Meursault
Meursault
Post rating:
~
In 2008, I was in graduate school, working full time, teaching sections, and could only devote a little bit of time to following or helping with the Obama campaign. I voted for him in the primaries and did a little bit of volunteering right before election day, but I was no raving fan. I was more worried about the employment world ending around me as I finished graduate school, my personal life, and getting the Party Of Bush I had grown up with for eight years out of the White House.
So like a good number of people on the left, this year is the first time I’ve had to confront in a really meaningful or powerful way the “Is Obama Worth My Time/Money/Vote in 2012” question. I've decided to volunteer, donate, and do what I can with the time and money of a public school teacher. Here's how I rationalize/understand the common Left objections to Obama:
1. Healthcare Reform Was A Failure
See? The Right told you Clinton killed his political enemies!
I don’t want to drown people in resources – health care is a deep, difficult topic and I will never ever stand against someone who says UHC is a better option. It is, period.
However, politics is the art of the possible. Obama probably should have pursued Wall Street reform more aggressively in the midst of the public anger over the bailouts rather than something as far from the immediate headlines and public consciousness as healthcare. However, given his choice to pursue it, the PPACA is about what we might have hoped for, given that it had to be written by Congressmen and their staff and pet lobbies more than anyone else.
One of my primary sources for this is:
http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/health/demand-health-insurance-among-uninsured-americanssurvey-experiment-policy/
And companion pieces on JR, which does a good job compiling relevant news, studies, etc and providing notes on how to use/evaluate them.
To summarize my ideas: I will acknowledge that the reform bill is a hash. It is written by a dozen Senators, dozens of House members, and every lobbyist who could revolving-door their way into their staff or buy a way into the Obama White House Office of Legislative Outreach. It will make the insurance industry quite a lot of money, some of it at the cost of already-insured people’s rate increases allowed and encouraged under the PPACA.
However, I feel Obama has done well enough on this issue that he deserves time and votes because:
1) The most recent analogous situations – Clinton’s healthcare reform and Bush’s attempt to privatize Social Security Retirement – met immediate and massive failure which politically damaged the party of the Administration. Obama’s shot at reform arguably hurt his party in the 2010 midterms, but it WAS passed and IS beginning implementation in a relatively consistent way.
2) The PPACA expands Medcaid coverage in very significant ways and offers more Medicaid block grants to states to help with it, provided they use PPACA standards. Medicaid is the closest we come to UHC payment structures in this country, and broading it to tens of millions more people while simultaneously using the carrot-stick of funding to force states into the project is a universal good.
3) PPACA implementation is primarily in the hands of the HHS, not in the hands of Congressional oversight committees. HHS is significantly more insulated against lobbying (though it is by no means immune), and so I believe implementation will not neccesarilly redeem the bill, it will make it hew much closer to the best versions of its projections of effect.
2. Wall Street Reform Has No Teeth
That'll never catch the rats that screwed us in 2008.
As with the PPACA, I will admit immediately that Dodd-Frank is far short of what I, and everyone else on the left, would want it to be. However, I think many of these problems can be blamed on naïve or poor choices in appointment and the legislative and lobbying muscle of the FSR and other lobbying groups rather than on the direct failure of Obama. In fact, when compared to the response of the Clinton administration to the Asian financial crisis , Brooksley Born’s warning bell, or the run-up to the dotcom bust, Obama’s approach looks pretty damned good.
Matt Taibbi’s recent article:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-wall-street-killed-financial-reform-20120510
Sums up reasonably well what happened to Dodd-Frank. Although some of that can be laid at the feet of Obama’s choice of appointees at the CFTC and SEC, I am not convinced that Obama hasn’t learned some lessons from that debacle. His action to recess-appoint Cordray and try to give the (albeit rumpified) CFPB teeth quickly gives me some hope that he is wising up to the finance lobby’s tactics despite the sweet voices in his ear from conventional wisdom experts like Larry Sommers.
3. The Surveillance State Has Continued Unabated
Obama's administration could never be this open, could it?
While the surveillance state has continued, it has not been entirely unabated.
The Washington Post’s excellent expose piece, Top Secret America:
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/
Did an excellent job showing exactly how huge and top-heavy the infrastructure of national surveillance, data mining, and intelligence contracting had grown. One of the important things it points out is how difficult to differentiate and track the contracting and funding process, and as a corollary, how hard it is to defund or end the process. An example of what I think the Administration can and has done to restrain the beast watered with money and fed on secrecy that is the intelligence world is their restraint of National Security Letters – they haven’t fought the decision in Doe v Ashcroft and have even reached a bargain with some of the principles in that case to release them from their gag orders.
Again, I really wish more had been done – and more could have been done. But Obama has worked to, in some ways, restrain the black budget used to surveil and damage American citizen’s civil liberties. In incidents like the FBI/NYPD Muslim student surveillance, the agencies involved were operating outside of close oversight and were punished by the appointed members of the Executive branch when the extent of their civil liberties violations were discovered, for example.
4. Drone Warfare Is Insidious and Evil
Yeah, pretty much.
It is. Drone warfare continues to distance us from the human costs of warfare in more and more sci-fi like ways, and places the authority to conduct military strikes in areas with increasingly less Congressional oversight. Though I’m defending Obama as a positive good more than a lesser evil here, there’s not much I can do with unregulated sky-assassins. Someone else give this a shot.
5. Obama’s Positions Are Weak and Driven By Temporary Advantage
Get real. He’s a 21st century politician and does the best he can to navigate the complexities of exercising power in Washington DC without becoming a Bush-like imperator of his own priorities on an incensed political class, machinery of governance, and public. In fact, he’s better in this way than Clinton was, and probably better than Carter was. Where Clinton left health care to bleed out on the White House floor, Obama tried his best to work it through the Senate, awful though the result was. When Clinton experienced a wave election that shoot his position, he got right on the fuck-the-poor train and passed PRWOA (Welfare Reform) in 1996, Obama dug in his heels and tried to keep stimulus going to the states and protect programs like SNAP.
A position like “let the states decide” on something like the right to same-sex marriage seems weak in some ways, but putting the prestige of the office behind a position and making it clear with policy moves (DADT repeal, DOMA non-enforcement) that you mean to make it stick where you can without full blown Constitutional power arguments is quite good in the long run. Coming out to proclaim his sympathy with Trayvon Martin’s parents is a damn sight better than Clinton joining the chorus of concern trolling during the 1992 LA riots.
Sure, he could try to be an LBJ and cockslap Eric Cantor and the Federal Reserve, but somehow I don’t imagine that working in today’s political environment.
6. Obama’s Appointees Are Shiteating Apparatchiks of Regulatory Capture
Much like the question of drone attacks, there’s not much I can do here. Obama’s appointees, with a few notable exceptions (Chu, Warren, Cordray, Sotomayor, and the EPA offices come to mind) have proven compromised. This is especially true of his finance and economics advisors, who are primarily ex-employees of Wall Street investment banks. However, I think his appointee choices have begun evolving in a more left direction, and may continue to do so. Most importantly, the lobbying access allowed to those appointees includes left groups rather than forcing them to the sidelines, leading to major victories both at EPA and at NLRB.
Ultimately, I find Jonathan Chait’s defense of Obama vis-à-vis other Democratic politicans:
http://nymag.com/news/politics/liberals-jonathan-chait-2011-11/
And his critique:
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/03/how-obama-tried-to-sell-out-liberalism-in-2011.html
To be a 60-75% accurate to my position, and they’re worth reading if you’re on the fence about how active to be in this election.
I’ve concluded that Obama is worthy of my time as a volunteer, but I know this forum is full of worthwhile and interesting discussion about why and how Obama has failed the Left in this country, has led a government that has done things a Republican could only have dreamed of under the safety of his label and image, and so on. This discussion has spilled over into a number of other threads – especially the Republican Primary thread and the 2012 Election Horserace Thread. In particular, I think he Horserace thread, meant to be devoted to more-or-less objective analysis of polls, advertisements, strategies, and so on could use a purge of this stuff, but it is a conversation worth having.
So there are a few topics and my ten cents on each. I live in a swing area of a swing state, which is tactically important, but I feel like anyone could make use of those arguments.
So like a good number of people on the left, this year is the first time I’ve had to confront in a really meaningful or powerful way the “Is Obama Worth My Time/Money/Vote in 2012” question. I've decided to volunteer, donate, and do what I can with the time and money of a public school teacher. Here's how I rationalize/understand the common Left objections to Obama:
1. Healthcare Reform Was A Failure
See? The Right told you Clinton killed his political enemies!
I don’t want to drown people in resources – health care is a deep, difficult topic and I will never ever stand against someone who says UHC is a better option. It is, period.
However, politics is the art of the possible. Obama probably should have pursued Wall Street reform more aggressively in the midst of the public anger over the bailouts rather than something as far from the immediate headlines and public consciousness as healthcare. However, given his choice to pursue it, the PPACA is about what we might have hoped for, given that it had to be written by Congressmen and their staff and pet lobbies more than anyone else.
One of my primary sources for this is:
http://journalistsresource.org/studies/society/health/demand-health-insurance-among-uninsured-americanssurvey-experiment-policy/
And companion pieces on JR, which does a good job compiling relevant news, studies, etc and providing notes on how to use/evaluate them.
To summarize my ideas: I will acknowledge that the reform bill is a hash. It is written by a dozen Senators, dozens of House members, and every lobbyist who could revolving-door their way into their staff or buy a way into the Obama White House Office of Legislative Outreach. It will make the insurance industry quite a lot of money, some of it at the cost of already-insured people’s rate increases allowed and encouraged under the PPACA.
However, I feel Obama has done well enough on this issue that he deserves time and votes because:
1) The most recent analogous situations – Clinton’s healthcare reform and Bush’s attempt to privatize Social Security Retirement – met immediate and massive failure which politically damaged the party of the Administration. Obama’s shot at reform arguably hurt his party in the 2010 midterms, but it WAS passed and IS beginning implementation in a relatively consistent way.
2) The PPACA expands Medcaid coverage in very significant ways and offers more Medicaid block grants to states to help with it, provided they use PPACA standards. Medicaid is the closest we come to UHC payment structures in this country, and broading it to tens of millions more people while simultaneously using the carrot-stick of funding to force states into the project is a universal good.
3) PPACA implementation is primarily in the hands of the HHS, not in the hands of Congressional oversight committees. HHS is significantly more insulated against lobbying (though it is by no means immune), and so I believe implementation will not neccesarilly redeem the bill, it will make it hew much closer to the best versions of its projections of effect.
2. Wall Street Reform Has No Teeth
That'll never catch the rats that screwed us in 2008.
As with the PPACA, I will admit immediately that Dodd-Frank is far short of what I, and everyone else on the left, would want it to be. However, I think many of these problems can be blamed on naïve or poor choices in appointment and the legislative and lobbying muscle of the FSR and other lobbying groups rather than on the direct failure of Obama. In fact, when compared to the response of the Clinton administration to the Asian financial crisis , Brooksley Born’s warning bell, or the run-up to the dotcom bust, Obama’s approach looks pretty damned good.
Matt Taibbi’s recent article:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-wall-street-killed-financial-reform-20120510
Sums up reasonably well what happened to Dodd-Frank. Although some of that can be laid at the feet of Obama’s choice of appointees at the CFTC and SEC, I am not convinced that Obama hasn’t learned some lessons from that debacle. His action to recess-appoint Cordray and try to give the (albeit rumpified) CFPB teeth quickly gives me some hope that he is wising up to the finance lobby’s tactics despite the sweet voices in his ear from conventional wisdom experts like Larry Sommers.
3. The Surveillance State Has Continued Unabated
Obama's administration could never be this open, could it?
While the surveillance state has continued, it has not been entirely unabated.
The Washington Post’s excellent expose piece, Top Secret America:
http://projects.washingtonpost.com/top-secret-america/
Did an excellent job showing exactly how huge and top-heavy the infrastructure of national surveillance, data mining, and intelligence contracting had grown. One of the important things it points out is how difficult to differentiate and track the contracting and funding process, and as a corollary, how hard it is to defund or end the process. An example of what I think the Administration can and has done to restrain the beast watered with money and fed on secrecy that is the intelligence world is their restraint of National Security Letters – they haven’t fought the decision in Doe v Ashcroft and have even reached a bargain with some of the principles in that case to release them from their gag orders.
Again, I really wish more had been done – and more could have been done. But Obama has worked to, in some ways, restrain the black budget used to surveil and damage American citizen’s civil liberties. In incidents like the FBI/NYPD Muslim student surveillance, the agencies involved were operating outside of close oversight and were punished by the appointed members of the Executive branch when the extent of their civil liberties violations were discovered, for example.
4. Drone Warfare Is Insidious and Evil
Yeah, pretty much.
It is. Drone warfare continues to distance us from the human costs of warfare in more and more sci-fi like ways, and places the authority to conduct military strikes in areas with increasingly less Congressional oversight. Though I’m defending Obama as a positive good more than a lesser evil here, there’s not much I can do with unregulated sky-assassins. Someone else give this a shot.
5. Obama’s Positions Are Weak and Driven By Temporary Advantage
Get real. He’s a 21st century politician and does the best he can to navigate the complexities of exercising power in Washington DC without becoming a Bush-like imperator of his own priorities on an incensed political class, machinery of governance, and public. In fact, he’s better in this way than Clinton was, and probably better than Carter was. Where Clinton left health care to bleed out on the White House floor, Obama tried his best to work it through the Senate, awful though the result was. When Clinton experienced a wave election that shoot his position, he got right on the fuck-the-poor train and passed PRWOA (Welfare Reform) in 1996, Obama dug in his heels and tried to keep stimulus going to the states and protect programs like SNAP.
A position like “let the states decide” on something like the right to same-sex marriage seems weak in some ways, but putting the prestige of the office behind a position and making it clear with policy moves (DADT repeal, DOMA non-enforcement) that you mean to make it stick where you can without full blown Constitutional power arguments is quite good in the long run. Coming out to proclaim his sympathy with Trayvon Martin’s parents is a damn sight better than Clinton joining the chorus of concern trolling during the 1992 LA riots.
Sure, he could try to be an LBJ and cockslap Eric Cantor and the Federal Reserve, but somehow I don’t imagine that working in today’s political environment.
6. Obama’s Appointees Are Shiteating Apparatchiks of Regulatory Capture
Much like the question of drone attacks, there’s not much I can do here. Obama’s appointees, with a few notable exceptions (Chu, Warren, Cordray, Sotomayor, and the EPA offices come to mind) have proven compromised. This is especially true of his finance and economics advisors, who are primarily ex-employees of Wall Street investment banks. However, I think his appointee choices have begun evolving in a more left direction, and may continue to do so. Most importantly, the lobbying access allowed to those appointees includes left groups rather than forcing them to the sidelines, leading to major victories both at EPA and at NLRB.
Ultimately, I find Jonathan Chait’s defense of Obama vis-à-vis other Democratic politicans:
http://nymag.com/news/politics/liberals-jonathan-chait-2011-11/
And his critique:
http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/03/how-obama-tried-to-sell-out-liberalism-in-2011.html
To be a 60-75% accurate to my position, and they’re worth reading if you’re on the fence about how active to be in this election.
I’ve concluded that Obama is worthy of my time as a volunteer, but I know this forum is full of worthwhile and interesting discussion about why and how Obama has failed the Left in this country, has led a government that has done things a Republican could only have dreamed of under the safety of his label and image, and so on. This discussion has spilled over into a number of other threads – especially the Republican Primary thread and the 2012 Election Horserace Thread. In particular, I think he Horserace thread, meant to be devoted to more-or-less objective analysis of polls, advertisements, strategies, and so on could use a purge of this stuff, but it is a conversation worth having.
So there are a few topics and my ten cents on each. I live in a swing area of a swing state, which is tactically important, but I feel like anyone could make use of those arguments.
gyrofry
gyrofry
Kurdt
Post rating:
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the answer, as always, is phonebank
GoldenLionTamarin
GoldenLionTamarin
Goldgelbes Löwenäffchen
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He's trying his best, I know he is. He's a good man and he knows what's best for us.
Ironicwarcriminal
Ironicwarcriminal
Post rating:
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how utterly depressing
gyrofry
gyrofry
Kurdt
Post rating:
+
brother aziz >>> brotheradso
Superabound
Superabound
Not Your S.H.I.E.L.D.
Post rating:
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any liberal/leftist that even hesitates to vote for Obama is a petulant child
this isnt a goddamn primary you naive little turdds. grow the fuck up
this isnt a goddamn primary you naive little turdds. grow the fuck up
Meursault
Meursault
Post rating:
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gyrofry posted:brother aziz >>> brotheradso
yah
getfiscal
getfiscal
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating:
~
gyrofry
gyrofry
Kurdt
Post rating:
~
See, my worry about third party voting is not neccessarily that it loses the election for Obama (which is unlikely) but that it convinces him he can win without the help of the activist left. If apolitical base voters and pure partisan democrats give Obama a comfortable margin in November, he'll have less reason to give the real Left any voice at all in bill writing, lobbying, agenda setting, or appointments. On the other hand, if the real Left can help to deliver him a solid win, it is possible they will also win themselves a more significant voice in the policy debate (since their political utility is so obviously demonstrated).
That said, Green is probably best. It's the American equivalent of a European Social Democrat party with a little more of an environment/consumer protection slant.
That said, Green is probably best. It's the American equivalent of a European Social Democrat party with a little more of an environment/consumer protection slant.
Groulxsmith
Groulxsmith
drivel of drunken hags
Post rating:
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I really really wish guys like bro adso and choco America and nihilist canada posted here
gyrofry
gyrofry
Kurdt
Post rating:
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i agree, goldsmith.
getfiscal
getfiscal
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating:
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centering life decisions and volunteer time around a vote held between 100 million odd people is probably a bad idea. but then again i'm an anarchist teen.
Superabound
Superabound
Not Your S.H.I.E.L.D.
Post rating:
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3rd parties dont really exist, so why would you vote for them. lets vote for a ghost
getfiscal
getfiscal
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating:
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nihilist canada ruled. iirc he was a unionized cashier at a grocery store in edmonton or something and he was convinced that he found the jackpot job and was raking it in.
Goethestein
Goethestein
Nippon
Post rating:
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i remember when i was arguing sith willa about third parties and she said if we can just get five percent of the vote we can get public financing and i asked what difference that was going to make and i never got a straight answer in three years
gyrofry
gyrofry
Kurdt
Post rating:
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Goethestein posted:i remember when i was arguing sith willa about third parties and she said if we can just get five percent of the vote we can get public financing and i asked what difference that was going to make and i never got a straight answer in three years
Some of us could do without the bones of regulatory appointments and political nods, sure. But the people down the road who rely on SNAP and Medicaid, whose housing income is supplemented by Section 8? They needs the 'bones' a Left support for Obama can secure pretty damned badly indeed.
Empathy
Empathy
Post rating:
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Obama is centering his reelection campaign on attempting to defame private equity and will therefore lose.
Ironicwarcriminal
Ironicwarcriminal
Post rating:
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third parties own, i voted Greens last election and Labor was forced into a coalition with them and had to adopt their loopy progressive policies so my vote counted
gyrofry
gyrofry
Kurdt
Post rating:
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noice
Goethestein
Goethestein
Nippon
Post rating:
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gyrofry posted:Goethestein posted:i remember when i was arguing sith willa about third parties and she said if we can just get five percent of the vote we can get public financing and i asked what difference that was going to make and i never got a straight answer in three years
Some of us could do without the bones of regulatory appointments and political nods, sure. But the people down the road who rely on SNAP and Medicaid, whose housing income is supplemented by Section 8? They needs the 'bones' a Left support for Obama can secure pretty damned badly indeed.
parasites usually feed on flesh, not bones
Goethestein
Goethestein
Nippon
Post rating:
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lol jk. one love poors~ ;-*
stegosaurus
stegosaurus
Post rating:
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if there were some sort of American version of hezbollah I'd vote for them. that's a third party that fuckin parties if you know what I mean. hell yeah
aerdil
aerdil
Post rating:
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either dont vote or vote for one of the socialist parties that will never get more than 10k votes. people who are anti-capitalist that vote for democratic candidates... just what the hell man, what the hell
aerdil
aerdil
Post rating:
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i've been voting straight PSL/Peace & Freedom the past couple elections
Superabound
Superabound
Not Your S.H.I.E.L.D.
Post rating:
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quick, someone list all the successful 3rd parties that didnt form as a massive and immediate fracturing of one of the former powerful and entrenched parties
Goethestein
Goethestein
Nippon
Post rating:
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Superabound posted:quick, someone list all the successful 3rd parties that didnt form as a massive and immediate fracturing of one of the former powerful and entrenched parties
*points 2 dilznick*
stegosaurus
stegosaurus
Post rating:
+
The Party of God
TROT_CUMLOVER
TROT_CUMLOVER
Post rating:
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gonna write in joseph kony and then put the ballot in the machine upside down because maybe that will break it? i duno anyway culture jam smash the state
Ironicwarcriminal
Ironicwarcriminal
Post rating:
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stegosaurus posted:if there were some sort of American version of hezbollah I'd vote for them. that's a third party that fuckin parties if you know what I mean. hell yeah
the Republicans seem reasonably similar to Hezbollah. They both want to protect the homeland, protect family values, combat liberalism and love weapons.
Ironicwarcriminal
Ironicwarcriminal
Post rating:
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voting in America (or at least attendance at the voting both) should be compulsory like it is here. That would have a great effect at combating extremism and the disproportionate representation of zealously.
Superabound
Superabound
Not Your S.H.I.E.L.D.
Post rating:
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aerdil posted:either dont vote or vote for one of the socialist parties that will never get more than 10k votes. people who are anti-capitalist that vote for democratic candidates... just what the hell man, what the hell
literally every single American election is won or lost entirely on Democratic turnout
if you dont vote Democrat, youre voting Republican
besides, if you were a real socialist then you would already know that the political process is bullshit and the only real solution is revolution, so wtf r u doin anyway
guidoanselmi
guidoanselmi
meet me in st louis
Post rating:
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vermin supreme 2012
TROT_CUMLOVER
TROT_CUMLOVER
Post rating:
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voting should be compulsory and not voting should come with huge fines and possibly public flagellation in america because its on a weekday and polls close at like 6 and early voting is being progressively rolled back. basically kill all poors is what i'm getting at here
Superabound
Superabound
Not Your S.H.I.E.L.D.
Post rating:
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hey remember that political party that helped change things by slowly gathering votes over a period of several decades and relying entirely on college kids making idealistically symbolic gestures once every four years? no?
TROT_CUMLOVER
TROT_CUMLOVER
Post rating:
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the know-nothings were americas only true proletarian party btw
[account deactivated]
getfiscal
getfiscal
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating:
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in canada you get mondo tax benefits for donating to politics. like if you donate $400, you get $300 straight off your taxes. if you donate $750 it only costs you net $275. and the same basic rules apply at the provincial level too so you can give your party like $1,500 combined for $600 net or something nuts. which if you are a political junkie and have a professional job is plausible. and still the vast majority of donations in canada are small ones, mostly to the conservatives.
i sort of wish i had money so i could donate to the bloc quebecois.... to troll.
i sort of wish i had money so i could donate to the bloc quebecois.... to troll.
[account deactivated]
getfiscal
getfiscal
Mike Nelson here.
Post rating:
~
tpaine posted:change getiscal's username to The Senataur and make his avatar a picture of the minotaur beast of greek legend dressed up in a suit on the steps of capital hill
for a few years on SA my name was "jack for congress" because i thought it was plausible at time of registration that i could move to the US and become a congresspersyn
Superabound
Superabound
Not Your S.H.I.E.L.D.
Post rating:
~
getfiscal posted:in canada you get mondo tax benefits for donating to politics. like if you donate $400, you get $300 straight off your taxes. if you donate $750 it only costs you net $275. and the same basic rules apply at the provincial level too so you can give your party like $1,500 combined for $600 net or something nuts. which if you are a political junkie and have a professional job is plausible. and still the vast majority of donations in canada are small ones, mostly to the conservatives.
i sort of wish i had money so i could donate to the bloc quebecois.... to troll.
so the government uses your tax money to pay you money as a reward for you paying them money?