Obama’s Liberal Critics Find Their Voice
We on the left have been in numb denial about President Obama’s failures. But as the crises pile up we can’t remain silent
by Clancy Sigal
Until President Obama’s first ever Oval Office address-to-the-nation the other night BP’s chief executive Tony Hayward was winning the booby prize as “America’s most clueless man” for his gaffe-prone TV interviews. But Obama is gaining fast. His self-exonerating speech, full of sparkling generalities and with no hint of frank accountability for his administration’s culpability in the nation’s worst environmental disaster, was like the man himself, bloodless and emotionally detached from the human costs of an oil invasion that’s now spreading from Louisiana to Texas, Florida and as far north as the Carolinas.
Instead, to cover his impotence to cope with the seemingly unstoppable 60,000 barrel a day spillage, and his deference to BP he’s appointing – what else? – one of those tired old wheezes, a “tsar” to oversee the Gulf spill effort and a “commission” to investigate its causes which by now are well known by everyone except the clueless White House. Don’t they listen to their own scientific advisers?
Tony Hayward must feel a little relief that the spotlight on him as a 24-karat fool shifted momentarily on Tuesday night to our do-nothing-except-make-war president.
But the dogs are waking up and barking in the night.
Until BP’s blowout in the Gulf eight weeks ago the American left (what there is of it) trailed poodle-like after Barack Obama, refusing to criticise, let alone, attack “our guy in the White House”. We had worked our butts off for his election, and now we were punched out or perhaps felt we had nowhere else to go – and isn’t it nice for a change to have a president who can parse a complicated sentence? Any lingering doubts we had were stifled after one scary look at Obama’s yowling enemies – racist and crazy about Palin – which was enough to send us whimpering back to our kennels.
But like tiny buds of spring little fragile flowers of dissent are springing up all over the place, sometimes unexpectedly. I live in West Los Angeles, an incubator for the Obama-voting intelligentsia. A few days ago I drove past an ultra-liberal private academy in Santa Monica for the children of affluent Obama-ites, and the lawn sign in big letters proclaimed a snide reference to Obama’s dismal failure get a handle on BP’s environmental crime. Garry Trudeau’s daily cartoon Doonesbury, which bashed Bush for years, now satirises the Obama presidency for its incomprehensible torpor in the national emergency. “The White House grows more passive every day,” a Doonesbury character says in a dig at No Drama Obama’s habit of lofty detachment.
Once faithful Obama retainers like syndicated columnists Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich are turning on the president for his crushing indifference to the simple human predicament of the disaster’s victims. Even TV’s Keith Olberman, until now virtually an Obama PR man, complains that the Oval Office speech “was great … if you were on another planet for the past 67 days”. And Rachel Maddow, until now a fervent Obama cheerleader, has criticised his way-off-the-mark speech.
George W Bush gave the (false) impression, fostered by his flacks, of actually liking ordinary people. Obama prefers photo ops to human contact, such as the ridiculous posed pictures of him earnestly examining “tar balls” washed ashore in LaFourche Parish and promising Gulf residents, “I’m here to tell you that you are not alone. You will not be abandoned, and you will not be left behind” – only to promptly leave for a Chicago vacation.
He’s not only tone deaf but also growing hostile to public criticism. Indeed, Obama goes after whistleblowers with more punishing venom than ever did George W Bush who whined about leaks but did not indict. In Obama’s 17 months in office he has outdone all his Oval Office predecessors in going after anyone in government who dares spill the beans to the media. For example, instead of ordering court-martials for the army helicopter gunmen who murdered unarmed Baghdad civilians – a video shown worldwide by Wikileaks – the young GI leaker, 22-year old Bradley Manning, has been arrested, and the Pentagon cops are frantically trying to smoke out, and shut down, Wikileak’s Pimpernel-like founder, Julian Assange. I did not think it possible, but our President Obama has an even thinner skin than Bush.
With each passing day, as crises pile up, from out-of-control unemployment to the Gulf to Gaza to the failed Afghanistan adventure, the underlying liberal authoritarianism of the Obama White House becomes clearer. We, Obama’s “liberal base”, of which I’m a charter member, were in numb denial that our former community organiser, who elicited such an outpouring of love from his vast network of volunteers, is actually just another Illinois pol – but with a better vocabulary.
But the dogs of dissent are waking up and starting to howl.
© 2010 Guardian/UK
I found this comment on Commondreams with the article. I wanted to post it here as I thought it was a good comment.
OldBeforeHisTime June 20th, 2010 10:48 am
I’ve long since considered Obama to be a lightning rod.
When things happen, there he is for people to voice their grievances at and to expend all their energies into.
Unfortunately a lightning rod absorbs energies and dissipates it away so that it has no effect.
The usual political strategies are played well by Beserk Obama, give flowery speeches, promise things, delay, delay, then not only fail to deliver, but do the opposite of what people want and need.
Obama’s been a choice stooge for the presidential position whereby people actually think he’s running things, or perhaps just needs persuasion to ‘do the right thing’….
Nope, Obama was crafted out of ebony amber, hoisted up there high above where the lightning publicly flashes about just to make people feel like there was a chance of a change in the weather coming.
Here is another comment from Common Dreams.
johnny u June 20th, 2010 10:25 am
no real bites till a big name enters the 2012 hampshire democratic presidential primary. someone needs to enter now, so that special someone can exert leverage against the president over the next eighteen months, during which the president will be making crucial decisions about nearly every issue that is important to us,
Johnny,
I too wish a real Progressive would enter the 2012 Democratic Presidential Primary, but the reality is that no Progressive Democrat will run against Obama in 2012. The only way that someone would do that is if the President Obama like Johnson decided for the good of the country and the Democratic party that he will not seek re-election. For a Progressive Democrat to seek the nomination would be insult to the sitting President of their own party. It is just one of those rules that when the President is in your own party that others don’t seek to run against him when he decides to run for re-election. 1968 Eugene McCarthy entered the race and was willing to take on Johnson. I would like to think that Johnson saw the writting on the wall and decided to bow out gracefully and not be embrarrased by loosing. Will Obama do the same thing?
We Greens are a true Progressive Party. I would love for our party to start thinking now who we should nominate. There are a couple of people who if they were to become Greens would be a great asset to our party. It won’t be easy, but if we start planning now on how we will get our candidate included in the debates so that our message is also heard is going to have to be a big focus. We can start fighting for open debates. Will we Greens be able to channel our resources and people donate their time, talents, and money to make sure our candidate has high quality commericals, slogans that say our message in an few lines that people will remember, hosting neighborhood parties where we raise money from the people? The Green Party is the real grass roots party and if the Progressives in this country are really angry than we might just be able to let the two corporate parties know that real Progressives are not falling for anymore of their fake Progressive talk of saying the right words to get elected only to forget when Progressives put you in power.
We Greens have the best platform on the environment. I say we focus on the environment for the 2010 and 2012 elections. We focus on ending Mountaintop Removal Mining, developing Green energy and getting off of oil and coal, and hold Obama’s administration accountable for every lie told to the American people. He sounds tough but under his Administration they are still giving out permits for deep water drilling when we haven’t dealt with the national and global disaster in the gulf of Mexico. We haven’t been able to stop the volcano of oil we have now and Obama is giving them more drilling permits in deep water and I read one of the wells they will be drilling is even deeper than deepwater Horizon that exploded. People are tired of LIES!!!!!!!!!!!
Vote Green in 2010 and 2012 is going to be my message.