MUST-READ: Joseph Palermo: The Perils for Obama of Not Talking About Poverty in America

[highplainsdem]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-a-palermo/the-perils-for-obama-of-n_b_923649.html

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By not speaking about the poor and poverty in America President Obama allows the Reagan era "welfare queen" construct to go unchallenged and, even worse, creates a vacuum that's already being filled by right-wing pseudo-scholars. The Heritage Foundation's Robert Rector, (whose philosophy for decades now regarding the poor can be summed up with Ebenezer Scrooge's line: "Are their no prisons?"), has produced a "study" proving how well off, even affluent, the poor in America really are.

Even in the heat of the 2008 presidential campaign when I wrote blog after blog in favor of Obama's nomination I never believed he was going to be a "radical" president, or a "transformational" leader, and certainly not a "post-partisan" or, (even more absurdly), a "post-racial" president. But I did think he would be a forceful advocate for bedrock liberal-progressive values and policy prescriptions. It turns out he's a forceful advocate, but not for what I thought. He's a forceful advocate for a weird concept of "bipartisanship" that has never really existed in this country and certainly never existed when it came to moving the country forward in periods of progressive reform. In the 1930s and the 1960s the progressives won battles not by "reaching out" to Republicans, but by sidelining them and pealing off those moderates who would join what was a Democratic agenda. Obama has gotten it backwards -- he's forsaken his agenda for a Republican one, and then acts surprised when members of his progressive base bolt. Nowhere is this trend more apparent than with his avoidance of saying anything about the plight of the poor in America, even while their ranks grow at an alarming rate.

Instead of getting mad at the Republicans and their corporate buddies who threw the United States off a cliff during the Bush years he "reaches out" again and again seeking to work with them. In doing so he legitimizes their ideas about deficits and government "spending" and reinforces their interpretation of the causes of the Great Recession. And in the process he undermines his own narrative about where the blame should lie. His silence about the plight of the poor in America is just more collateral damage from his strategic decision he made sometime in 2009 to move rightward, away from his base and toward the same Republican politicians who crashed the economy. That ain't much to run in 2012.

The recall elections in the state of Wisconsin show that with a Herculean effort activists of the Democratic base can mobilize to the point of pushing back against right-wing social engineering. But they did so with little help from the Obama Administration, either symbolically or concretely, and in the aggregate fewer Democratic voters made it to the polls than Republicans. The worker mobilization in Wisconsin might have benefited from a little encouragement from the nation's top Democrat, but the president these days doesn't want to ruffle the feathers of the extreme Right, and doing something "proactive" in behalf of those who are suffering under the sustained economic catastrophe might ruffle some feathers.

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Emphasis added.

[DJ13]

1. "In doing so he legitimizes their ideas about deficits and government "spending" "

Its just as likely he's legitimizing his own ideas, which happens to parallel the conservative ideas.

[highplainsdem]

2. kick

[Starry Messenger]

3. k&r

[highplainsdem]

4. Thanks!