The One and Only Cause of "Fiscal Cliff" Economic Crisis: Republicans Fear Tea Party Primaries

By Robert Creamer
Progressive America Rising via HuffPost

Dec 29, 2012 - Often, economic crises are caused by real physical problems - like draught, war, demography, or technological innovation that robs one economy of a competitive advantage over another.

Other times, economic crises result when asset bubbles burst, or financial markets collapse. That was the case of the Great Depression - and more recently the Great Recession.

The economic crisis of the moment - the "fiscal cliff" - does not result from any of these factors. In fact it is not a real "economic crisis" at all, except that it could inflict serious economic hardship on many Americans and could drive the economy back into recession.

The "fiscal cliff" is a politically manufactured crisis. It was original concocted by the Republican Senate Leader, Mitch McConnell as a way to get past the last crisis manufactured by the Republicans - the 2011 standoff over increasing the Federal Debt Ceiling.

Theoretically, "the cliff" - composed of increased taxes and huge, indiscriminant cuts in Federal programs - would be so frightening to policy makers that no one would ever consider allowing the nation to jump.

Now, America is on the brink of diving off the cliff for one and only one reason: many House Republicans are terrified of primary challenges from the Tea Party right.

That's right, if your tax bill goes up $2,200 a year, or you're one of the millions who would stop receiving unemployment benefits, the cause of your economic pain is not some a natural disaster, or a major structural flaw in the economy. The cause is Republican fear of being beaten in a primary by people like Sarah Palin, Sharon Angel or Richard Mourdock - funded by far Right Wing oligarchs like Sheldon Adelson and the Koch Brothers. It's that simple.

Most normal Americans will have very little patience with Republicans as they begin to realize that GOP Members of Congress are willing to risk throwing the country back into a recession because they are worried about being beaten in low turn out primaries by people who do a better job than they do appealing to the extreme right fringe of the American electorate - and to the far Right plutocrats that are all too willing to stoke right wing passion and anger.

Nate Silver, of the New York Time's 538.com, argues in a recent column that one of the reasons for this phenomenon is the increasing polarization of the American electorate. That polarization translates in to fewer truly "swing" Congressional seats and an increasing number where Members are more concerned with primary challenges than they are with losing in a general election. He concludes that at this moment the number of solidly Republican seats is larger the number of solidly Democratic seats.

This, he argues is partially a result of redistricting by Republican legislatures that packed Democrats into a limited number of districts in many states. But he also contends it results from increasing polarization of the electorate in general. And it is due to the fact that solidly Democratic urban areas have very high concentrations of Democrats, where Republican performing areas tend to have relatively lower concentrations of Republicans. These reasons help explain why, even though Democrats got more votes in House races this cycle than Republicans, Republicans still have more seats in the House.

Increased political polarization in the United States is not a result of some accident or act of God. In 2006, political scientists Nolan McCarty, Kevin T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal published a study of political polarization called Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches. Their study found that there is a direct relationship between economic inequality and polarization in American politics.

They measured political polarization in congressional votes over the last century, and found a direct correlation with the percentage of income received by the top 1% of the electorate. It is no accident that the years following the second World War, a period of low political polarization, was also a period that economist Paul Krugman refers to as the "great compression" -- with robust economic growth for most Americans and reducing levels of economic inequality. In other words, it turns out that if you want less political polarization, the best medicine is reducing income inequality.

Of course, one of the other major factors feeding the GOP fear of primaries is that, because of the Citizens United decision, far right plutocrats can now inject virtually unlimited amounts of money into primary races. Unlimited independent expenditures have so far been much more successful in unseating incumbent Republican Members of Congress than it has been winning General Elections.

In the end, of course the relatively more diluted presence of Republicans in Republican districts - and the country's changing demographics -- may allow Democrats to win many currently Republican seats. What's more, Republican near term concern about primary challenges - and the stridency it breeds -- may alienate increasing numbers of moderate Republican leading independents. We've already seen this effect in the Presidential and Senate races and it would not be surprising that by 2014 many of the primary obsessed Republican incumbents are hoisted on their own petard in the General Election. Just ask Tea Party Members of Congress who were defeated in 2012, like Alan West and Joe Walsh. But in the near term, at least, there is also no question that many occupants of Republican seats appear far more concerned with primary challenges than they are with general elections.

If House Speaker Boehner is to be successful passing any form of compromise to avoid the "fiscal cliff" - either before the end of the year or after - he will need to convince Republican Members of the House that he is doing them a favor by bringing a bill the floor that can pass even with many Republicans voting no. That, of course requires that the deal is good enough to allow many Democrats to vote yes.

Boehner will get political cover for that kind of maneuver if a bill passes out of the Senate with bi-partisan support. But even then, he will certainly weigh whether he risks his otherwise certain re-election as Speaker on January 3rd if he acts before the country goes over the cliff at midnight, December 31.

Of course the many Republicans that will never support any form of tax compromise don't justify their position by explaining they are more concerned with primaries than they are of general elections. In fact they generally fall back on one of three myths that are themselves utter nonsense.

Myth #1 - You shouldn't tax the wealthy because they are "job creators". The plain fact is that no one invests money in any business if they do not think there are customers with money in their pockets to buy the products or services they produce.

Customers with money in their pockets are "job creators" - and the root of our current economic problems can be traced directly to the fact that everyday consumers are receiving a smaller and smaller percentage of the national economic pie and as a result have less ability to to buy the increasing number of products and services our economy can create. In fact, wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation's gross domestic product since the government started keeping records in 1947. And corporate profits have climbed to their highest levels since the 1960's.

Over the last two decades, per capita Gross Domestic Product has gone up; productivity per hour of work has gone up; but the median income of ordinary Americans has remained stagnant. That is only possible because all of the growth in our economy has been siphoned off by the top 2% of the population.

And it has meant that everyday people haven't had the money in their pockets to buy the increased numbers of goods and services that are the consequence of that increased productivity. Stagnation and slow economic growth has been the result.

Henry Ford had this right. For the economy to grow over time, workers need to be paid enough to buy the products they produce.

If you want the economy to grow, the fruits of economic growth must be spread equally throughout the economy - if not consumers won't have the money to buy and, as a consequence, investors won't invest.

Higher taxes on the wealthy - including higher estate taxes on fortunes left to the sons and daughters of multi-millionaires - are not "bad" for the economy - just the opposite. They help address the economic inequality that is the core problem in our economy.

Myth #2 - Our biggest problem is the federal deficit. This is just flat wrong. It is the economic equivalent of the medieval view that you should "bleed" patients when they are sick.

We have learned from centuries of economic history, that when an economy is recovering from a recession, the right medicine for sluggish economic demand is more fiscal stimulus - and in the short run that does not mean lower deficits.

More economic stimulus, of the type that the President proposed in the American Jobs Act over a year ago, puts money in people's pockets who can then spend it on more products and stimulate more investment. Austerity and reducing national debt will yield the same outcome we have recently seen in Europe - another recession. And that is exactly what the deficit hawks are likely to get if America slides of the fiscal cliff and stays there.

Right Wing deficit hawks are fond of warning that if we don't cut the deficit, the country could turn into Greece - or some other European country that can't pay it's bills. They ignore the fact that right now U.S. Treasury Bonds are considered the safest investments in the world, and interest rates are at a record low. They also ignore the fact that, unlike the Europeans, the American Federal Reserve can monetize the federal debt and assure that U.S. bond holders are always paid -- unless, of course, the Republicans refuse to pay the debts that we owe, which would be like committing economic Hara-Kiri.

In fact, the quickest way for America to become like Europe is a precipitous reduction of the federal spending. Ask the Brits how that worked out.

Finally, of course, let's remember that the way to reduce the deficit is not an inscrutable mystery. When Democrat Bill Clinton was President he did it, just a few short years ago. The recipe for success involved two factors: increasing revenue, especially from the wealthy, and growing the economy.

Today we would have to add, the need to control the spiraling increase in health care costs. While ObamaCare will make big steps in that direction, much more will be needed. Shifting costs to seniors and other consumers by cutting Medicare or Medicaid benefits is not controlling health care costs - it is simply shifting them from government to individuals. And what is needed is not more de-regulation of for-profit health care companies. In fact we ultimately need to follow the model of the Canadians - and most of the other industrial nations in the world - and provide a universal Medicare coverage to all Americans. Our system of private health insurance is simply too expensive. Americans, after all, pay 40% more than any other country per capita for health care and have outcomes that rank only 37th in the world.

Myth #3 - Government is always bad and- as Grover Norquist argues - must be shrunk so it can be drowned in a bathtub.

Let's ignore for a moment the fact that while Republicans talk about small government, they inevitably expand it when they control the White House - mostly in the form of larger military budgets.

Government, as Congressman Barney Frank says, is the name we give to the things we choose to do together--and that includes many of the most important things we do in our economy. From fire and police protection to providing free public education and health care for all, to building public infrastructure, to creating the Internet - government does a better, more efficient, more equitable job in many economic arenas than the private sector.

To hear the Republicans talk you wouldn't know it, but right now taxes are at their lowest levels since 1958.

Right now in America we need more government - more education, more roads and bridges, more mass transportation, more cancer research, more health care, more nutrition programs, more drug education and treatment - not less. More government shouldn't mean more regulation of our freedom - it should mean that when we co-operate together we have the ability to achieve more than if everyone is left to sink or swim. Government action is necessary to provide the foundation from which each person can individually excel.

The question of the type of society we want in America was squarely on the ballot in the election last November, and voters overwhelming voted for a society where we have each other's back - where we're all in this together, not all in this alone.

Progressives need to make all of these arguments to win the battle for the future. But let's remember that the unwillingness of most Republicans to compromise to avoid the "fiscal cliff" - or anything else - has less to do with their commitment to their ultra right principles than to the protection of their own political hides.

That being the case, there are only two ways to convince Republicans to compromise. One is to demonstrate that their obsession with primary challenges from the right will ultimately lead them to defeat in General Elections. The second is to defeat them so badly in the next General Election that they no longer have the power to impose the will of an extremist minority on the people of the United States.

Robert Creamer is a long-time political organizer and strategist, and author of the book: Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, available on Amazon.com. He is a partner in Democracy Partners and a Senior Strategist for Americans United for Change. Follow him on Twitter @rbcreamer.

Follow Robert Creamer on Twitter: www.twitter.com/rbcreamer

White Racial Resentment: The Elephant in the Room

AP Poll: A Slight Majority of Americans Are Now Expressing Negative View Of Blacks

By Associated Press
October 27, 2012

WASHINGTON — Racial attitudes have not improved in the four years since the United States elected its first black president, an Associated Press poll finds, as a slight majority of Americans now express prejudice toward blacks whether they recognize those feelings or not.

Those views could cost President Barack Obama votes as he tries for re-election, the survey found, though the effects are mitigated by some people’s more favorable views of blacks.

Racial prejudice has increased slightly since 2008 whether those feelings were measured using questions that explicitly asked respondents about racist attitudes, or through an experimental test that measured implicit views toward race without asking questions about that topic directly.

In all, 51 percent of Americans now express explicit anti-black attitudes, compared with 48 percent in a similar 2008 survey. When measured by an implicit racial attitudes test, the number of Americans with anti-black sentiments jumped to 56 percent, up from 49 percent during the last presidential election. In both tests, the share of Americans expressing pro-black attitudes fell.

“As much as we’d hope the impact of race would decline over time ... it appears the impact of anti-black sentiment on voting is about the same as it was four years ago,” said Jon Krosnick, a Stanford University professor who worked with AP to develop the survey.

Most Americans expressed anti-Hispanic sentiments, too. In an AP survey done in 2011, 52 percent of non-Hispanic whites expressed anti-Hispanic attitudes. That figure rose to 57 percent in the implicit test. The survey on Hispanics had no past data for comparison.

The AP surveys were conducted with researchers from Stanford University, the University of Michigan and NORC at the University of Chicago.

Experts on race said they were not surprised by the findings.

“We have this false idea that there is uniformity in progress and that things change in one big step. That is not the way history has worked,” said Jelani Cobb, professor of history and director of the Institute for African-American Studies at the University of Connecticut. “When we’ve seen progress, we’ve also seen backlash.”

Obama has tread cautiously on the subject of race, but many African-Americans have talked openly about perceived antagonism toward them since Obama took office. As evidence, they point to events involving police brutality or cite bumper stickers, cartoons and protest posters that mock the president as a lion or a monkey, or lynch him in effigy.

“Part of it is growing polarization within American society,” said Fredrick Harris, director of the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. “The last Democrat in the White House said we had to have a national discussion about race. There’s been total silence around issues of race with this president. But, as you see, whether there is silence, or an elevation of the discussion of race, you still have polarization. It will take more generations, I suspect, before we eliminate these deep feelings.”

Overall, the survey found that by virtue of racial prejudice, Obama could lose 5 percentage points off his share of the popular vote in his Nov. 6 contest against Republican challenger Mitt Romney. But Obama also stands to benefit from a 3 percentage point gain due to pro-black sentiment, researchers said. Overall, that means an estimated net loss of 2 percentage points due to anti-black attitudes.

The poll finds that racial prejudice is not limited to one group of partisans. Although Republicans were more likely than Democrats to express racial prejudice in the questions measuring explicit racism (79 percent among Republicans compared with 32 percent among Democrats), the implicit test found little difference between the two parties. That test showed a majority of both Democrats and Republicans held anti-black feelings (55 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of Republicans), as did about half of political independents (49 percent).

Obama faced a similar situation in 2008, the survey then found.

The AP developed the surveys to measure sensitive racial views in several ways and repeated those studies several times between 2008 and 2012.

The explicit racism measures asked respondents whether they agreed or disagreed with a series of statements about black and Hispanic people. In addition, the surveys asked how well respondents thought certain words, such as “friendly,” ‘’hardworking,” ‘’violent” and “lazy,” described blacks, whites and Hispanics.

The same respondents were also administered a survey designed to measure implicit racism, in which a photo of a black, Hispanic or white male flashed on the screen before a neutral image of a Chinese character. The respondents were then asked to rate their feelings toward the Chinese character. Previous research has shown that people transfer their feelings about the photo onto the character, allowing researchers to measure racist feelings even if a respondent does not acknowledge them.

Results from those questions were analyzed with poll takers’ ages, partisan beliefs, views on Obama and Romney and other factors, which allowed researchers to predict the likelihood that people would vote for either Obama or Romney. Those models were then used to estimate the net impact of each factor on the candidates’ support.

All the surveys were conducted online. Other research has shown that poll takers are more likely to share unpopular attitudes when they are filling out a survey using a computer rather than speaking with an interviewer. Respondents were randomly selected from a nationally representative panel maintained by GfK Custom Research.

Overall results from each survey have a margin of sampling error of approximately plus or minus 4 percentage points. The most recent poll, measuring anti-black views, was conducted Aug. 30 to Sept. 11.

Andra Gillespie, an Emory University political scientist who studies race-neutrality among black politicians, contrasted the situation to that faced by the first black mayors elected in major U.S. cities, the closest parallel to Obama’s first-black situation. Those mayors, she said, typically won about 20 percent of the white vote in their first races, but when seeking reelection they enjoyed greater white support presumably because “the whites who stayed in the cities ... became more comfortable with a black executive.”

“President Obama’s election clearly didn’t change those who appear to be sort of hard-wired folks with racial resentment,” she said.

Negative racial attitudes can manifest in policy, noted Alan Jenkins, an assistant solicitor general during the Clinton administration and now executive director of the Opportunity Agenda think tank.

“That has very real circumstances in the way people are treated by police, the way kids are treated by teachers, the way home seekers are treated by landlords and real estate agents,” Jenkins said.

Hakeem Jeffries, a New York state assemblyman and candidate for a congressional seat being vacated by a fellow black Democrat, called it troubling that more progress on racial attitudes had not been made. Jeffries has fought a New York City police program of “stop and frisk” that has affected mostly blacks and Latinos but which supporters contend is not racially focused.

“I do remain cautiously optimistic that the future of America bends toward the side of increased racial tolerance,” Jeffries said. “We’ve come a long way, but clearly these results demonstrate there’s a long way to go.”

___

AP News Survey Specialist Dennis Junius contributed to this report. 

Online: Poll results: http://surveys.ap.org Academic analysis: http://tinyurl.com/8pzbebm

Republicans Out of Touch with Reality—And What We Can Do

By Bill Fletcher, Jr.
Progressive America Rising via Precinct Reporter Group

I saw this astounding figure that approximately 70 percent of Republicans believe that the poll numbers on the presidential race are biased towards President Obama.  In other words, they are asserting that because President Obama has been—at least at the time of this column—ahead in most polls, this cannot be correct and the media must be mucking around.

It is important to put this sentiment in context.  This is the same Republican Party where more than 60 percent of its members believe that President Obama was not born in the U.S. Despite the incontrovertible evidence, most Republican voters wish to believe otherwise.  I would love to think that this was a comedy routine but it is reality.

To understand how 70 percent of Republicans would believe that the polls are biased, you have to appreciate their inability to recognize the nature of the changes underway in the country.  To the extent to which they believe that this is a ‘White republic,’ where the rest of us are barely-tolerated visitors, the polls don’t make any sense.  After all, from their perspective, there is no way that the U.S.A. should have a Black president, and, more importantly, there is no way that the demographics of the U.S.A. should be changing in the manner in which they are – towards a society where there is no White majority.

There is no way of knowing how the elections will turn out. The fact that President Obama has been ahead in most polls is striking, particularly given the depth of the economic crisis.  Such ratings have to indicate that large numbers of people have little confidence in the vision articulated by Romney/Ryan, but also that there is a sense when looking at the pictures of the Republican National Convention in Tampa, that this gathering (and this Party) bore no resemblance to the reality of the nation.  It looked like something very alien and for that matter, something very scary.

While President Obama may be slightly ahead in the polls, the only poll that really matters is to be held on November 6 when we actually vote.  Despite all of the efforts by the Republicans to reduce voter turnout by the elderly, the youth, by people of color, by union members and by gays/lesbians, the bottom line will be the determination of those same constituencies that were not in evidence at the Tampa Republican Convention to mobilize in the interest of justice.  This will take us further down the road, away from the racist and archaic notion of a ‘White republic’ (for the rich), and instead in the direction of a more consistent democracy.

Forget the opinion polls and just make sure to vote on November 6.

Bill Fletcher, Jr. is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum, and the author of “They’re Bankrupting Us” – And Twenty Other Myths about unions.  He can be reached at papaq54@hotmail.com. Submit to Facebook Submit to Google Bookmarks Submit to Twitter Submit to LinkedIn Written by: Precinct Reporter Group

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.]