Support for President Obama’s re-election bid is in disarray. His sinking poll numbers have left many Democrats hoping for a miracle (i.e. some degree of economic recovery before November of 2012). A significant component of the party’s progressive bloc is looking for a challenger to step forward – as can be seen at the StopHoping.org website. One of the bloggers at Corrente – Hugh – recently had a good laugh at those who were anticipating a possible Primary challenge to Obama from former Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold. Here is some of what Hugh had to say:
The point is that Feingold could have been, and should have been, if he were legit, a focus for progressive organizing. But he wasn’t. . . . Feingold could have been the voice of opposition to Bush and his policies, but the silence from the Wisconsin Senator’s office was deafening. He could have played the same role opposing Obama’s right wing corporatist agenda. He did not. Indeed he lost his Senate seat largely because of his failure to distance himself from Obama.
There are other reasons to dislike Feingold and question his progressive credentials. He voted for John Roberts as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. He voted for Obamacare. And he is a deficit hawk.
Many left-leaning commentators have been offering suggestions to the President as to what actions he should be taking – as well as what message he should be delivering. Experience has demonstrated that Obama never pays attention to well-intentioned, sensible advice. How many times has Robert Reich written a roadmap for the President to use toward saving the economy as well as Obama’s own Presidency – only to be ignored? As the campaign drags on, try to keep count of how many commentaries are written under the theme: “What Obama Needs to Say and Do Right Now”. Rest assured that he won’t say or do any of it.
Meanwhile, Republican voters are currently flocking to the standard-bearer du jour, Texas Governor Rick Perry. Alexander Cockburn of CounterPunch wrote a great essay about Perry’s unmatched political instincts and the challenges ahead for both parties in the upcoming Presidential race:
The obvious question is whether Perry, having won the right, can clamber back along the kook branch towards something vaguely resembling the solid timber of sanity, to capture the necessary independents and disillusioned folk who bet on Obama in 2008. Hard to say. Perry is pretty far out on the limb. Reagan, with the strenuous help of the press, managed the crawl back in 1980, amid widespread disappointment and disgust with Jimmy Carter. Disappointment and disgust with Barack Obama? The president has slithered down in the most recent polls, and now is just above the 50 per cent disapproval rating. There are still around 30 million Americans without work, or enough work. There’s the endlessly cited observation that no president presiding over more than a 7 per cent jobless rate can hope for a second term.
The progressive sector is already rallying the Obama vote by pounding out the unsurprising message that Perry is a shil and errand boy for corporate America, Amazing! Imagine that a conservative Texas Republican would end up in that corner, arm in arm with Barack Obama, messenger of hope and change, also shil and errand boy for corporate America, starting with the nuclear industry, the arms sector, the ag/pesticide complex and moving on through Wall Street and the Fed, and equipped with truly noxious beliefs about fiscal discipline, the merits of compromise. He’s a far more dangerous man to have in the Oval Office than Perry. We need a polarizer to awaken the left from its unending, unbreakable infatuation with our current president, despite all the horrors he has perpetrated and presided over, most significantly the impending onslaught on Social Security and Medicare.
Any Republican who wants to maintain a viable candidacy will be forced to start taking some hard swings at Rick Perry. Jon Huntsman has already started to do so. Michele Bachmann might not, if she wants a shot at becoming Perry’s running mate. It won’t matter what Ron Paul says … because the mainstream media are pretending as though he doesn’t exist. If you haven’t seen it yet, Jon Stewart ran a superb piece, exhibiting how all of the major news outlets – including Fox – were apparently reading from the same script after Congressman Paul came within 100 votes of beating Michele Bachmann in the Iowa Straw Poll. Watching those reports could have led one to believe that Ron Paul had dropped out of the race. On August 17, Tara Sartor of the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism provided this analysis of how the television news organizations squelched Ron Paul’s near-victory in Iowa:
In a further attempt to gauge the post-straw poll attention to Paul’s campaign, PEJ also used the Snapstream server’s closed captioning capability to assess the candidates’ television coverage in the first few days after that balloting.
The sample included the three network Sunday morning panel shows on August 14, the morning and evening network news programs on August 15 and four hours of prime-time cable and one hour of daytime from each of the three major cable news networks on August 15.
According to that analysis, Paul was mentioned just 29 times. By comparison, Perry was mentioned 371 times, Bachmann was mentioned 274 times, and Romney was mentioned 183 times.
I hope that the anti-Paul conspiracy helps to energize those voters who had been ambivalent about supporting the “other Texan” in the race.
At some point, the progressive Democrats are going to be faced with the ugly reality that they don’t have a candidate in the 2012 Presidential campaign. As has been the case with Ron Paul and his supporters – the Left will be left out.