Obama 2.0 — Calls Out The GOP & Knocks Boehner For A Loop, But Does A Challenger Lurk Within His Own Camp?

by Michael Matheron · Published September 21, 2011 · Updated August 30, 2013

Michael Matthew Bloomer, September 21, 2011

About ten paragraphs down, I’m re-publishing an early August 2011 article, but I’m disowning my conclusion then that we need a Democratic primary challenger to President Obama for the 2012 election. Three recent events caused my turnaround:

(1) The September 8th jobs program speech to Congress where President Obama debuted a new public persona, one with strength, resolve, and purpose. No pandering to Republicans, quite the opposite. No soft-spoken phrases to reassure the GOP of his bipartisanship; “Pass this bill” is short, sweet, and its intent obvious, a textbook declarative sentence, a leader’s statement. Incredibly for this President, he did not utter the word “bipartisan” a single time . . . A strong and hopeful start. Bipartisanship with this GOP Congress has been a losing proposition.

(2) President Obama’s remarks on Monday about deficit reduction where he added more heat to the fire he lit on September 8th. Finally, he got rhetorically personal and physical, landing a series of roundhouse hooks to various GOP chins. Moreover, after calling out Speaker of the House Boehner by name, Obama – in the blue trunks – hammered the Speaker’s orange nose. Yesterday, Boehner seemed a bit shaken, not stirred. His counter-punch was a weasly non sequitur, a comment conflating “class warfare” with “leadership.”

(3) Ralph Nader’s Monday announcement that he is actively seeking six progressive/liberal contenders willing to challenge the President in primary contests.

Channeling Rocky Balboa? The President’s deficit reduction remarks, added to his jobs plan speech two weeks ago, provide evidence of an unexpected moxie, a bit of a temper, and a tad of FDR’s sarcastic humor (“This is not class warfare. It’s math.”). Rather than shadow boxing, he threw some swift, well-aimed uppercuts. He now evinces a full understanding that allowing the GOP to throttle him against the ropes will not wear them out, they can do that all day, all night. You won’t exhaust them to the mat in the 15th round. You have to flatten them, and publicly.

My earlier posting, re-published below, pushed an entirely different agenda. Now, though, I believe that if Obama continues to battle without cravenly compromising with the GOP Congressloons on essentials, he’s got a reasonable chance to win some victories. It’s quite good too that he called out Grover Norquist and his anti-tax pledge that many Congressloons signed. These moves are like spirited and stinging jabs to the nose, and if he does it long enough, publicly enough, the highly sought after Democratic base will rally. Perhaps too will the independent voters, the Holy Grail of U.S. presidential elections, move into the Obama camp. . .

(Courtesy of Fearguth at bildunblog)

So, if Obama and his entire administration forcefully attack, attack, and attack the GOP (and some pesky Democrats too) on all points, and demand they enact, at a minimum, the more substantial portions of his suggested tax provisions and his jobs plan, an impending primary battle would do more damage than good. My reason for promoting a primary challenge in early August was precisely, and only, to force President Obama to move to the left from a position many of us viewed as pandering to the far right-wing. I’d hoped he would decide to stand on Democratic principles and start punching. Yesterday, and in his jobs plan speech two weeks ago, he did, and he’s got some fancy footwork. If yesterday’s speech is followed up, this is the President we’ve been looking for, and a primary challenge would be beyond ill-advised. Let’s allow the President to “float like a butterfly, and sting like a bee,” undisturbed by a 5th column of primary contenders that, in the end, will only aid the GOP/TP.

Ladies and Gentlemen, In This Other Corner, at 180 I.Q, Ralph “Pesky” Naaaaaaderrrrr. On Monday, five time presidential contender Ralph Nader called for a primary challenge to the President. Mr Nader whose nearly 100,000 Florida votes as a 3rd party candidate in the 2000 election caused George W. Bush to (eventually) be quasi-elected president is seeking, six “recognizable, articulate “candidates. Nader does not want them to

The great – but pesky
– Ralph Nader.

mount serious challenges to Obama, but to instead “rigorously debate his policy stands” on issues. Six candidates, mind you. According to an LA Times article:

“. . . Nader insists the purpose of his latest electoral effort is not to deny Obama the Democratic nomination, or undermine his chances in the general election against whomever the Republicans put up against the president. “Just the opposite,” Nader said, speaking via telephone from Washington shortly after the recruitment effort was made public.

“If [Obama’s] smart, he’ll welcome it, because nothing’s worse than an incumbent president slipping in the polls, being constantly on the defensive, being accused by supporters of having no backbone and running an unenthusiastically received campaign. That’s a prescription for defeat.

“He’s got a lack of enthusiasm with his base,” Nader continued. “If he goes through a one-year presidential campaign with mind-numbing repetition, responding to crazed Republican positions, he is not going to activate his base. He will be put on the defensive, just the way he is now.”

When Mr. Nader begins a project, as all of us over 50s know, he’s like a feral dog with a tasty bone. Nothing will stop him, although I’m sure at least some Democratic party HQ types are quietly trying to do so.

A primary challenge to the “new” Obama would be both constructive . . . and destructive. Constructive by forcing Obama to move more passionately toward his Democratic base and its members’ interests, to refine his sense of what the Democratic party stands for; destructive in causing a sense of Presidential weakness and vulnerability just at the time he’s building and demonstrating strength while taking the offensive against the GOP with force. In addition – and something I didn’t recognize in my early August posting below – a primary battle, despite some positives, would be a major distraction from the work the President has at hand – defeating the GOP and the Tea Party, or at least neutralizing them. Either result would likely secure Obama’s re-election, and just might deflate the most dangerous political group of fanatics since the civil war.

If we use the word “primary” at all, defeating the Randian Right is the President’s primary job.

Read on . . .

________________________________________

Re-post from August 1, 2011:

Is It Time For A DEMOCRATIC PARTY Primary Season?

In light of the generally lightweight resistance to the Tea Party mayhem caused during this long debt ceiling fight, I’m wondering about things I’ve never wondered before. Is the president many of us have often defended for his habitual compromises with the GOP/TP, not the “down-in-the-dirty” enough fighter we need to run the Tea Party out-of-town? They are down and dirty, and, in this 21st century civil war skirmish, do we need a Grant rather than a McClellan, a Sherman rather than a Burnside? It’s a war we’re in, without doubt. Clausewitz wrote, “War is a mere continuation of policy by other means.” Since the close of the Civil War, whether we’ve formally noticed it or not, we’re largely a country where, to paraphrase freely, “Politics is a mere continuation of war by other means.” Following his recent and worst compromise on the debt ceiling, is Obama up to this task? And who is, or who might be?

Now, please do not take this personally, but should
you dare to cross this line in the sand,
you shall force me to taunt you with yet another.

The so-called debt ceiling deal lately cobbled together is a politically and morally poisonous mixture of Ayn Rand, Arthur Laffer, and a significant portion of the GOP, particularly its Tea Party cabal. The deal approved by President Obama leaves many of his earliest supporters, including me, disappointed, angry, and wondering whether he has any fight in him. Choosing to name a cold capitulation as a bipartisan compromise chases truth beyond propaganda. To fail to wage a principled all-out fight with the House Tea Party – primarily freshmen – deflates Democratic principles built with political and personal courage from the 1930’s forward.

Prior to this debt ceiling defeat, the President at times entered the rink, gloves on, to take on the “no taxes!” bully. At various points, he fought for raising the debt ceiling while simultaneously raising revenue, but too often retreated to his corner when Republicans threw the first counter-punch. When he put Social Security and Medicare temporarily up for discussion, we had a feeling our fighter was on the way to the mat. Where was the Obama of April of this year when, during his speech on the deficit, he said:

The fact is, [the GOP/TP] vision is less about reducing the deficit than it is about changing the basic social compact in America. As Ronald Reagan’s own budget director said, there’s nothing “serious” or “courageous” about this plan. There’s nothing serious about a plan that claims to reduce the deficit by spending a trillion dollars on tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires. There’s nothing courageous about asking for sacrifice from those who can least afford it and don’t have any clout on Capitol Hill. And this is not a vision of the America I know. [For the full transcript]

That’s a good, solid right hook to the Tea Party head.

Float like a butterfly, get
stung by an elephant.

Didn’t He See That Punch Coming? After that April 2011 offensive he barely threw anything stronger than jabs. He often leaned into the ropes taking shot after shot. But the President’s rope-a-dope didn’t wear out the Tea Partiers like Ali’s wore out Foreman. When the final bell rang, and the TKO accomplished, the story was the President came up short when a tough, unrelenting fighter’s spirit was needed.

The Unknown Unknown Foretold. He neglected to – or chose not to – take the issues forcefully, directly, and repeatedly to the people. He didn’t speak from the bully pulpit enough. He never explicitly roughed up the Tea Party. He didn’t make it personal enough for the plurality of the Tea Party hatin’ public, the vast number of whom do not benefit, and never will, from Tea Party ideology. We’ll never know, but, had he, the President might have strengthened the hand of the less radical GOP, and thereby the Speaker, his odd bedfellow in the House. He also never unleashed his Secretaries at Commerce, Labor, and the Treasury, who might have educated the public about the very real threat to average families posed by the rank economic and humanitarian unfairness of GOP/TP debt ceiling proposals.

The White House, by and large, chose the macroeconomic path – warning of the consequences to the country of a default. Had the President and other White House staff brought the issues down to “micro-earth” for average families with far more forcefulness and repetition, the polls would have reflected it. Tea Party districts themselves might have moved to the left a bit when given that news. In turn, the push back from constituents could have forced compromise on the Tea Partiers, the most uncompromising group in memory. Even Tea Partiers, despite their claims to political “purity,” react to polling data. But, as of August 1st, all that is post-fight surmise and wistful thinking.

Frighteningly, the President’s words accompanying yesterday’s signing of the Budget Control Act of 2011 sounded, as we say, “eerily reminiscent”:

“And since you can’t close the deficit with just spending cuts, we’ll need a balanced approach where everything is on the table. Yes, that means making some adjustments to protect health care programs like Medicare so they’re there for future generations. It also means reforming our tax code so that the wealthiest Americans and biggest corporations pay their fair share. And it means getting rid of taxpayer subsidies to oil and gas companies, and tax loopholes that help billionaires pay a lower tax rate than teachers and nurses. I’ve said it before; I will say it again: We can’t balance the budget on the backs of the very people who have borne the biggest brunt of this recession. We can’t make it tougher for young people to go to college, or ask seniors to pay more for health care, or ask scientists to give up on promising medical research because we couldn’t close a tax shelter for the most fortunate among us. Everyone is going to have to chip in. It’s only fair. That’s the principle I’ll be fighting for during the next phase of this process.” [Emphasis added]

With fighting words like that can you imagine how much the GOP will be able to slash and burn Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security? Can you say “retirement age 85” for your children? Oh, and here’s a hundred bucks to help you buy health insurance in the private market.

Who knew?

Consequences For 2012. Yes, it’s painfully true, if any election in recent memory had “consequences,” the 2010 election did. It allowed a group of our more selfish and uncaring citizens to shunt off to Congress a large cadre of candidates who promised to govern by mayhem and blockade. This turn of events the D.C. GOP congressional “establishment” did not understand, and clearly underestimated. Imagine John Boehner, one of the original 1990 “Gang of Seven,” laid low by a freshman class. Imagine the likes of the undereducated (not to put too fine a point on it) and selfishly craven Michelle Bachmann – Michelle Bachman! – among the leaders in the GOP presidential primary race? (Well, realistically, for Democrats, that may be a good thing. Know what I mean?)

All this and much more makes a strong case that any president would be overmatched in establishing common ground with a group so constituted as to believe their role in governing is to disassemble the government – to drown it in a bathtub, as the slimy tax-allergic Grover Norquist often advises. This time, though, unlike anytime since the run-up to the civil war, we face a real challenge not simply to this program or that agency. The post-FDR United States is at stake. It’s not a perfect world, and, among other things, certainly the federal government’s police powers are now frightening.

But it is a world where some imperfect safety nets exist that seek to protect those who need it the most, and, ironically, in doing so, protect the flank of the capitalist system. FDR had grand visions and learned much from his rehabilitation from polio about the plight of the poor, disabled, and unfortunate, but he was very much a member of his class. Invisible to their psyches, but in a large sense, the FDR programs that Tea Party and GOP howlers detest with such fury, by helping to avoid unrest and the vindication of the socialist movement, likely saved the capitalist system in America in the 1930s.

So, with the Tea Party’s strength, Obama’s task was as daunting as any in recent times. However, given the severity of the threat of an Ayn Randian nightmare in the offing, his backing away from a politically violent confrontation with a frankly depraved Tea Party, has done great damage. The likes of Michelle Bachmann, Peter King, Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan, Tom Hensarling, and a small chorus of other low lights now constitute the primary power within the GOP. One waxes nostalgically for the old-fashioned John Boehner running around energetically snooping for controversy in the House Bank and restaurant. He, unlike the Tea Partiers, was merely a pest. The Tea Party is a pariah, a veritable gang of bilblically conjured insects blotting out the sun like the day that locusts arrived in D.C. from Oklahoma in the 1930s. But, not to put too fine a point on it . . .

Did I hear you correctly, Sarah?

Indeed, and sensibly, we are warned to never put “too fine a point on it.” But I simply can’t imagine a point too fine for these Tea Partiers. They are as revolutionary as they advertise, as undereducated in the very history they deify, and as selfishly self-interested as a PMS-ing Ayn Rand. Unlike the Founders who they deify, there is nary a functioning brain that could be constructed among them. Where is their James Madison, their Thomas Jefferson, their Patrick Henry? Sarah Palin thought Paul Revere was warning the British, by golly, dont-cha-know. Michelle Bachmann believes that John Quincy Adams was a founding father, although he was nine years old at the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Herman Cain believes the Constitution allows the banning of Muslim mosques. And they all believe that taxes are unconstitutional.

A 2012 Democratic Party Presidential Primary Season? Hmmmm. Again, not to put too fine a point on it, but, given that the dire threat to Democratic principles offered by the right is as never before a real one, we need a Democratic president who is a fighter, a proved fighter. Not a Harry Reid, or Tom Durbin, or Steny Hoyer, or you name him/her. After President Obama’s no-luster performance, I’m regrettably beginning to wonder whether four more years of governing by abject compromise on every Democratic principle is something upon which we can afford to risk the country. Look outside, aren’t those tricorn-hatted barbarians at the gate? One can be happy for his presidency in many ways, but now we’ve got a real battle – a war – on our hands, and he leads us in a punch drunk fashion. Perhaps he simply needs a challenge from the left to get back in fighting shape . . .

More on this soon . . . where I look to Wisconsin for but one of many alternative candidates that might succeed in pushing our president to the left, where he once seemed to belong: