Tag Archives: 2008 election

Blogiversary VII: The FISA-ing

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The main ingredient, un-7-up'd. (photo: Craig Duncan via Wikipedia)

The main ingredient, un-7-up’d. (photo: Craig Duncan via Wikipedia)

December 30, 2005–a day that will live in infamy.

Well, for me, anyway. (And maybe a few of you.) For it was on that day–seven years ago, today–that all of this began. . . all of this blogging thing.

No, not for everybody–this is about me!

A callow newbie to some, a grizzled vet to others, as of today, I have been in the blogging game for seven years, and so, in keeping with the tradition established by my original blog–guy2K: a journal of politics, popular culture, and mixed drinks–I give you a themed cocktail:

The Seven & Seven

Pour 2 oz. Seagram’s Seven Crown Whiskey into a highball glass; fill with ice.

Top with about 7 oz. 7-Up; stir lightly.

Garnish with a lemon slice.

I know, that seems pretty humdrum for this age of the artisanal cocktail. Whiskey and soda pop, how high school! But not only is it so seventh anniversary appropriate–so seven nice they seven’d it twice–it is also special for another reason. It is perhaps the most branded cocktail recipe I know. Sure, you could mix Jeremiah Weed and Bubble Up, and it might taste pretty darn similar, but what the hell are you going to call it? The Weed & Bubble?

That does not sound good.

And the Seven & Seven is not just a good drink for my seventh blogiversary (yes, I used to spell it “blogaversary,” but this seems to now be an actual thing, and the spelling with the “i” now seems to be the preferred one)–it being all seven-ie and all–the Seven & Seven’s specificity makes it a very appropriate cocktail for this last weekend of the year for a more, shall we say, “all inclusive” reason.

Friday morning, while some were distracted by Washington’s self-inflicted fiscal clusterfuck, and most were distracted by things that had nothing at all to do with Washington, the US Senate passed a five-year extension to the FISA Amendments Act (FAA)–the oversight-deficient warrantless surveillance program started by the George W. Bush administration. The vote was 73 to 23.

During my first few blogging years, I wrote a lot about the domestic surveillance, FISA (+here) and the Bush administration’s wholesale disregard for the Fourth Amendment. In 2007 and 2008, I hit these topics often, especially as Congress moved forward with the Protect America Act (PAA) and the original FAA, which were supposed to be ways for freshly installed Democratic majorities to expose and rein-in the Bush-Cheney surveillance state.

What actually happened–and you can watch this unfold across my old posts–was, of course, something else. Democrats, either out of expedience, cowardice or naked self-interest, wound up passing a law that went a long way toward legalizing what Bush’s bunch had only hoped to get away with in secret. And not to be missed in that pre-election-year and election-year dog and pony were the positions of certain Senate members who aspired to replace George W. Bush. Most notably, those of the guy that grabbed that brass ring: Barack Obama.

Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) made much of his public opposition to much of what the Bush administration had been doing surveillance-wise in the name of fighting terror (more on that in a moment), he opposed retroactive immunity for telecoms (a key feature of the act) and said he would support a filibuster of the bill threatened by one of his early rivals for the presidential nomination, Chris Dodd (D-CT). But when proverbial push came to proverbial shove a few months later, the distinguished gentleman from Illinois not only failed to push any meaningful changes to the FAA that might have restored some of the rule of law, he actually helped break the filibuster of the bill. Then Obama voted in favor of the nasty new act.

Such an obvious stiff-arm was this to a group of Democrats Obama hoped to have in his camp come election time, that, if my memory serves, he pretty immediately came out with a video (was it on YouTube? I think so. Anyway, here’s the text of his statement) where he said he of course had many problems with the blah blah blah, but because the tools were essential in the fight against terror blah blah blah, he would vote for it now, then work to fix it should he become president. . . blah. . . blah. . . blah.

Fast forward five years–that’s the equivalent of FIVE blog years–and you find a President Barack Obama that has not worked to fix it, but has arguably worked very hard to expand the abilities of the national security apparatus to spy on United States citizens. And on Friday, with the help of the Democratic leadership of the Democrat-controlled Senate, the president worked to beat back each and every amendment to the FAA extension–many of which were proposed by Democrats–that would have tried to if not fix the FISA, at least provide some access to some of the broad outlines of what has been done to Americans by the American government, in the hopes that this bit of sunshine could lead to better oversight.

Why the need for a “clean” bill RIGHT NOW!?!?!

Well, the GOP-controlled House passed this version way back in September, and what with the law sunsetting on December 31, there just wouldn’t be time now to send amendments to any kind of conference, and you can’t let the law expire cause then the terrorists. . . blah blah blah.

Of course, the terrorists nothing. If the Senate did let January 1 come without acting on this gun-to-their-head extension, absolutely nothing going down on behalf of the GWOT would change. All the permissions on all the ongoing investigations would remain good and open for many months to come. But that leads to an even more important point, one again almost completely–no, let’s, this time, just say completely–absent from the coverage of the FISA Amendments Act.

I do not right now have time to go back and refresh everyone’s memory on the history of FISA (I’ve got anniversary cocktails to drink, after all), but let’s just say that even the original 1978 law–though drafted in reaction to illegal Nixon-era domestic surveillance–still had plenty of room for national security intel interests to get legal cover for some types of domestic spying. But the law did impose some limits and some oversight.

But all that changed on. . . .

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking I’m going to say “All that changed on 9/11,” aren’t you? I don’t blame you. Back during the PAA/FAA battles five years ago, most reports spoke of the expansion of domestic surveillance in response to the terror attacks on September 11, 2001. Again today–and I’m not going to dig up any links, but throw a rock at any major newspaper, and if you throw it hard enough, hard enough, say, to get back to page A23, because that’s about as close to the front page as this story will get–today you will read that all of this last-minute congressional kabuki all stems from Bush’s original violations of the old FISA law post-9/11/01.

And that would be a big, fat lie. Now, maybe some of today’s reporters weren’t on this story in 2007 or 2008, and they just took for granted the sort of “war on terror” shorthand that comes affixed to this topic, so I guess that would just make it a big, fat, lazy lie–but this idea is just as untrue (and just as easy to uncover as untrue) today as it was way back when I wrote about it the first time.

So, let’s all get this straight for the record: The Bush administration’s expansion of domestic spying was not a response to the terror attacks of 9/11. The Bush admin’s expansion of domestic spying pre-dates those attacks. Bush’s expansion of domestic spying starts as early as February 2001–just weeks after W was inaugurated. Here’s what I wrote on October 19, 2007:

Really, enough with this fairy tale already. If the events of last week involving the statements of former Qwest CEO Joe Nacchio have taught you nothing, perhaps you should go back and read some of the press from early 2006, or, perhaps, James Risen’s book. But no matter which of these sources you read, you should come away with the same understanding: The Bush Administration began collecting phone and e-mail data without a warrant and/or began eavesdropping on US citizens inside the country without a warrant before the attacks of September 11, 2001. Surveillance might—might—have increased after 9/11, but it is now increasingly clear there was plenty going on from the earliest days of Bush-Cheney rule.

You can follow the links in that block quote for more detail.

What do those seven (there’s that number again) months tell you? It tells you that the ramp-up of illegal domestic surveillance was not about uncovering the next al-Qaeda cell (remember how hard it was for Clinton administration holdovers to get any of Bush’s team to care about this pre-9/11), it was about something else. What was that exactly? There are many theories–repression of dissent, intimidation of unfriendly media, opposition research, maybe all of the above–but the point to make is that when you heard folks back then insisting we needed the FAA to protect us from the terra-ists, you needed to call bullshit.

And the same applies today. Sure, there are still some wide-eyed Washington watchers among us who will say, “that was then, but this is now, and now is post-9/11, and now we have a guy who is not Bush in the White House, so now it is about the terra-ists,” but you need to call bullshit on that, too. First and foremost because no president should be above the Fourth Amendment, but also, and also importantly, because if the warrantless domestic surveillance was to keep us safe from terrorism, but the surveillance was expanded long before 9/11/01, and the attacks of 9/11 happened anyway, then this breach of our Constitution did not do what its advocates say it is supposed to do.

Here is where you say, “I’ll drink to that!”

But why drink a Seven & Seven, the world’s most specific cocktail? Because specificity is what it’s all about–or, more accurately, what this FAA is extension not all about.

The whole point of the Fourth Amendment is that Americans should not be subjected to un-checked government power. That if the government wants to search or surveil a US citizen in the US, it has to pick a specific person and a specific crime. The kinds of blanket permissions and basket warrants permitted under the FAA are the very kinds of things the Fourth Amendment is supposed to prevent.

Got that? No archiving of domestic data, no Total Information Awareness, no trawling for keywords in private emails, no “dossiers” on hundreds of millions of Americans who have done nothing except trip one of the NSA’s algorithmic flags–because that sort of non-specific surveillance doesn’t pass Constitutional muster, and it doesn’t protect America from enemies foreign or domestic.

So, I started this tome with a joking toast to the infamous birth of my blog, but, in all seriousness, with the president expected to sign the new FISA Amendment Act today, the day that should live in infamy is December 30, 2012. And that’s not just about me; that’s about everybody.

And I do mean everybody.

Obama Drops Nuclear from Energy Segment of Convention Speech

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Delegates react to President Barack Obama’s speech during the closing night of the 2012 Democratic National Convention. (Photo by Jared Soares for PBS NewsHour)

Compare and contrast.

When then-Senator Barack Obama took the stage in Denver four years ago to accept the nomination of the Democratic Party, he delivered what many saw as a powerful and pitch-perfect speech that contained an ambitious plan to correct course after eight years of President George W. Bush. But to this reporter, sitting amongst the cheering throngs at Mile High, one point hit a decidedly sour note.

In the section on energy, which began with the understanding that the country’s economy, security and energy futures are intertwined, Obama pledged to “end our dependence on oil from the Middle East” in ten years, and also spoke of investing $150 billion in renewable energy over that same decade. But then the Democratic nominee added this:

As President, I will tap our natural gas reserves, invest in clean coal technology, and find ways to safely harness nuclear power.

And with that, at least from where I sat (politically more than physically), a soaring speech came crashing to the ground. Even four years ago, “tapping natural gas reserves” was an ominous gloss-over for dangerous drilling techniques and increased carbon emissions. “Clean coal” had already proven to be nothing better than a marketing laugh line, something the Senator from coal-producing Illinois had to say. And “find[ing] ways to safely harness nuclear power,” well, funny that, both because it, too, felt like campaign-trail noblesse oblige for some of Obama’s biggest contributors, and because it implied that a safe way to harness nuclear power was something that had not yet been found.

But there it was–what would eventually come to be known as “fracking,” plus the myth of “clean coal,” and a big nod to the moribund nuclear power industry. One, two, three strikes in Obama’s energy pitch.

Fast, uh, “forward” four years, move indoors and 2,000 miles east, and listen to what President Obama had to say about America’s energy future in his 2012 convention speech:

We’ve doubled our use of renewable energy, and thousands of Americans have jobs today building wind turbines, and long-lasting batteries. In the last year alone, we cut oil imports by one million barrels a day, more than any administration in recent history. And today, the United States of America is less dependent on foreign oil than at any time in the last two decades.

So, now you have a choice – between a strategy that reverses this progress, or one that builds on it. We’ve opened millions of new acres for oil and gas exploration in the last three years, and we’ll open more. But unlike my opponent, I will not let oil companies write this country’s energy plan, or endanger our coastlines, or collect another $4 billion in corporate welfare from our taxpayers. We’re offering a better path.

We’re offering a better path, a future where we keep investing in wind and solar and clean coal; where farmers and scientists harness new biofuels to power our cars and trucks; where construction workers build homes and factories that waste less energy; where — where we develop a hundred year supply of natural gas that’s right beneath our feet.

Yes, despite a concrete acknowledgement two minutes later that “climate change is not a hoax” and “droughts and floods and wildfires are not a joke,” the president still brags of opening “millions of new acres for oil and gas exploration in the last three years”–and then he promises to open more. And, yes, there is still a reference to the fool’s anthracite, “clean coal,” this time incongruously grouped with “wind and solar.” But notice what is not there–not in this section, not in the paragraph about the climate, not anywhere in the entire 38-minute speech.

President Obama no longer promises to “safely harness nuclear power”–that likely would have sounded like a cruel joke in a world now contaminated by the ongoing Fukushima disaster–but beyond that, he does not promise anything about nuclear power at all. There was no platitude, no carefully crafted signal to the industry that has subsidized much of Obama’s political career, no mention of nuclear power whatsoever.

That is not to say that the entire 2012 Democratic National Convention was a nuclear-free zone. A few hours before the president took the stage at the Time Warner Cable Arena, James Rogers, co-chair of the Charlotte host committee, and oh, by the way, CEO of Duke Energy, stepped to the lectern and endorsed Obama’s “all of the above” energy “strategy” (they keep using that word; I do not think it means what they think it means):

We need to work even harder toward a future of affordable, reliable and cleaner energy. That means we need to invest heavily in new zero-emission power sources, like new nuclear, wind and solar projects, as well as new technologies, like electric vehicles.

Well, if you are looking for a future of affordable, reliable and cleaner energy, you need look no further than nu–wait, what? If you are looking for those three features in an energy future, it is hard to imagine a worse option than the unsustainably expensive, chronically unreliable and dangerously dirty nuclear power plant. And, as has been discussed here many times, nuclear is not a zero-emission source, either. The massive carbon footprint of the nuclear fuel lifecycle rivals coal, and that doesn’t even consider the radioactive isotopes that facilities emit, even when they are not encountering one of their many “unusual events.”

But the CEO of the Charlotte-based energy giant probably has his eyes on a different prize. Rogers, who has been dogged by questions about a power grab after Duke’s merger with Progress Energy and his lackluster performance as fundraiser-in-chief for the DNC, sits atop a company that operates seven US nuclear power plants, and is partners in a plan to build two new AP1000 reactors in Cherokee County, South Carolina.

That last project, which is under active review by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, awaiting a combined construction and operating license, is one of a small handful of proposed new nuclear facilities currently scrambling for financing. The South Carolina plant, along with a pair of reactors in Georgia, two slated for a different site in South Carolina, and possibly one more in Tennessee, represent what industry lobbyists like to call the “nuclear renaissance.”

But completion of any of the above is nowhere close to guaranteed, and even if some of these reactors are eventually built, none will be able to generate even one kilowatt of commercial power until years after President Obama completes his sought-after second term.

Which, if you really care about America’s energy future, is, of course, all for the better. As even James Rogers noted in his speech (and he gets props for this):

[W]e cannot lose sight of energy efficiency. Because the cleanest, most efficient power plant is the one we never have to build.

That Duke’s CEO thought to highlight efficiency is interesting. That President Obama, with his well-documented ties to the nuclear industry, chose not to even mention nuclear power is important.

In the wake of Fukushima, where hundreds of thousands of Japanese have been displaced, where tens of thousands are showing elevated radiation exposure, and where thousands of children have thyroid abnormalities, no one can be cavalier about promising a safe harnessing of the atom. And in a world where radioisotopes from the breached reactors continue to turn up in fish and farm products, not only across Japan, but across the northern hemisphere, no one can pretend this is someone else’s problem.

Obama and his campaign advisors know all this and more. They know that most industrialized democracies have chosen to shift away from nuclear since the start of the Japanese crisis. They know that populations that have been polled on the matter want to see nuclear power phased out. And they know that in a time of deficit hysteria, nuclear power plants are an economic sinkhole.

And so, on a night when the president was promised one of the largest audiences of his entire campaign, he and his team decided that 2012 was not a year to throw a bone to Obama’s nuclear backers. Obama, a consummate politician, made the decision that for his second shot at casting for the future, nuclear power is political deadweight.

This is not to say that the Obama administration has thoroughly abandoned nuclear as part of its energy plan, or even its kitchen-sink rhetoric. There is no shortage of well-researched analysis detailing where the president’s deeds have failed to match his words, and it will take more than a significant omission in one speech to turn around the federal government’s policy of protecting and propping up the nuclear industry.

But the fact remains that at a convention underwritten by the head of a large nuclear energy conglomerate, nuclear energy didn’t even rate head-of-state lip service. That in a country where the nuclear industry tries desperately to brand itself as an energy of the future, the president decided to, at least rhetorically, leave it in the past. And that in a time where apostles of the atom claim that there is a nuclear rebirth, Barack Obama decided, on one of his biggest nights, that nuclear power would be better left for dead.

The Party Line – August 12, 2011: Obama, Drew Westen, and Me

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Watching Barack Obama deliver his jobs speech Thursday in Holland, MI, I couldn’t help but wonder if the president had read Drew Westen’s critique in last weekend’s New York Times.

Under the headline “What Happened to Obama?” Westen, an Emory University psychology professor and Democratic communications guru of a sort, tried to divine the source of the Obama administration’s trouble. The seeds were sown, Westen explains, in the opening minutes of the presidency, as Obama delivered his inaugural address.

As Westen recounts (in words remarkably similar to ones I’ve used in the past), Obama’s speech failed to tell the story of the disaster that had befallen America during the Bush years:

That story would have made clear that the president understood that the American people had given Democrats the presidency and majorities in both houses of Congress to fix the mess the Republicans and Wall Street had made of the country, and that this would not be a power-sharing arrangement. It would have made clear that the problem wasn’t tax-and-spend liberalism or the deficit — a deficit that didn’t exist until George W. Bush gave nearly $2 trillion in tax breaks largely to the wealthiest Americans and squandered $1 trillion in two wars.

And perhaps most important, it would have offered a clear, compelling alternative to the dominant narrative of the right, that our problem is not due to spending on things like the pensions of firefighters, but to the fact that those who can afford to buy influence are rewriting the rules so they can cut themselves progressively larger slices of the American pie while paying less of their fair share for it.

In fact, Westen and I use the exact same phrase for the core message that Obama needed to communicate out of the box: “your government has your back again.”

That would be as opposed to Wall Street’s back, or the Banksters’ backs, corporations’ backs, or the wealthiest of the wealthy’s backs.

Westen reminds us that narrative—a structure for understanding the world around us as old as humanity itself—needs opposing forces. Narrative honors heroes, yes, but in order for there to be heroes, there also has to be a villain—and Obama’s seemingly obsessive refusal to name the villains not only undermined his administration’s narrative, it communicated that the architects of America’s misfortunes would not be held accountable.

This (again, as I have often said) created the space for the various TEA parties, and their sympathizers and sycophants. Yes, this so-called populist anger has been nourished, exploited, and in some cases manufactured by some of the very people and organizations—let’s go ahead and call them villains—that helped tank the economy, but it would have been a much harder task to gin up this “movement” if Obama had dared to call out these villains from the get-go.

But he didn’t then, and he continues to spare the rod and spoil the spoiled today. Even with popular opinion overwhelmingly favoring higher taxes on wealthy individuals and windfall corporate profits, President Obama bent over backwards to again avoid naming names.

As witnessed Monday by NPR White House correspondent Ari Shapiro, this avoidance is comprehensive and conscious:

It was striking how far they went to try not to point fingers. As a matter of fact, just before the president began speaking today, I was able to see the printed text of his comments on the teleprompter, and I watched a last minute edit that may give some insight. One passage of the speech referred to asking for sacrifice from those who can most afford to pay their fair share. And as I was looking at the teleprompter, the phrase wealthy Americans and corporations was highlighted and deleted from the text.

Because of that failure to finger, and a striking lack of proactive ideas in general, Obama’s Monday White House matinee served up a nothing-burger deluxe—not at all rare these days, I’m afraid, and also not well done. He wasn’t selling the steak, he wasn’t selling the sizzle, and he wasn’t telling a very good story in structural terms, either.

But the president very much needs to tell a story—to construct a narrative—because he very much needs to sell something: himself.

And so, in what was very clearly a campaign-style appearance at the Johnson Controls factory in Holland, president/candidate Barack Obama tried his hand at crafting a Drew Westen-style traditional narrative:

We know there are things we can do right now that will help accelerate growth and job creation –- that will support the work going on here at Johnson Controls, here in Michigan, and all across America. We can do some things right now that will make a difference. We know there are things we have to do to erase a legacy of debt that hangs over the economy. But time and again, we’ve seen partisan brinksmanship get in the way -– as if winning the next election is more important than fulfilling our responsibilities to you and to our country. This downgrade you’ve been reading about could have been entirely avoided if there had been a willingness to compromise in Congress. See, it didn’t happen because we don’t have the capacity to pay our bills -– it happened because Washington doesn’t have the capacity to come together and get things done. It was a self-inflicted wound.

So, “brinksmanship” is the big, bad wolf? Washington is the villain? Well, as Obama tells it, yes, but more specifically, it has been decided by the White House political team that the Lex Luthor to Obama’s Superman (if not his kryptonite) is Congress:

They’re common-sense ideas that have been supported in the past by Democrats and Republicans, things that are supported by Carl Levin. The only thing keeping us back is our politics. The only thing preventing these bills from being passed is the refusal of some folks in Congress to put the country ahead of party. There are some in Congress right now who would rather see their opponents lose than see America win.

And that has to stop. It’s got to stop. We’re supposed to all be on the same team, especially when we’re going through tough times. We can’t afford to play games — not right now, not when the stakes are so high for our economy.

And if you agree with me –- it doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat or a Republican or an independent — you’ve got to let Congress know. You’ve got to tell them you’ve had enough of the theatrics. You’ve had enough of the politics. Stop sending out press releases. Start passing some bills that we all know will help our economy right now. That’s what they need to do — they’ve got to hear from you.

I will give the president a tiny bit of credit in that, instead of the wholly empty pleading for a similar call to Congress that he stroked during the debt-ceiling circle-jerk, Obama did list a series of actions he’d like Congress to approve (as meaningless, dangerous or counterproductive as many of them may be). But Obama also bragged about what he was able to get done without having to go through Congress. And Obama made it clear throughout: America, you’ve got problems, and those problems have their provenance on Capitol Hill.

Running against the “Do-nothing Congress” may have worked well for Harry Truman, and running against Washington is a time-tested tactic for many aspirants to higher office, but where does this get us?

It might work out OK for Obama. He has pretty much made being “above it all” his raison d’être, and by avoiding direct engagement with the big issues of our day, he might be able to slough off some of the Beltway taint. But where does it leave the rest of the Democrats? We really don’t have to ask because we have an example, it’s called the midterms. Obama did plenty of Congress-bashing during the summer of 2010. He railed against establishment Washington, even though he and his party had been that establishment for the previous twenty months, and when the dust cleared, America had the “divided government” Obama likes to point out “America voted for.”

Except they didn’t. America doesn’t elect our government on a national proportional basis. America votes state by state and district by district, and if voters in those specific races voted at all, they voted against a disappointing two years, not for a political concept.

And if the antagonist in Obama’s campaign narrative is Congress, then, in practice, the villain he wants Americans to rally against is elected government itself.

And that’s not only dangerous to sitting members of Congress, that’s dangerous for the democracy. It affirms the agenda of the elites, it confirms the fears of the TEA parties, and it will make voters across the board more cynical and less inclined to get involved.

So, did the president or his political team read the Westen piece, and did they decide to refine this Congress-as-villain narrative as an answer? I have no way of knowing, of course, but if they did, I do know they’re doing it wrong.

But in crafting his critique of the president’s path, Drew Westen also might have made some mistakes. First, Westen doesn’t allow himself to take the next step—beyond story-craft to actual belief. In wondering “What happened to Obama,” Westen can’t bring himself to conclude the answer might be “nothing.” It is possible, sad though it may be, that while America thought it was electing a man from the party of FDR, it instead got a confirmed Hooverite. So much of Obama’s language of late seems to point that way, not to mention his policies, and let us not forget the time he spent raising elbows with the magical marketeers at the University of Chicago.

Second, Westen also bemoans the “dialing for dollars” culture that pervades and pollutes national politics. Huffington Post senior Washington correspondent Dan Froomkin also tried to explain it earlier this week:

Progressives say Washington’s governing class absorbed its bias toward austerity — and, implicitly an agenda favoring the wealthy — by osmosis.

“The people who do fundraisers are the people who don’t want to pay taxes,” [Roosevelt Institute fellow Rob] Johnson said.

Politicians “spend an awful lot of time calling people with assets,” said Robert Borosage, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, a liberal think tank. “You don’t spend a lot of time with people who aren’t affluent, and you certainly don’t have extended discussions with them about economic policy.” Over time, Borosage said, “you develop a set of self-justifying rationalizations,” he said.

Westen makes it seem like it is virtually impossible for the president—or any president, really—to both single out Wall Street and Corporate elites for blame and simultaneously ring them up for campaign cash. But Westen doesn’t call out the president for failing to capitalize (as it were) on his ability to change that culture.

Obama has hinted at wanting to be a transformational figure (and others have assigned that role to him, outright), and one of the things that once made that seem possible, at least to me, was the way he ran his 2008 campaign.

Prior to Obama, from Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign onward, the prevailing logic in national campaigns was that they had to emulate the Republican successes of the 1980s—chase big-donor money, and you can effectively buy all the votes you need. However, with Hillary Clinton having locked up much of the early establishment money in ’08, the Obama campaign set up an unprecedented (dare we say “transformative?”) structure for collecting small-donor contributions. . . and then they set out to motivate those potential small donors. Yes, in time, big-donor bucks did fund half of Obama’s awesome campaign coffer, but initially the strategy was seemingly the opposite of the Terry McAuliffe-Bill-and-Hillary Clinton tack—instead of chasing the money to woo the voters, Team Obama chased the voters to woo the money.

But that is not what the Obama campaign is doing this time. Publicly hostile to his liberal political base, and privately nervous about his Obama for America, small-donor fund-raising base, the president is heading straight for the big money for 2012. The Chicago campaign staff is already bragging about its bankroll. Obama has been courting classic big-ticket bundlers at old-school four- and five-figure-a-plate fundraisers, and, in fact, on his way back from Michigan, the president stopped off in New York for just such a soirée.

It is in this case where Obama once proved that he could change the game—that he could be a transformational figure—and it is here where he has pointedly chosen not to. There comes a point where we have to stop looking for outside factors that prevent the president from accomplishing what we want, and admit that Barack Obama might be accomplishing exactly what he wants.

What happened to Obama? He was elected president. All other answers are based more on hope than change.

The Party Line – June 24, 2011: The Play’s the Thing

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I spent Thursday evening at New York City’s Town Hall—which is a theater, complete with stage, and not a government building—attending the multi-media launch of “Rebuild the Dream,” an attempt to shape a movement around a push for economic justice and against the corporatist forces that have so skewed the political debate in recent decades.

Yes, decades. While the keynote speech by Van Jones was likely referencing the very obvious injustices of the last decade or so, one of the graphs projected behind him on stage showed that the disparity between worker productivity and wages (the former increasing sharply while the latter barely edged above flat-lining) started in about 1980.

That 1980 was the year Ronald Reagan ran successfully for president is not a coincidence.

It has long been my contention that the 1980 election, and the Reagan presidency that followed, forever changed America’s perception of itself. Prior to that time, Americans saw their country as a land of plenty. There were pitched political battles to be sure, but they were over how to distribute that plenty, how to husband the bounty that was the USA’s fortunate combination of vast natural resources and forward-thinking spirit of innovation. That is not to discount the great disparities that existed, but, at least since World War II, those disparities were not the product of national privation.

All that changed with Reagan. Suddenly, our resources were scarce, the American pie was finite, and if one didn’t hustle to get a slice, someone else would get it first. Making it in America became a competitive sport. Those that made a point of questioning the theory of evolution championed social Darwinism as the natural order.

Beginning with Reagan, too, America started looking backward. When a Reagan campaign ad declared it was “morning in America,” it was not looking forward to a new day, better than the previous one. Instead, the “morning” was one of nostalgia for a mythic place where life appeared simpler and race and gender roles seemed more clearly defined and enforced. For Ronald Reagan and his ilk, America’s best days were found in the past.

In other words, Reagan was a pessimist, and all those who have followed in his footsteps, claimed his mantle, or praised his presidency—Republicans and Democrats—are also selling America short.

Enter the seemingly unflappable optimist, Van Jones. Jones indeed put up a picture of a pie (apple), and noted that it wasn’t the whole pie that was shrinking, just your slice. America wasn’t broke, Jones said, it had just been robbed. And, over the next hour, Jones did a nice job detailing some of the myths—“lies,” he rightfully called them—that have promulgated the pessimism and stood in the way of economic justice.

But after that hour, after the explication of the current situation, beyond Van Jones’s own infectious spirit, what did we have?

And there’s the rub, for it was an evening long on diagnosis, but short on prescription. Yes, all were told that ideas were to be submitted to a website on July 5, and that house meetings to discuss those ideas would follow, but the evening left me with more questions than answers. What is the goal, in concrete terms, of this movement? What kind of action(s) will it use? What are the targets of those actions? Is this a play at the federal level, or will it focus on state politics? Or local governments?

I suppose Jones and his coalition would tell me that is up to me. . . to me, you, all of us who participate in something bottom-up and grass-roots—but I would hope that someone on the inside has a little more of plan than that.

One need only pick up on the name not spoken—not once that I can recall in the entire event—that of President Barack Obama, to begin to grasp the problems any attempt at a broad coalition will run into at the federal level. Jones made two oblique references, first saying that in 2008 we voted for “Peace and prosperity, not war and austerity”—a nice turn of phrase (and a true one) that left me thinking about who embodied those ideals. And, second, Obama’s momentary “green jobs czar” stated that the movement to rebuild the American dream was “not about an individual person” because we had learned what that got us.

Pointed in its way, I suppose, but still far from a direct attack, and I fear that times are bad enough—as the event tried hard to make clear—that a direct attack is most certainly what is needed. I am not talking about a primary challenge for Obama, or a national third party up-and-running by 2012, but a direct acknowledgment that Obama and the Democrats need the support of the people this nascent movement hopes to empower. For without that recognition, without that willingness to use the power “Rebuild the Dream” hopes to acquire and shape, then there is nowhere for the movement to move. There is no play—not state or federal—and as another fond of the stage once said, “The play’s the thing.”

The Party Line – June 17, 2011: Noble Savages

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This week, I am at Netroots Nation #6 in Minneapolis, and I had planned to bring you a video all about one of the themes I saw running through the first day of panels, speeches and briefings. . . I had planned to bring you video, but I am only here through Sunday and that is probably not enough time to upload my usual eight-or-so minutes because the speed of the internet connection here is pre-millennial. . . again.

This is actually another common theme, one that runs through pretty much every one of the NetNats I have attended. The internet is either not free, not fast, or both. I can remember running down to a lobby to get a connection one year, balancing my computer on the mini fridge near the door of my room another. And always, the waiting—the spinning, gray-barred, “sorry, you are not connected to the internet” waiting.

Now, obviously, the conference organizers cannot really be held responsible for the internet in the hotels—and the wifi in the convention center is certainly an improvement over last year—but damn! Every year I come to the largest concentration of netizens on the planet, and it is like we are suddenly the cast of some cyber version of “Survivor.”

It’s, like, practically “Lord of the Flies.”

OK, perhaps I exaggerate just a tad, but it is a constant—every year a consistent struggle to break through to the super tubular interwebs we remember from home.

Which is also kind of serendipitous because the theme from this year that I wanted to note was that everyone seems to be expressing a frustration with the inability of progressive ideas to break through—break through to the legacy media, break through the establishment-policed, corporate-driven narrative, break out of our bright, shiny ghetto of liberal thought. It seems that, after being quite obviously on the outside during the infancy of the blogosphere, progressives expected a nurturing embrace after the presidential election of 2008—or at least expected not to be punched—and now, not feeling the love, the natives are restless.

I hear the frustration—hell, I feel it, too—but I am not sure if I have yet heard the answer to it. A popular (dare I say) “mantra” is that we have to break out of our silos. The idea is that the left is fractured—fractured over strategy, over tactics, over goals, over issues. It is the belief that, so far, we have not done enough to find commonality among theoretically different movements inside the broader progressive one.

There is probably some, or plenty, of that sort of problem, but it just doesn’t feel, to me, like it is the problem. Fracturing is actually pretty much the way of all revolutions—from 1848 to the present—and heaven knows the right, whose narrative we are trying to crash, has plenty of fissures, from hairline cracks to continental divides.

Another “answer” I heard was that the left needs to be more daring. (“Bold” is one mighty over-used word these days.) And it needn’t be a big production—glitter bombing Newt Gingrich (and, just yesterday, Tim Pawlenty) broke though for one shining moment—it just needs to be original and, ideally, telegenic (think: singing to the president about Bradley Manning). Dan Choi, speaking on a Thursday panel, said we have to be willing to get crazy, “And crazy is not a limited resource among activists.”

I am not against that, but I see three problems. First, the brevity of the breakthrough, second, the need to continually ratchet up the “crazy” to get attention, and third, the fact that crazy often plays right into the establishment stereotypes of lefties. You might get them to cover your action, but being daring does not prevent the legacy media from marginalizing your position.

I also heard several mentions of the need for the left to build its own media complex to compete with the corporate behemoths that now have an iron grip on the narrative. This “tactic,” I’m afraid, seems to be idle dreaming—as far off as say, my ability to stream video at this hotel.

Better, I think, would be a search for the next social organizing tool. The twitter or what-have-you of 2013. Something relatively cheap to use and so new that it has not yet been commandeered by right wing activists or co-opted by capitalists. I am thinking this is possible, but, of course, I am thinking about something I cannot really describe, except to say it will be the next big thing.

And finally, only touched on today, the idea that we need to think beyond silos on the left and attempt to find alliances across traditional boundaries. Looking for what the establishment might think of as “strange bedfellow” pairings to flummox the forces that find it easy to wall-off and marginalize issues embraced solely by the familiar left. That is, real, results-oriented “bipartisanship,” as opposed to the process-driven kind. (Jane has called this “transpartisanship.”)

Yes, I would have talked about all of that in my video—but I cannot upload anything even remotely that long. Once again, progressive ideas marginalized and shut out by the media. . . or, maybe in this case, the medium.

The Party Line – May 13, 2011: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

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Three countries–one gets 29 percent of its electricity from nuclear power, one gets 26 percent from nuclear, and one gets 20 percent. Guess which one is winning the future. . . or, more to point, guess which one is not.

(Also, I dive into the always contentious “stell cem” debate.)

[As always, to view video in a separate window, click “YouTube” on the title bar or follow this link.]

(A version of this post previously appeared on Firedoglake.)