to show some courage and do some thinking, this can be done and should be done by [the Democrats].”

Liberals dismiss such fretting, arguing that the country’s fiscal straits are overstated and, anyway, pale in comparison to joblessness of the present that needs more urgent attention.

“The best way to get out of a deficit is to grow your way out of a deficit,” said American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. “We have an object lesson from what Europe has done — just going at it from austerity does not work. There has to be a balanced approach, and there are those of us who will fight very hard against benefit cuts in Medicare or Medicaid or Social Security because we know people are living on this.”

AFL-CIO political director Michael Podhorzer was even blunter.

“There’s no denying that there are two Democratic parties,” said Podhorzer. “One that has a fair amount of allegiance to Wall Street and to the notion that it’s no big deal to raise the retirement age or cut benefits. They see the Democratic coalition of the future being more upscale. But there’s a big part of the party that still sees Democrats as still being anchored by downscale.”

“There’s a schism up-down,” said Begala.

Labor officials point to the stark numbers from last year’s presidential election: Mitt Romney won 53 percent of the vote among those making over $50,000 a year while Obama captured 60 percent with those making less than $50,000.

And the growing share of minority voters in the country should ensure Democrats hew to a liberal line, said Center for American Progress head Neera Tanden.

“As you look through presidential elections, I do believe we’re going to see a more and more and more diverse electorate,” Tanden said, adding that the broadening of the Obama electoral coalition into a “bigger and bigger share of the electorate is going to mean a more progressive posture on issues”

The disconnect in the party now is between many of their elected officials and a sizable chunk of their base.

Brown, a traditional populist who has kept to the true faith even since moving from the House to the Senate, lamented that among members of both parties his new chamber “has an upper-class accent.”

Look no further than Brown’s 2010 amendment to the Dodd-Frank legislation introduced along with former Sen. Ted Kaufman (D-Del.) that would have broken up the country’s biggest banks. It got only 33 “yeas” and faced a bipartisan wall of opposition.

The issue of Wall Street reform, while somewhat dormant since the passage of Dodd-Frank, is another major fault line in the Democratic family and raises a sensitive topic: the provenance of campaign funds for a significant number of their elected officials.

“The problem is that Wall Street money in both parties has silenced the establishment of both parties,” said Jeff Connaughton, Kaufman’s former chief of staff and the author of “The Payoff,”a cri de coeur on the political power of banks. “Until we have another meltdown the lesson is that even a devastating financial crisis can be managed from Bob Rubin’s front porch.”

“I wouldn’t be fully candid if I were to say to you that Democrats aren’t overly dependent on Wall Street,” Ellison said.

“A party in bed with Wall Street wouldn’t have passed Dodd-Frank,” fired back Rep. Rob Andrews (D-N.J.).

But to the likes of Markell, Wall Street ought not be vilified.

“My hope for our party is that we remember that 99 percent of workers at financial institutions are good, middle-class people,” he said. “They’re an easy target, but we need a vibrant financial services industry and I don’t think we do a lot of good when we pick these battles.”

Brown said he’s going to keep pushing his legislation to break up the banks and he and other progressives pointed hopefully to the arrival of Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren as a political force who could keep the pressure on Wall Street.

As 2016 grows nearer, the other major fault line likely to emerge on the issue of public employees. Democratic governors and mayors grappling with strained budgets are having to do battle with unionized government workers who often double as the worker bees in Democratic campaigns.

Emanuel, who clashed with his city’s teachers union last year, said he was focused on the greater good of his community even if that meant not always pleasing municipal unions. He recalled contentious town hall meetings over whether or not to lay off some of the city’s downtown traffic aides.

“Is the budget about traffic aides or is it about moving traffic efficiently through the city?” he asked.

New York Andrew Cuomo has also incurred the wrath of public employees in his state thanks to similar budget battles.

He memorably called himself “a progressive Democrat who’s broke” in his first year in office.

Indeed, Cuomo has been a living testament to the friction between pragmatism and some strains of progressivism in governing, just as Obama has. After tilting early toward the center on fiscal issues and “tangling,” as he put it, with public-sector unions to rein in costs, he gained national credibility with his party’s base when New York passed its gay marriage law. Yet he still became a favored target of liberal commentators during 2012 and recently has begun repositioning himself under the “progressive” rubric as firmly as possible.

Looking ahead to 2016, a harder line on public spending could be for the next generation’s center-left Democrats what welfare reform was for Bill Clinton — proof positive that DLCers were serious about the “responsibility” part of “opportunity, responsibility and community.”

“The main dividing line in the party will be: How do we go forward in a cost-constrained environment? How do we project a vision for progressive government when we don’t have any money?” said Bennett.

© 2013 POLITICO LLC

Dollarocracy vs. Democracy

Which Millionaire Are You Voting For?

By NICHOLAS CARNES
Progressive America Rising via NYT Op-Ed

ELECTIONS are supposed to give us choices. We can reward incumbents or we can throw the bums out. We can choose Republicans or Democrats. We can choose conservative policies or progressive ones.

In most elections, however, we don’t get a say in something important: whether we’re governed by the rich. By Election Day, that choice has usually been made for us. Would you like to be represented by a millionaire lawyer or a millionaire businessman? Even in our great democracy, we rarely have the option to put someone in office who isn’t part of the elite.

Of course, many white-collar candidates care deeply about working-class Americans, those who earn a living in manual labor or service-industry jobs. Many are only a generation or two removed from relatives who worked in those fields. But why do so few elections feature candidates who have worked in blue-collar jobs themselves, at least for part of their lives? The working class is the backbone of our society, a majority of our labor force and 90 million people strong. Could it really be that not one former blue-collar worker is qualified to be president?

My research examines how the shortage of working-class people in public office affects our democracy and why there are so few former blue-collar workers in government in the first place. The data I’ve studied suggest that the working class itself probably isn’t the problem. It’s true that workers tend to score a little lower on standard measures of political knowledge and civic engagement. But there are many more workers than there are, say, lawyers — so many more, in fact, that there are probably more blue-collar Americans with the qualities we might want in our candidates than there are lawyers with those traits. If even only half a percent of blue-collar workers have what it takes to govern, there would still be enough of them to fill every seat in Congress and in every state legislature more than 40 times — with enough left over to run thousands of City Councils.

Something other than qualifications seems to be screening out people with serious experience in the working class long before Election Day. Scholars haven’t yet confirmed exactly what that is. (Campaign money? Free time? Party gatekeepers?) But we’re starting to appreciate the seriousness of the problem.

If millionaires were a political party, that party would make up roughly 3 percent of American families, but it would have a super-majority in the Senate, a majority in the House, a majority on the Supreme Court and a man in the White House. If working-class Americans were a political party, that party would have made up more than half the country since the start of the 20th century. But legislators from that party (those who last worked in blue-collar jobs before entering politics) would never have held more than 2 percent of the seats in Congress.

And these trends don’t stop at the federal level. Since the 1980s, the number of state legislators whose primary occupations are working-class jobs has fallen from 5 percent to 3 percent. In City Councils, fewer than 10 percent of members have blue-collar day jobs. Everywhere we look in government, almost no one with personal experience in working-class jobs has a seat at the table.

Their absence, moreover, has real consequences. Lawmakers from different classes tend to bring different perspectives to public office. John Boehner is fond of saying that he’s a small-business man at heart and that “It gave me a perspective on our country that I’ve carried with me throughout my time in public service.” And he’s right. Former businesspeople in government tend to think like businesspeople, former lawyers tend to think like lawyers, and (the few) former blue-collar workers tend to think like blue-collar workers. Edward Beard, a house painter from Providence, R.I., who was elected to Congress in 1974, always carried a paintbrush with him and tacked one to the wall outside of his Washington office — as a “symbol of who I am and where I’m from, the working people.”

Former house painters are the exception in Congress, of course. And although there are many white-collar lawmakers with good intentions, with so few leaders with experience in working-class jobs (from 1999 to 2008, the average member of Congress had spent 1.5 percent of his or her adult life in working-class jobs), economic policy routinely tilts toward outcomes that help white-collar professionals at the expense of the working class. Social safety net programs are stingier, business regulations are flimsier, tax policies are more regressive, and protections for workers are weaker than they would be if our lawmakers came from the same mix of classes as the people they represent.

The key is finding more lawmakers like Mr. Beard, politically adept working-class Americans. Or people like Representative Stephen Lynch, who worked as an ironworker in Boston for nearly two decades before attending law school and becoming a legal advocate for workers — politicians who worked their way up to white-collar jobs but who still remember what it’s like to push a broom.

My experience suggests that finding them will be the easy part. The hard part will be persuading the people with resources to help them. Many political gatekeepers still cling to myths about how there’s something “the matter with Kansas,” how workers are too backward to know what’s best for themselves politically. And people who value political equality already have their hands full with big challenges: mainly, the explosion of money and interest groups in Washington, and the large social class gaps in routine forms of political participation, including voting.

Even if we somehow stem the tide of money in Washington, even if we guarantee equal participation on Election Day, millionaires will still get to set the tax rate for millionaires. White-collar professionals will still get to set the minimum wage for blue-collar workers. People who have always had health insurance will still get to decide whether to help people without it. If we want government for the people, we’ve got to start working toward government by the people. The 2012 election offers us a stark choice between two very different approaches to economic policy. But it’s still a choice between two Harvard-educated millionaires. Even in an election that is supposed to be about the future of our economy, we don’t have a working-class option in the voting booth.

It’s time for citizens who care about political equality to start investing in working-class candidates. We know how to do this. In 1945, the House and the Senate were each 98 percent men. In the decades since, party leaders and interest groups have deliberately recruited many female candidates, and today women make up 17 percent of Congress.

If the old boys’ club isn’t invincible, the Millionaires Party probably isn’t, either. Changes like these aren’t rocket science. They just take a little hard work.

Nicholas Carnes is an assistant professor of public policy at Duke University and author of the forthcoming book “White-Collar Government: How Class-Imbalanced Legislatures Distort Economic Policy-Making in the United States.”

Saving Obama, Saving Ourselves

 

By Tom Hayden

Progressive America Rising

The threat of a Romney-Ryan regime should be enough to convince a narrow American majority to vote for Barack Obama, including the disappointed rank-and-file of social movements.

A widening of economic and racial inequality. Cuts in Medicare and Medical. More global heating. Strangling of reproductive rights. Unaffordable tuition. The Neo-cons back in the saddle. Two or three more right-wing Supreme Court appointments to come. Romney as Trojan horse for Ryan the stalking horse and future presidential candidate.

The consolidation of right-wing power would put progressives on the defensive, shrinking any organizing space for pressuring for greater innovations in an Obama second term.

Where, for example, would progressives be without the Voting Rights Act programs such as Planned Parenthood, or officials like Labor Secretary Hilda Solis or EPA administrator Lisa Jackson?

But the positive case for More Obama and Better Obama should be made as well. History will show that the first term was better than most progressives now think. A second-term voter mandate against wasteful wars, Wall Street extravagance, and austerity for the many, led by elected officials including Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Barbara Lee, Raul Grijalva, Jim McGovern and Keith Ellison, would be a target-rich field of opportunities as they say in the Pentagon.

Why Obama's achievements are dismissed or denied by many on the white liberal-left is a question worth serious consideration. It may only be a matter of legitimate disappointment after the utopian expectations of 2008. It could be pure antipathy to electoral politics, or a superficial assessment of how near-impossible it is to change intransigent institutions. It could be a vested organizational interest in asserting there is no difference between the two major parties, a view wildly at odds with the intense partisan conflicts on exhibit every day. Or it could even be a white blindness in perceptions of reality on the left. When African American voters favor Obama 94-0 [that's right] and the attacks are coming from the white liberal-left, something needs repair in the foundations of American radicalism.

I intend to explore these questions further during the election season. The point here is that they cumulatively contribute to the common liberal-left perception that Obama is only a man of the compromised center, a president who has delivered nothing worse celebrating. The anger with Obama on the left, combined with broad liberal disappointment with the last three years, results in a dampened enthusiasm at the margins which could cost him the election.

By their nature, the achievements of social movements are lesser versions of original visions. As the venerable socialist presidential candidate Norman Thomas used to lament, when asked if he was proud of Social Security being carried out, "they carried it out in a coffin." The limits of the 1935 Social Security Act lay in its token payments, limited eligibility, and lack of health insurance- all a result of political compromises thought necessary at the time. Because paying for the program in by taxation was much too controversial, Social Security was based on employer and employee contributions. That's what Norman Thomas apparently meant in describing the program as the death of his original vision.

While the forerunners of social progress are disappointed in the results they achieve, it should be of some comfort that the gravediggers have been trying to bury Social Security for 75 years without success so far.

As the Port Huron Statement [1962] concluded, "if we appear to seek the unattainable, let it be said we do so to avoid the unimaginable." With dreams like that, it was inevitable that most of us cynically viewed the reforms of the Kennedy and later Johnson administrations as tokenism. Many young radicals of my time [SNCC and SDS] distrusted the Kennedy’s as too gradual and Martin Luther King as too accommodating.

But despite all the inherent tensions and faction fights, social movements do achieve significant reforms, which I would define as empowering the powerless, opening up spaces previously closed, and expanding material benefits for those previously denied them. Prominent examples included:

- The 1965 Voting Rights Act, which racists and Republicans have attempted to thwart from its passage to the present day;

- The enfranchisement of young people who could be drafted but could not vote;

- Migrant worker protections achieved by the United Farm Workers;

- Medicare and Medicaid [1965];

- The US-Soviet nuclear test ban treaty [1963] was a response to global pressure for peace;

- Creation of the Peace Corps in response to a student campaign;

- The birth of opposition to the Cold War [1965 SDS march and teach-ins].

We could neither anticipate nor stop the Vietnam escalation starting in 1965, nor the growth of the National Security State thereafter. The collaboration that existed on domestic issues - cresting in the unity of labor and the civil rights movement in the 1963 March on Washington - did not extend to foreign policy where labor and the Democratic establishment were battling communist-connected insurgencies. But the achievements were not as token as we feared. Under moral and political pressure, Kennedy evolved from early managerialism to become a crucial partner on voter registration, civil rights and the arms race before his 1963 assassination. Were it not for the assassinations of that time, our movements would have been participants in a broad coalition that came to power. A strategy for social change grew from our direct experience, that of outside [often radical] forces taking direct action to awaken and link with establishment insiders to achieve all that was possible, and to lay the foundations for later movements.

After several historical zigs and zags, a similar progressive moment came in the year 2000, when a popular American majority elected Al Gore president only to be thwarted by the US Supreme Court. Gore would have given us a ten-year head start in facing global warming, tested the limits of an environmental presidency and, arguably, kept us out of the trillion-dollar Iraq War.

Some on the left still believe that Kennedy was an imperialist who would have been no different than Lyndon Johnson in sending500,000 Americans to Vietnam, and that Gore was no different than George Bush. Such opinions are wrong on both the facts and conjectures, driven more by ideology or disdain for two-party politics than by the weight of historical evidence.

What these cynical worst-case analyses leave out is the role of strong social movements and progressive constituencies in shaping the political character of the presidency. Just as Abraham Lincoln was influenced by the slaves and Abolitionists, and just as Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal was shaped by labor and populist movements, so the student, women's, civil rights and environmental movements carved an essential place for themselves in the future that might have been under John Kennedy and, later, Al Gore.

Barack Obama, like Lincoln, FDR and John Kennedy, has been criticized as too incremental by his base and too radical by his enemies. An irate Thomas Frank concludes that Obama will never pursue a second New Deal because "that is precisely what Obama was here to prevent." [Harpers, September 2012]. In much analysis, Obama's role seems to be to give austerity and global imperialism an African-American face. Liberal icons share the disappointment from their perspective too. Paul Krugman, who supported Hillary Clinton, wrote of the 2009 stimulus package that "Mr. Obama's victory feels more than a bit like defeat." [237]. A common complaint from the left and liberals was that Obama was too timid, as if oratory could have achieved the public option in health care.

There is another explanation, as first described in my The Long Sixties, from 1960 to Barack Obama. It goes like this. Obama was elected on the wings of social movements going back to slavery time and, concretely, by an extraordinary campaign that challenged the Democratic Party establishment and Iraq orthodoxy in 2008. "Hope" and "change" were code words for Obama's signal achievement, becoming the first African-American president. In doing so, he opened the door to the presidency to Latinos, women, Jews, gays and lesbians and others long assumed to be "unqualified." In victory, however, Obama inevitably fueled emotions ranging from anxiety to hatred among the legions that became the Tea Party counter-movement. Vast numbers of Hillary Clinton Democrats accepted the Obama victory with mixed emotions, while most of the new president's constituency relaxed their energy after two years of grueling campaigning.

This was not the Civil War when slaves and Abolitionists pushed the president towards Appomattox. Not the New Deal with 40 percent unemployment, thousands of workers occupying auto and steel plants, and a rising Left resisting the threat of fascism at home and abroad. Nor was it the Kennedy era when 200,000 marched for jobs and justice under the leadership of civil rights, labor and clergy organizations. Not even close.

In fact, polls as early as 2009 showed that government was as much the enemy as banks and corporations. By a huge margin of 63-28, Americans preferred austerity to stimulus and that cutting taxes was better than government programs. [186]. IN 2010, a 52-19 majority believed erroneously that Obama had raised middle-class taxes. [393]. Surveys by Democratic consultants indicated the same thing, that voters pinched in an economic recession were reluctant to part with their tax dollars for a bureaucracy they didn't trust. There was a racial dimension that few pundits mentioned: white voters in places like western Wisconsin, the land of Paul Ryan, were less than enthused about sending their tax dollars to black Milwaukee.

The surprising truth, according to Time Magazine's Michael Grunwald in The New New Deal, is that the stimulus program - the American Recovery Act - worked beyond anyone's expectations. Which is true, Krugman's repeated story that the stimulus was inadequate, Frank's claim that Obama's role was to prevent more radical change, or Grunwald's conclusion that it was both an historic achievement and all that Obama could achieve? Grunwald's documented account, based on two years of writing, holds up - and should be read by any doubters.

At the beginning of the Obama administration, the American economy was losing a net 700,000 jobs per month. In the first month alone of Obama's presidency, 818,000 jobs vanished. "The shocks of 2008 were nastier than the crash of 1929", Grunwald asserts, citing the eight trillion dollars in housing wealth that vanished overnight. [427] That terrifying situation only began to improve when stimulus dollars began to flow. The Recovery Act funded direct employment for people in 100,000 projects including:

Roads, bridges, subways, water pipes, sewer plants, bus stations, fire stations...federal

buildings, Grand Canyon National Park, trails, libraries courthouses...hospitals, Ellis

Island,seaports, airports, dams, locks, levees, INdian reservations, fish hatcheries, coral

reefs, passport offices, military bases, veterans cemetaries, historically-black colleges,

particle accelerators, and much more. [13]

The green stimulus package transformed the Energy Department into the "world's largest green energy investment fund." [17] The US Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy grew from $1.2 billon to $16.4 billion in two years. Ninety billion in stimulus funds were invested in green energy programs [which leveraged another $100 billion in private funds.] An advanced battery industry was built from scratch, and 680,000 low-income homes have been weatherized, 120,000 buildings retrofitted for energy efficiency, ten million smart meters have been installed, and 400,000 LED streetlights and traffic signals. [pp. 425, 439] Renewable electricity doubled in three years, as promised. Wind, solar and geothermal projects approved on federal lands grew from zero to 29. [435] Solar installations went from 280 megawatts in 2008 to 1,855 in 2011. Just five years earlier, the Clinton administration barely pushed through a five-year $6.3 billion clean energy initiative, just three percent of Obama's $200 billion. Two Obama administration mandates on fuel efficiency, one in 2009 and another last week, will increase the standard from 29 mpg to 54.5 mpg by 2025.

In addition to providing unemployment benefits to millions of Americans, the Recovery Act "pushed 39 states to rewrite their eligibility rules in order to qualify for stimulus bonuses, dragging the New Deal-era unemployment system into the computer age [and] permanently extending the counter-cyclical safety net to part-time workers and domestic abuse victims." [435]

Grunwald sums up as follows: the Obama Recovery Act, in constant dollars, was the biggest and most transformative energy bill US history, the biggest and most transformative education bill since the Great Society, a big and transformative health care bill, too, the biggest foray into industrial policy [the auto bailout] since FDR, the biggest expansion of anti-poverty programs since LBJ, the biggest middle class tax cut since Ronald Reagan, the biggest infusion of research money ever, and it extended high-speed Internet to under-served communities, a twist on the New Deal rural electrification program. And it contained virtually no earmarks.

And, Grunwald adds, the stimulus became a huge liability in the face of nine percent unemployment, the rise of the Tea Party, and a Republican Party strategy to punish any Republicans who cooperated with Obama. The Republican obstructionism was unprecedented: whereas the Gingich-era Republicans sought to stop the Congress during the Clinton era, the new Republicans had no qualms in trying to stop the president from acting at all during the worst economic and credit crisis in 70 years.

Democrats flinched. They even stopped talking about the stimulus. They even let Jay Leno get away with joking that it was communism, "or, as we call it in this country, a stimulus package." [8]. A CBS-NYT poll in February 2010 revealed that only six percent of Americans believed the stimulus had created any jobs. [486]. More Americans thought Elvis was alive.

OBAMACARE

Perhaps more than any other policy, Obamacare fed the disillusionment of the liberal-left with the new administration. They agonized in watching Obama retreat over months from his preferred single-payer position to a public option and finally to the only option which could pass the Congress, a huge subsidy to private insurers that resembled the bailout of banks. Liberals blamed Obama for his retreat more than the dinosaur Democrats and obstructionist Republicans who insisted on the final outcome. Thus Obama received no liberal credit for being the first president to sign the biggest expansion of coverage since 1965. Obamacare adds 32 million more people to the rolls, including those with pre-existing conditions, women seeking birth control options, and young people up to the age of 26. The provisions of Medicaid in the Obama budget will support elderly and disabled people, and children, as well as middle-class people needing future nursing home care. These Medicaid expansions will be slashed under the Romney-Ryan administration, in addition to Medicare being degraded into a voucher program.

Like the stimulus package, however, Obamacare fueled the Tea Party's massive protests against the bogeyman of "big government", even producing hallucinatory right-wing calls to save "our Social Security" from the State. Timid Democrats retreated from their legislative product again, at least for one year. The media headlined polls showing that Obamacare was wildly unpopular [though a closer reading would show that a slight majority either supported the legislation or didn't think it went far enough.]

Was this an optical problem? Did the passage of Obamacare appear to be a step backwards when viewed against the original single-payer proposal? Or did the liberal-left actually think the spectrum of American politics ranged from themselves to Obama, leaving out the inconvenient truth that hordes of right-wingers were both numerous and highly-organized. It had taken 75 years to add health insurance to FDR's original Social Security concept, but the politics had changed scarcely at all.

IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN

Obama was the first presidential candidate to succeed on a platform of pulling US troops out of an ongoing war [unless you count Richard Nixon's secret plan for peace in 1969 and "peace is at hand" promise of 1972]. By any rational standard, Obama fulfilled that pledge when the last American troops departed Iraq last year.

Many in the peace movement didn't believe it then and dismiss it now. To the extent this is a rational objection - and not blindness - it rests on two arguments. First, some claim that Obama was only following the withdrawal plan already agreed to by George Bush. It's an interesting question for future historians to uncover what shadow entity orchestrated the Iraq-US pact between the end of Bush and the coming of Obama. That aside, it's logical to conclude that the immanence of Obama's victory pushed the Bush administration to wrap up the best withdrawal agreement possible before the unpredictable newcomer took office. In addition, Obama increased his previous withdrawal commitment in February 2009 to include virtually all American forces instead of leaving behind a "residual" force of 20-30, 000. It is true that as the endgame neared, Obama left open the possibility of a residual force after American ground troops departed, saying he would be responsive to the request of the Baghdad regime. Some on the left seized on these remarks to later claim that Obama had to be forced by the Iraqis to finally leave. There is no evidence for this claim, however. It is equally possible - and I believe more credible - that Obama was simply being Obama, knowing that the Iraqis could not possibly request the Americans to stay.

Dissecting diplomacy, like legislation, is like making sausage, in the old saying. Obama certainly knew that he would gain political cover if he could say with credibility that he was only following Bush's withdrawal plan and Iraq's request.

A more bizarre left criticism of Obama on Iraq is that the war itself never ended but instead morphed into a secret war with tens of thousands of Americans fighting as Special Ops or private contractors. Why it would be more effective to continue a losing war with fewer troops has never been asked. After all the talk of tens or hundreds of thousands of US personnel being left behind, the most recent numbers are these: in June of this year there were 1,235 US civilian employees in Baghdad along with 12, 477 private contractors [not all Americans]. That was a decline of 10-20 percent over the previous three months. The personnel are for intelligence, embassy security and customary logistical support, not an extraordinary number in a country seething with anti-Americanism. South Korea has up to 28,500 US military personnel, and Japan some 34,000, not including thousands of dependents- that's what a post-war occupation looks like.

AFGHANISTAN, PAKISTAN AND THE LONG WAR

Like many who campaigned for Obama in 2008, I opposed the continuing US wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the military doctrine of the "Long War" against Islamic fundamentalism. Obama has proven true to his word, the critics have been proven right in our warnings.

According to Bob Woodward's Obama's Wars [2010], Obama granted his generals an increase of 33,000 troops for an Afghan surge but drew the line there and insisted that those troops would start coming home in 2011, a pledge he has kept. The 33,000 figure was disappointing to those of us, including Rep. Barbara Lee, who demanded that at least 50,000 being pulled out by the end of this year. Instead Obama has promised the pullout of US ground troops and an "Afghan lead" by 2014. In doing so, Obama has triggered a dynamic towards the exits favored by overwhelming numbers of Americans and NATO citizens. [Mitt Romney has opposed deadlines while at the same time accepting the 2014 framework].

While it will take years to know the truth, I believe there is a strategic and political reason for Obama's 2014 timetable. He knows that Afghanistan is a lost cause which cannot be acknowledged and dealt with during the election season. Between 2013 and 2014, Obama will have a narrow window to replace Hamid Karzai with a power-sharing arrangement, and make enough deals with the Taliban, the Haqqanis, Pakistan, China and yes, Iran - to salvage and perhaps partition Afghanistan. At present, the neo-cons running Romney's foreign policy team won't permit any diplomatic contacts with the insurgency even if it means leaving an American soldier, Bowe Bigdahl, in captivity somewhere in North Waziristan. An ultimate political agreement to try stabilizing Afghanistan will require diplomacy with several countries at the top of the neo-cons enemies' list. Even then, implosion and defeat are Afghan possibilities which Obama dares not mention.

Others in the peace movement, along with civil libertarians, rage against Obama because of his secret escalating drone attacks. They are right morally to keep making righteous noise, especially about the official cover-up of casualty rates. But it will take a political-diplomatic strategy of ending the Afghan war in order to stop the drones. Civil liberties and human rights groups who are vociferous against the drones still refuse to oppose the Afghan war itself, which is the primary cause of the drone killings. Such groups also oppose the assassinations of Al Qaeda leaders and the prosecution of whistleblowers without opposing the underlying wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen.

In summary, Obama's withdrawal from Iraq has been clouded in left disbelief and overshadowed by criticism of his policies in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and beyond. On the merits, these criticisms are entirely justified. When they lead to opposing Obama's re-election, they help Romney and the return of the neo-cons.

WHERE TO GO FROM HERE

The white liberal-left, however modest in numbers, is hugely important in a close presidential election, where the margin of difference may be one percent or less in states with large progressive constituencies. If Obama loses, it will be unfair to blame the left but they will be blamed nonetheless. As a consequence they will become more marginal, far less able to connect with the progressive constituencies and mass movements with vital stakes in Obama's re-election.

The potential toll can be glimpsed already, in the current decline of the radical left amidst the greatest economic meltdown in seven decades. Of course radical movements will rise again, but more likely from the activist networks who tried to stop Romney and re-elect Obama, not from those who sat on their hands and believed it was all another circus.

There is plenty of time to still make a difference. First, some people on the left will have to become used to the idea that partial power only brings partial results. While we can establish enclaves for dreamers from Mendocino to Brooklyn, from Madison to Austin, we have to win support from the center in battleground states or risk losing decades.

The second lesson is for self-defined radicals to be immersed in the everyday problems of the mass constituencies that depend on presidents to make a small margin of difference in their lives. [One small example of how it works: there would be no federal consent decrees over brutal police departments were in not for Al Sharpton hammering at Bill Clinton to include lawsuits for unconstitutional "patterns and practices" in his otherwise draconian Omnibus Crime legislation in 1994.]

Third, election seasons are perfect organizing moments when large numbers of people are open to persuasion on public issues. It may be springtime before the next cycle of activism comes around again. Now is the time to build local lists and structures for voter turnout in November and street turnouts thereafter.

This particular election offers the perfect moment to build opposition to Citizens United

and "corporate personhood", for a renewed movements for a constitutional right to vote, the deeper regulation of Wall Street and a constitutional right to vote for campaigns down the road. Does anyone seriously believe that the Dreamers and marriage-equality movements will accept a return to second-class status without the fight of their lifetimes?

It can be time to begin a realignment of the electoral left as well. The active Green Party networks need to shed their reputation as "spoilers" just as the Progressive Democrats of America [PDA] needs to shed its appearance of only "tailing" the Democrats. Labor insurgents like National Nurses United, and even the formidable SEIU, are demanding a more independent role in coalition politics. One can almost feel a new politics trying to be born in the so-called womb of the old, a third "party of the people" both inside and outside the two-party system. What if the Green Party decided to invest in places of the richest electoral opportunity instead of campaigning vigorously where the stakes are 50-50? Why not a negotiated merger of the Greens and PDA in the close races, and PDA support for Green candidates where they are most viable? It's entirely possible to visualize creative leaps out of electoral traps while strengthening an independent left within the institutions of state power. Protestors in the streets should serve as a permanently challenging - and threatening - disruptive presence in constant orchestrated interaction with forces on the inside too, not simply serve as occasional "street heat" to be enlisted when pressure is needed by the insiders.

Now through November, the radical left can be the effective One Percent. The 99 Percent will be appreciative. #

[For a thoughtful left perspective, see also Aug. 09, 2012 Alternet essay by Bill Fletcher and Carl Davidson.]