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Tempus Fugit

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If a Democrat wants to challenge Barack Obama for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination, time is quickly running out.  It takes a while to put a campaign together.  Aside from rounding-up enough money to challenge an incumbent – who is expected to have a $1 billion war chest – there are other logistic challenges.  For starters, a campaign team must be assembled, along with a network across the states.  Messaging strategy and a campaign theme must be established.  It’s a huge deal.  Nevertheless, if the Democrats believe that they can just sit back and watch Obama swagger his way to re-election – they’re going to be in for a big disappointment.

As I pointed out in my last posting, Obama’s problems have expanded beyond weak polling numbers.  The Solyndra scandal can be expected to receive at least as much television coverage as the Casey Anthony “Tot Mom” trial.  Ron Suskind’s new book about the President’s handling of the economy, Confidence Men, has provided us with an abundance of insights on Obama’s leadership failings.  Those observations will reverberate throughout the 2012 campaign until Election Day.

Obama’s mishandling of the economic crisis is useful only as evidence of the President’s ineptitude in the domestic policy arena.  Has Obama done any better with his foray into foreign policy?  Steve Clemons provided us with the answer to that question by way of an article which appeared in The Atlantic.  The essay is also available at his own blog, The Washington Note.  Mr. Clemons provided a great analysis of Obama’s influence on the Israel – Palestine peace process:

Obama continues to parrot the line that peace can only be achieved between the “two parties”, that only they can really bring this global ulcer to a close, when they decide to negotiate.  The fact is that the status quo of frozen negotiations is benefiting the dominant, settlement-expanding Israel — and the US, in promising to veto at the UN Security Council Palestine’s bid for official state recognition, is playing guarantor to one side, undermining the aspirations of others on the other side of the equation.  What if the US had said to Kosovo — no statehood, no recognition from the US until you resolve all of your ongoing issues with Russia?

*   *   *

Obama is assuring the further emasculation and perhaps final demise of Palestine’s moderates.  Obama is also treating the Israelis and Palestinians as if they are on equal footing, equally able to concede to each other’s demands.  What Obama doesn’t get is that a substantial portion of Israel’s population loves not having a deal and never wants one.  They are OK with a peace process to nowhere — but that is not acceptable for the less-endowed, less-powerful Palestinian side.  Hamas is in the rejectionist corner as well, seeing its fortunes rise as earnest efforts at peace go nowhere.

The world watched Barack Obama lose a battle in the last two years with Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over Israeli settlement expansion in contested and occupied territories.  This is like the Soviet Union having lost a war of wills at the height of its power with Cuba.

The client state trumped the President of the United States — telegraphing to many around the world that President Obama ultimately didn’t have the courage of his convictions and wasn’t able to deploy power and statecraft to achieve the outlines of what he called for in his lofty rhetoric.  Obama’s UN General Assembly speech has done nothing to reverse the impression that Netanyahu is the alpha dog in the relationship with President Obama — and this is truly tragic and geostrategically consequential.

Well, at least Obama is consistent  .  .  .  equally inept and spineless on foreign policy issues as he is when challenged with domestic policy matters.

Will any Democrat step up to prevent the Republican Party from taking over the White House (any more than it already has with Obama in there)?  The President’s apologists can no longer dismiss criticism of this administration by characterizing it as propaganda from Fox News.  Matt Taibbi’s recent remark about Obama exemplifies how an increasing number of Americans – from across the political spectrum – feel about our current President:

I just don’t believe this guy anymore, and it’s become almost painful to listen to him.

Wake up, Democrats!  Time is of the essence.


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Re-Make Re-Model

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Welcome to the new incarnation of TheCenterLane.com !

For a number of reasons, I changed to a new web host and switched over to a WordPress-based platform.  This was a big project and I am still in the process of updating links to my archived postings, as they may appear in pieces written before this changeover.  While doing this set-up, I found that WordPress resisted my initial efforts to have a two-tier blogroll with my favorite sites at the top, as was the case previously.  Nevertheless, having the list in alphabetical order makes it easier to find the links, so I’m inclined to leave it this way.

As I went through the blogroll, I gave some thought to bumping some sites and adding others.  When I came across the link to CenterMovement.org, I was reminded of something they said about this site:  that I was “not afraid of sounding radical at outrages to common sense”.  The concept of  “radical centrism” became the subject of a recent article by Gerald Seib at The Wall Street Journal.   Mr. Seib appeared to share my expectation that the rise of the Tea Party movement has inspired voters (and more importantly:  aspiring candidates) from all perspectives to escape from  the two-party trap.  Here are some of Seib’s points that resonated well with me:

Many of  those seriously estranged from the political system and its practitioners appear to sit in the political center.  They are shaping this year’s campaign, but equally important is the question of what happens to them after the election Nov. 2, and especially on the road toward the next presidential campaign in 2012.

*   *   *

Mostly they want solutions — economic and job-creating solutions — and they seem to think Democrats have failed to provide them.  They also thought that of  Republicans previously.  And they seem to think this failure to produce in Washington is, at least in some measure, the result of  both parties being in the thrall of  “special interests,” a term with various definitions.

Some of this frustration is being channeled into the tea-party movement, but not all of it by any means.  The tea-party movement is more conservative, and more Republican at heart, than many of these independent voters appear to be.

*   *   *

But perhaps the tea-party influence will push the Republican Party too far to the right for many of these independents.  And perhaps Mr. Obama will tack too far to the left in the next two years, to protect his liberal flank and preclude the possibility that he, like Jimmy Carter in 1980, faces a primary challenger from his party’s liberal base when he seeks re-election.

If that’s what happens after this year’s election, Washington may descend into true partisan and ideological gridlock, and independent voters’ frustration and estrangement may only grow.

Seib concluded that such a scenario could give rise to “a third-party challenge in 2012”.  As I have stated previously:  by 2012 I would hope to see a third, a fourth, a fifth and a sixth party, as well.

As I said when I first started this blog in April of 2008:  It’s an exciting time to be a centrist.  Since that point, we have seen a number of politicians claiming to be centrists, simply because their positions on most major political issues were constantly changing — in order to “follow the money”.  Claiming to be “pragmatists”, many of those politicians have been more than willing to horse-trade away any accomplishments made in advancing a particular cause for their supporters.  Unlike Gerald Seib, I believe that many “middle-of-the-road radicals” are peeved by the absolute lack of any ideological principles behind the actions taken by too many of those in government.  We can expect a number of diverse political groups to form after the 2010 elections.  Hopefully. the voters will have better alternatives next time around.



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How The Democrats Self-Destruct

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June 29, 2009

For the past few days, we have been inundated with news reports detailing the self-destructive behavior of the late singing sensation, Michael Jackson.  Perhaps it is this heightened awareness of self-destruction that is causing people to take a closer look at the self-destructive behavior taking place within the Democratic Party.

Most notable is the behavior of President Obama.  As his Inauguration approached, many people were surprised to learn that some principal players selected for Obama’s economic team were the same people responsible for creating this mess during the Clinton years.  The most prominent of these is Larry Summers, who is expected to replace Ben Bernanke as Chairman of the Federal Reserve in January.  On June 24, Robert Scheer, on his Truthdig website, bemoaned the fact that Obama is following the “trickle down” strategy of bailing out the big banks, while doing nothing to really solve the mortgage crisis:

It’s not working.  The Bush-Obama strategy of throwing trillions at the banks to solve the mortgage crisis is a huge bust.  The financial moguls, while tickled pink to have $1.25 trillion in toxic assets covered by the feds, along with hundreds of billions in direct handouts, are not using that money to turn around the free fall in housing foreclosures.

*    *    *

Here again the administration, continuing the Bush strategy, is working the wrong end of the problem.  Although President Obama was wise enough to at least launch a job stimulus program, a far greater amount of federal funding benefits Wall Street as opposed to Main Street.

*    *    *

Why was I so naive as to have expected this Democratic president to not do the bidding of the banks when the last president from that party joined the Republicans in giving the moguls everything they wanted?  Please, Obama, prove me wrong.

If President Obama doesn’t prove Robert Scheer wrong, Obama might find himself facing some hostile crowds at the “town hall” meetings as 2012 approaches.

The President might also be surprised to encounter large-scale Democratic grassroots disappointment over his proposed “overhaul” of the financial regulatory system.  As I pointed out on June 18, President Obama’s financial reform proposal, released on that date, drew immediate criticism for the expanded powers granted to the Federal Reserve.  On June 24, The Nation (which prides itself on having a liberal bias) ran a harshly critical piece by William Greider, entitled:  “Obama’s False Reform”.  In addition to criticizing the expanded powers granted to the Federal Reserve, Greider emphasized that the proposal did not contain any significant measures, or “hard rules”, to reform the financial system.  Beyond that, Greider took Obama to task for the false claim that the regulatory system was overwhelmed by “the speed, scope and sophistication of a 21st century global economy”.  The article emphasized the need to “slow down the rush to weak solutions” by taking the time to find out about the root causes of the breakdown and then to address those causes:

Give subpoena power to Elizabeth Warren the Congressional Oversight Board she chairs.  Hire some of those investigative reporters who have no political investment in digging deeper into the mulch.  What exactly went wrong?  Who has bloody hands?  Where are the fundamental reforms?  If the economy returns to “normal’ rather soon, the ardor for serious reform might dissipate with much left undone.  That is a small risk to take, especially if the alternative is enacting the bankers’ pallid version of reform.

President Obama is now taking pride for the passage in the House of Representatives of the “climate change bill” (H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009).  Despite the claim of House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) that the bill’s passage in the House was “a transformative moment”, 44 Democrats voted against the bill.  One harsh critic of the bill is Democrat Dennis Kucinich.  Here’s some of what Mr. Kucinich had to say:

It won’t address the problem.  In fact, it might make the problem worse.  It sets targets that are too weak, especially in the short term, and sets about meeting those targets through Enron-style accounting methods.  It gives new life to one of the primary sources of the problem that should be on its way out — coal — by giving it record subsidies.  And it is rounded out with massive corporate giveaways at taxpayer expense.

*   *   *

.  .  .  the bill does not require any greenhouse gas reductions beyond current levels until 2030.

Worse yet is the Democrats’ fumbling and bumbling with their efforts at healthcare reform legislation.  Polling wiz Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com, did a meta-analysis of the polls conducted to assess public support for the so-called “public option”in healthcare coverage, wherein people have the option to buy health insurance from the government.  The insurance companies obviously aren’t interested in that sort of competition and they have launched advertising campaigns portraying it as controversial and flawed.  Nevertheless, Nate Silver’s report revealed that five of the six polls analyzed, demonstrated lopsided support for the public option, exceeding 60 percent.  Despite the strong popular support for the public option, Mr. Silver pointed out in another posting, how there is a great risk that Democrats might oppose the measure due to payoffs from lobbyists:

Lobbying contributions appear to have the largest marginal impact on middle-of-the-road Democrats.  Liberal Democrats are likely to hold firm to the public option unless they receive a lot of remuneration from healthcare PACs.  Conservative Democrats may not support the public option in the first place for ideological reasons, although money can certainly push them more firmly against it.  But the impact on mainline Democrats appears to be quite large:  if a mainline Democrat has received $60,000 from insurance PACs over the past six years, his likelihood of supporting the public option is cut roughly in half from 80 percent to 40 percent.

Awareness of this venality obviously has many commentators expressing outrage.  On June 23, Joe Conason wrote such an article for The New York Observer:

If Congress fails to enact health care reform this year –or if it enacts a sham reform designed to bail out corporate medicine while excluding the “public option” — then the public will rightly blame Democrats, who have no excuse for failure except their own cowardice and corruption.  The punishment inflicted by angry voters is likely to be reduced majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives — or even the restoration of Republican rule on Capitol Hill.

*  *  *

The excuses sound different, but all of these lawmakers have something in common — namely, their abject dependence on campaign contributions from the insurance and pharmaceutical corporations fighting against real reform.

*  *  *

Whenever Democratic politicians are confronted with this conflict between the public interest and their private fund-raising, they take offense at the implied insult.  They protest, as a spokesman for Senator Landrieu did, that they make policy decisions based on what is best for the people of their states, “not campaign contributions.”  But when health reform fails — or turns into a trough for their contributors, who will believe them?  And who will vote for them?

Those Democrats inclined to oppose the public option don’t appear to be too concerned about public indignation over their behavior.  Take California Senator Dianne Feinstein for example.  Do you really believe she gives a damn about voter outrage?  She was re-elected in 2006, despite criticism that as chair of the Senate Military Construction Appropriations subcommittee, she helped her husband, Iraq war profiteer Richard C. Blum, benefit from decisions she made as chair of that subcommittee.  So what if MoveOn.org is targeting her for ambivalence about the issue of healthcare reform?  MoveOn.org is also targeting other Democrats who are attempting to eliminate the public option.  If these officials have so much hubris as to believe that they can get away with scoffing at the public will, they had better start looking for new jobs now  . . . because the market isn’t very good.