I know I thought he was much more a populist

[SHRED]

I listened to many campaign speeches and read a lot.
Heck, after he was the nominee I donated to the campaign (I originally backed Kucinich).

Given the alternative it was a no-brainer but...
I seriously did not realize just how pro-corporate conservative (status-quo) Obama would turn out to be...so far.

I will continue to push from the left and hold out hope that the next 3 years are different but what I have seen happen this last year compared to what the image I had of him, well, it's mindblowing.

Anyone else feeling this?

Rather than this thread turning into a "bash the President" thread lets share ideas on ways we can affect the change this country so desperately needs.




---

[Emit]

1. Well, my feeling, SHRED, re: ideas on ways we can affect the change this country is

to go local - All politics is local. The right wing with their fundies and their tea partiers, etc. are out in full force in an attempt to infiltrate all levels of government. They are running for office and recruiting and funding their like.

Ralph Reed said, “I would rather have a thousand school-board members than one president and no school-board members.” That's what they do - they get in at these levels and then the next thing you know, they're running for national office. We need to counter that.

Anyway, to affect change, we stay involved, not walk away in frustration. We stay involved at the local level by paying attention to who is running, by joining groups who recruit, fund and support good local candidates, by joining groups who counter bad candidates.

[SHRED]

3. Love it...good info

[jwirr]

12. Absolutely. Hang on to the base.

[Emit]

18. And BUILD the base

We need members and candidates ~ members who will show up and participate in activities, donate money and time locally, and candidates who can run. I cannot tell you how hard it is to find decent candidates for local area races.

[bigtree]

2. the most effective way to 'affect change' is through our representatives

. . . in the election of committed progressives to the replacement of recalcitrant legislators.

And, don't allow ourselves to be dissuaded from engaging in the political process, in and outside of elections, by setbacks and resistance. Our persistence is agent that draws fire and garners attention. The resistors of change are counting on folks getting cynical and quitting the fight; so staying on task is our best weapon.

(If you began with Dennis, you must have realized that the compromises just compounded the further you moved away from his unwavering progressiveness.)

[Bluenorthwest]

4. Back to the old methods

All local and regional, national Democrats being virtually the same as the Republicans.

[PATRICK]

5. Grover Cleveland, Bill Clinton, Obama

Is this more a matter of keeping the president popular enough that the party as a whole is not massacred in the polls because of "pragmatic" betrayals of the massive populist base? FDR does not apply except that the restive Dems and GOP after four terms worked hard to regress, divide and exploit, and not an arrogant president in bed with wall Street.

I guess we follow the patterns of history. Before or after Centrist meltdowns on populist anger, progressives put up some opposition and primary challenges that will save some remnant of what it MEANS to be a democrat and struggle through the ensuing battles into what easily could have been a moribund corporate GOP party. As the MSM and their bosses continue to limit all possibilities. As the entire moronic leadership of just about everything marches us into a pit of death and shame.

As the world literally burns and hell literally freezes over and the world's population problem is permanently solved.

The opportunity now has become a necessity and the opportunity is pretty disadvantaged. An opportunity for a third party is as obvious and golden as all the truth lying in the gutter waiting for a real news organization to prosper from, like all the criminals exposed and begging to be rounded up by real law enforcement, like the opportunities for peace left to rot and the science to cope with the physical world as the behest of corrupt corporate lobbyists, etc. The impetus to destroy and be stupid is carrying both parties away from the mark so that a vast vacuum( wasteland they hope is devoid of money and public awareness) is there for real action, message and people to organize around the truth.

So we can and must and will try to progress, put the breaks on the engines of destruction within the party, because, as with the smallness of real journalism there is no present visible success on any powerful, simple front such as telling people like it is and giving them what they want in the best interests of law and civil society in this party or the next. Not in time. History is running out. The ashes look to bury the the insufficient phoenix.

[rurallib]

6. I live in Iowa and as such we had more time and opportunity

to really study what Obama had to say.
What he was saying and what he is doing is just about what he was saying here in Iowa. That is why I could not support him.
I still have hopes that Obama will soon understand what the Obama brand is really about.

[mdmc]

7. I worked for Clinton Gore in 92, so I feel your pain

and was not taken by surprise by Obama..

I sadly admit that I have but one wish for President Obama - re-election. I don't think we will get 'hope' or 'change'.. I just hope we get a second term..

[unblock]

8. there was no way we were going to get a president who was both black AND liberal

i said for a long time that the dynamics of u.s. electoral politics made it impossible that the first black president would be a democrat, for the same reasons that the first woman prime minister of the u.k. was not from labor.

the thought was that running a black democrat would be an electoral plus for the republicans by giving the bigots and the ideological conservatives strong motivation to vote against, while not really giving the democrats and real plus they didn't already have (blacks already voted overwhelmingly for democrats.)

while i could certainly count on shrub doing great damage to america, i didn't expect him to do so much damage to the republican "brand", despite the vast sums of money thrown at its propaganda system, that the precption became inevitable that the democrats were going to win in 2008. that opened the door for a miracle race in which the heir apparent was going to be either the first black president or the first female president.

still, the powers that be knew what was up and had to make deals with the front-runners and the emerging political landscape. it was in their corporate interests. let's not be naive about modern politics. obama and hillary both had discussions with very coservative people and made deals. hillary made a deal with murdoch, for pete's sake. obama might have been careful about taking corporate contributions directly to his campaign, but that doesn't mean he didn't cut deals. there are indirect ways a corporation can benefit a campaign, and vice versa.


so i was wrong that the first black president had to be a republican. my analysis would have been more correct had i said, as i should have, that the first black president could not have been a liberal.

that said, i support obama, recognize a huge improvement over the previous scum in the white house, and still hope for improvement in his remaining 7 years. also, note by his nomination of sotomayor that he is capable of giving liberals meaningful gifts.

[Moochy]

9. Either way we were screwed

American Liberalism is all but dead. Long Live the Neo-Liberal! sigh.

[unblock]

10. not clear. long-term politics is rather hard to predict.

i don't think we can underestimate the potential benefit to liberalism of having a black president, even if it had been a conservative republican (think clarence thomas :shudder:). enemies of liberalism have always painted non-blacks on the left as black sympathizers (and actual blacks as just plain dangerous and crazy). remember dukakis and the willie horton ad?

whatever obama does, he'll make the idea of having a black president seem not so scary, and thus he does great damage to a key argument conservatives had against liberalism -- fear.

i think it will be a long time before we have a second black president, but i CAN see a white liberal being more plausible and viable down the road.

[Moochy]

11. I edited out what I meant!

the two choices in my subject line 'either way', was meant to indicate the two choices of Clinton or Obama. Just wanted to be clear about that.

[unblock]

17. hillary would have had the same effect.

while hillary was more of a known quantity, and had been painted as liberal, or at least more liberal than bill clinton, she surely would have presided more from the center than from the left.

still, as with obama, being the first woman president would have made the entire concept less scary and somewhere down the road, it might have been possible for a second woman president to genuinely preside from the left.

either way, the pendulum has a loooong way to swing back, if indeed it's still swinging.

[AllentownJake]

13. Stop consuming so much and encourage others to do so as well

Kill Audrey II

[AllentownJake]

14. Sit an wait

Every corporation, bank, and government in the world is sitting on massive debt bombs that were made based on growth projections that were not possible based on scarcity of resources.

The only way for the elites to pay their debts to each other is to keep the growth going is to take more and more from people.

There is a certain point, when people aren't going to take it.

[Odin2005]

15. I worked my ass off for Obama, I feel like a knife has been shoved into my back.

[amborin]

16. he chose reaganomics Summers as his econ advisor! what does that say?