Advice to Democrats: Vote Romney
Outspoken and acerbic political commentator Alexander Cockburn, British born, now lives in California, home to some strange but sometimes great ideas.
He has a startling suggestion for Democratic voters, or is it a reflection of the thoughts of others from the U.S. to Panama and on around the world, suffering the pangs of disillusionment?
He believes that the best hope for America’s liberals is defeat for President Obama in the next presidential election.
This is what he wrote in The First Post on Thursday:
He blew it. Two days before the United States was officially set to default on its debts on August 2, Barack Obama had the Republicans where he wanted them.
All he had to do was announce that he'd trudged the last half mile towards a deal but that there's no pleasing fanatics who reject all possibilities of compromise, who are ready and eager to shut down the government, to see seniors starve and veterans denied their benefits.
So, Obama could proclaim, he was invoking the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution which states that the "validity of the public debt of the United States… shall not be questioned".
Obama could have done that, but he didn't. At the 11th hour and the 55th minute he threw in the towel, and gave the exultant Republicans 95 per cent of what they wanted: cuts in social programmes, a bipartisan congressional panel to shred at its leisure what remains of the social safety net.
As America plummets into phase two of the double-dip recession, Obama's deal has stripped the country of all available remaining defences: no jobs programme, no hope of stimulus money for stricken states and cities across the country.
It's as bad as the Republicans' onslaught on Franklin Roosevelt's programs prising America out of the great Depression – an onslaught that launched the terrible downturn of 1937, from which America was extricated only by the vast war spending after Pearl Harbor.
Why did Obama do it? Like all first-term presidents he thinks first and foremost about re-election in 2012, and the thinking in the White House is that the all-important independent voters are eager for deficit reduction, however ruinous it may be for the economy.
If Obama and his advisors think that the sell-out will yield rich political rewards, current polling is not encouraging. Eighty per cent of Americans think the country is on the wrong track and a majority think Obama is doing a bad job – scarcely surprising since 30 million Americans are without work or on short time.
But beyond coarse political calculation, it's plain enough that Obama is a quitter by nature. As someone joked bitterly last week, he turns up for a strip poker session already down to his shorts. In the crunch, the weapon he snatches from its scabbard is the white flag, which he flourishes at the bankers, the Pentagon, and America's billionaires.
It was plain in 2006 – the first time I looked at his record – that Obama was gutless and devoid of principle. By 2008, before his victory, he was already reassuring the establishment that he was set to "reform" Social Security and Medicare – ie. to hand these entitlement programmes over to Wall Street and the insurance industry.
Indeed, the best outcome for the left in 2008 would have been a victory for McCain, Obama's Republican opponent. Under Bush's two terms the spirit of opposition throve; the antiwar movement was flourishing; the labour movement fierce in its organising; blacks militant. Bush's hopes to gut social programmes were dead within months of the start of his second term in 2004. But since 2008 a Democratic president has neutralised all these constituencies.
Even after last week's frightful betrayals, there's been barely a fretful bleat from Democrats about running a challenger to Obama in the primaries such as the late Ted Kennedy mounted against Carter, another Obamian sell-out, in 1979.
The time to launch a third party left challenge to Obama was back in January of 2010 when the writing was on the wall. In these very columns I remember imploring ousted left Senator Russ Feingold to do just that. Now it's all far too late.
In 2013 we could be faced with Republican majorities in both houses and the prospect of Obama spending four years catering obediently to their requirements, defusing all liberal and left opposition. We need a Republican in the White House. Who?
Michele Bachmann is popular mostly with Tea Party ultras, Jon Huntsman with the Washington elites. Governor Rick Perry of Texas has yet to enter the race and is loathed by the Bush clan. The only candidate within reach of Obama is Mitt Romney, the Mormon millionaire businessman whose nomination bid fizzled in 2008.
Romney kept quiet through most of the recent brouhaha about raising the deficit ceiling, aside from a pro forma nod to the Tea Party ultras near the end, designed to placate them in early primary states like Iowa.
On casual inspection he doesn't seem to be marked for greatness, but greatness is not required of him – just the tenacity to win the White House and drive Obama out of national politics and destroy his appalling vision of bipartisanship as the way forward for America.
