Obama thumbs nose at progressive base

2010-04-13T00:20:00-07:00

When Barack Obama came into the White House in January 2009, his polled approval rating ran at 60 or 61 percent.

Now, a brief 15 months later, only 41 or 42 percent of Americans approve of the job Obama is doing.

Although reliable polling numbers gauging the allegiance of Obama's progressive Democratic base are hard to come by, my guess is that segments of the Democratic Left are now about as excited about the Obama presidency as is Senator Mitch McConnell (R) of Kentucky.

Such is the case with this writer.

Never in my memory has a president elected with so rousing a mandate--such a sense of a fresh start and a new and hopeful beginning for our nation--squandered that mandate as quickly as has Barack Obama.

While factors of partisan politics and Tea Party lies are certainly involved in Obama's retreating poll numbers among Americans in general, his determination from the outset to pander to the threats and sullen demands of petulant congressional Republicans–-his obsession with “bipartisanship” where no bipartisanship was in the offing–-has been a major cause of an early loss of momentum with his progressive base.

Progressives are disgusted with Obama for ceding so much to Republicans on health care reform without a fight. We have no public option and the medical insurance industry has millions of new customers mandated by law to purchase health insurance from them.

Progressives are further disappointed with Obama’s blatant sop to Big Oil as outlined in his unprecedented proposal to open vast areas of the Continental Shelf to oil exploration and drilling.

And if those departures from our expectations--those slaps to our faces-–were not enough, Obama has given new life to the Bush administration’s most egregious human rights violations with his assent to summary assassination of Americans without so much as a hearing or a trial.

One can assume a Predator drone will take out Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and his family somewhere, some night, while they sleep. Such an action is cowardly and disgusting and not representative of the collective ethos of Obama’s progressive base which he apparently takes for granted.

I will not vote for Barack Obama again. I will sit the election out in 2012 or I will vote for a Green or Socialist candidate

Obama's State of the Union address

2010-01-27T23:43:00-07:00

I watched President Obama's State of the Union address tonight. He was, as always, a gifted orator and communicator.

But he remains naively optimistic that he can woo obstructionist Republicans into cooperation on his major programs by invoking a warm and fuzzy sense of kumbaya bipartisanship in the name of what is best of the American people. That will never occur.

Most of Obama's address was devoted to a new and excessive appeal to fiscal conservatism--one born, no doubt, of the recent election of Republican Scott Brown in Massachusetts.

Obama promised a three-year fiscal freeze in federal budgets beginning in 2011 (military spending exempted, of course), expanded tax credits for middle class parents with enough income to send children to college in the first place, and various job creation schemes with an emphasis always on the importance of the "private sector" in job creation.

He also assented to Republican talking point issues such as offshore drilling, new nuclear power plants, and that monumental oxymoron of our time, "clean coal technology".

Obama soft peddled the health care issue during his address, not mentioning it for the first 30 minutes of his 70-minute speech and then only in general terms. He made no demands of Republicans. He threatened no passage by reconciliation of health care in the face of continued Republican opposition. He only begged them to cooperate in passing some sort of health care reform because of the crying needs of the American people. That approach will not sway Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, or Jim DeMint of South Carolina. Those politicians are bent on destroying Obama and his legislative agenda, as DeMint indicated in a recent interview. I doubt they and their constituents were moved by Obama's silver tongued oratory tonight.

I heard nothing to cause me to believe life will become any less stressful for a man such as myself who has to live on $12,000 annually--one who has had no dental insurance for 20 years and is about to lose all of his teeth because Medicare pays for one set of dentures in a retiree's lifetime and for no other dental work--one who is expected to pay 20 percent of the cost of any medical procedure, however expensive, or be referred to a medical collection agency, even as he approaches three score and ten years.

No, Barrack Obama is definitely not a socialist or a champion of the down and outs of this nation. He cannot identify with poverty and lack. He is centrist Democratic politician who is crab crawling to the right as fast as possible because of apparent political trends in this nation of unthinking knee jerk reactive fools.

I want to live in a socialist society or a social democracy at the very least. I want to live where I can receive generous dental and medical care because I am a human being and deserving of it--not because I am financially able to augment my Medicare with private supplemental dental, ocular, and medical insurance.

I want socialism--not Barack Obama's watered down centrist version of corporatized capitalism, the best the Democratic Party of this nation dares to hope for or strive to achieve.

Should I ever vote here again, I will not be voting for a Democrat or a Republican. The similarities of the aims, goals, and platforms of these major American political parties far outweigh their largely cosmetic differences.

I am as disgusted as hell with the entire process and, as I often write, truly grateful I don't have too much longer to tarry here.

D. Grant Haynes