My
tone may come across as particularly racist
this week, but I'm trying to make a point. What's interesting to
me about the highly politicized debate over the economy and the
Republicans’ efforts to blame it all on the president is how
late White America is arriving at this particular engagement.
Black America has been in a recession for generations. This is
old news to black folk: high unemployment, foreclosures, denied
car and bank loans, tough economic times. White conservatives
never seemed to notice or care that black unemployment has
routinely hovered around 10% or that the black community has
struggled since Reconstruction. The recession is only news now
because it’s happening to them, because White America is now
suffering the way Black America has always suffered. This has
always been our economic reality. White America sounding the
klaxons and getting up in arms seems a bit tragic to me. Where
was that alarm when it was mainly minority communities enduring
this?
It is ironic the people joining voices in this new Republican
mantra, “Obama has failed!” are, to a man, the very same people
who supported Bush’s squandering of the $236 billion national
surplus he inherited when he took office, the Bush tax breaks
for the rich, the Bush invasion of Afghanistan, the Bush
pointless misadventure into Iraq, and the massive Bush
deregulation policies which led to a near-collapse of America’s
banking system and the Gulf oil spill. These are the very same
people President Obama foolishly sought to appease by limiting
the scope of the stimulus—which the GOP is (no surprise) now
calling the “failed” stimulus—the very same people Obama
foolishly sought to partner with over health care, stripping
health reform of its teeth in a fruitless attempt to win even a
single Republican vote.
I’m on the anti-Obama bandwagon to this extent: that he wasted,
fully, half his presidential term golfing in Fantasyland. His
ambitions were politically naïve and he fails, even now, to
fully accept the evil—yes evil—that goes on in Washington. He
keeps expecting people to behave like adults, which makes me
worry about the president’s leadership qualities. Washington
D.C. is not now and never has been a place for adults. The
Republicans are obviously and unapologetically playing politics
with the future of the entire planet, risking global economic
meltdown and catastrophic political and even military
aftershocks across Europe and Asia, all in a gamble to make the
president look weak. And, it’s working. He does look weak. The
president is agonizingly slow to respond to sharply-focused and
disciplined GOP rhetoric. Any rational, thinking person could
read the GOP’s play, here. The Obama Administration is, as
usual, unfathomably slow to respond and seemingly bereft of much
of a proactive, get-in-front-of-the-train strategy. They
actually seem to have no political strategy, no message,
whatsoever. “Obama has failed!” The GOP is winning the message
war while, as usual, it seems the White House is relying on
thinking men and women to know and understand that the stimulus
was, in fact, too small (see sidebar). It was too small because
the president compromised himself to death, making fully 60% of
his economic stimulus package Republican-style tax cuts. Even a
bad economist can tell you cutting revenue during a severe
economic downturn is precisely the wrong thing to do. These
folks have gotten so good at putting the president in a corner,
that, even with the Democrats in power, the Republicans are
still calling the shots.
If the Republicans had any guts at all, that would be their
effective 2012 campaign theme. Not, “Obama has failed!” but
“Obama Is Weak,” or, “If Obama Is The President, How Come We’re
Still Calling The Shots?” That’s precisely what they’ve been
doing because that’s what the president has allowed them to do.
Obama seems to be trying to man up now, defying Congress on the
War Powers Act and butching up on the debt ceiling negotiations.
But it might be too late. Any school kid can tell you: the
longer it takes for you to assert yourself, the harder you have
to break bad in order to finally push the bullies back. The
president has extended one olive branch after another at the
expense of the nation’s economic and emotional recovery, and he
is now seen by friend and foe alike as a bit of a milquetoast.
Given majorities in both houses and a serious electoral mandate,
Lyndon Johnson would have steamrolled the GOP without hesitation
and done what was in the nation’s best interest. I agree with
Bill Maher who asserted the president has put bipartisanship
ahead of the national interest. His responsibility was not to
change Washington politics but fix the country. He had a huge
and unprecedented opportunity to do that, an opportunity he
squandered chasing three Republican votes on stimulus and zero
on health care. Over and over, the Republicans ran out the clock
on the president in stupid and useless negotiations and then
jammed him anyway. They ate up half of Mr. Obama’s presidency
that way. And he’s still negotiating, still playing their game
and allowing this tiny minority—the Tea Party, the tail wagging
the GOP dog—to not only hold all of America hostage to their
extremism, but risk running it into the ground.
The GOP running around blaming Obama for the terrible economy is
wholly disingenuous and, frankly, gutless. Their real campaign
should be, “How Foolish This Guy Was To Waste Time Getting
Rope-A-Doped By Us.” This tactic would require the GOP to admit
how contemptibly evil they are to prolong the economic malaise
just to make political trouble for the president, but at least
that’s an argument with some truth to it. Somehow and in some
way, between now and November 2012, the president has to
demonstrate that he’s actually learning, that’s he’s actually
growing and becoming wiser about getting things done. That he
is, well, the president, and not the negotiator-in-chief. The
economy may or may not help him out. It’s so hot right now, it’s
hard to remember that winter will be here in a few months. The
economy is so awful right now, it is difficult to imagine better
times coming. But the economy is so volatile that it could flip
on us, raining sunshine all over the political landscape. The
Republicans will seemingly stop at nothing to prevent that from
happening. So far as they have demonstrated, if another 10-20
million people lose their homes, so much the better. The
president’s reluctance to call them out on that fact, to charge
them with wasting time with idiotic and racist “marriage vows”
rather than getting serious about the debt ceiling, is his
biggest drag as a candidate.
African Americans coast-to-coast must be asking themselves the
same questions I’m asking myself: if Obama weren’t black, would
I be supporting him? If the GOP nominate Mitt Romney, a
flip-flopping political opportunist and bald-faced liar, the
answer is “yes.” The GOP would have to come up with somebody
amazing for me to not vote for the president, race
notwithstanding. Because the GOP are acting so hatefully toward
Black America, I can’t imagine giving them my vote for any
reason whatsoever. But, truthfully, if the president was not
black, I’d rate him somewhere near Bush 41, George W’s father,
who accomplished amazing things in office (as did Jimmy Carter),
but whose disconnect from the common man and seemingly inept
handling of the economy did him in. Bill Clinton was the
charismatic Arkansas rascal brimming with energy and ideas. Thus
far, the Republicans don’t have anything even remotely like Bill
Clinton in their stable of dull and wingnut candidates, which
is, for the moment at least, the president’s saving grace: the
Republicans really don’t have a better idea.
It’s just really sad that that is my strongest argument for
reelecting the president.
Christopher J. Priest
16 January 2011
editor@praisenet.org
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