Playing the Rightwing Populism Card

Enter Scott Walker, Stage Right

Thomas B. Edsall
Progressive America Rising via New York Times

April 29, 2015 - As Scott Walker has transformed himself from a three-time statewide winner in blue-leaning Wisconsin to a hard-right Republican primary candidate, he has jumped to the head of the pack in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Walker’s re-creation of his political identity is a test of whether a Republican presidential candidate can win on the basis of decisive margins among whites (while getting crushed among minority voters).

Walker hopes to stand apart from Jeb Bush, a former Florida governor, and Marco Rubio, a Florida senator, who are both taking a more centrist approach. Walker intends to stake out the right side of the Republican spectrum and trump competitors for this niche like Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.

Even as he shifts to the right, however, Walker, a preternaturally careful candidate, is avoiding any explicit suggestion that he is the champion of disaffected white voters. Still, key policy positions — particularly his changing stance on immigration and his attacks on public sector unions — reveal a thoughtfully directed appeal. In 2011, Walker successfully sponsored legislation repealing most collective bargaining rights for government employees. Walker’s anti-union initiative has made him a folk hero to conservatives concerned about what they see as the expanding power of government.

In a recent paper, “The Whiteness of Wisconsin’s Wages,” Dylan Bennett, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, and Hannah Walker, a doctoral candidate in political science at the University of Washington, argue that “Governor Walker and his allies activated the racial animus of white workers.”

Bennett and Walker contend that gutting the power of public sector unions serves as a vehicle to disempower African-American workers, “for whom the public sector is the single most important source of employment.”

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Guns, Settlers & Race

Black Panthers made headlines.

By Bill Fletcher, Jr.

Z Communications Daily Commentary

A front page story in the Washington Post struck me. [David A. Fahrenthold, “GOP field backs gun rights with both barrels,” March 29, 2015]  As one would expect, the potential candidates for the Republican presidential nomination are jumping all over themselves to show how ‘pro-gun’ they are.

In the USA we have discussions about guns that pretend to be based in history, but actually miss certain key features. In so doing, the heart and soul of the gun debate is overlooked and the issue devolves into questions of morality and gun safety.

The gun issue in the USA is related to history but not particularly to the 2nd Amendment (the supposed right to bear arms). The debate precedes the 2nd Amendment by more than a century and it revolves around settlers and race.

The gun debate in the USA started in the 1600s and, while there were always matters of safety and hunting, the key question was actually one of who had the right and authority to possess weapons. The second question centered on why the centrality of weapon possession at all.

The settlement of North America, and specifically the original thirteen colonies, was not a non-violent act.  It represented an invasion.  There immediately arose the question of the protection of the invaders, i.e., the colonists.  Thus, weapons, at all costs, had to be kept out of the hands of the indigenous population—the Native Americans or First Nations.  Severe penalties were created for any settler who sold or traded weapons to the Native Americans. This notoriety made its way into the popular media over the years with stories about so-called mavericks who supplied Native Americans with weaponry. During much of the colonial era, and into the 19th century, by the way, this form of activity was frequently associated in the minds of much of the white public with Irish dissidents who were in opposition to the British colonization of Ireland.

Weaponry was also essential for handling an ‘internal’ problem within the emerging settler state:  indentured servants and slaves.  The 1600s was a period of regular uprisings carried out by indentured servants and slaves.  The indentured servant workforce was originally composed of Africans, Europeans and some Native Americans.  It was the turmoil during this period that drove the colonial ruling elite to identify the need to splinter the workforce in order to retain power.  In that context arose the modern usage of “race,” based largely upon the successful experience of the British in the occupation and suppression of the indigenous population in Ireland. (Continued)

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The Christian Right Still dominates the GOP -- Is There Any End in Sight?

 

By Amanda Marcotte
Progressive America Rising via AlterNet

March 18, 2015 - In a recent interview on Fox, Christian right writer [3] James Robison went off on a rant about how Christian conservatives need to take over the government: “There are only 500 of you,” Robison said of Congress. “We can get rid of the whole bunch in one smooth swoop and we can really reroute the whole ship!”

He added that this takeover would cause "demons to shudder" and the "gates of hell to tremble," but what was really delusional about it was the idea that Congress is somehow devoid of Christians. In reality, 92% of Congress people identify [4] as Christian. More to the point, nearly every Republican, regardless of their sincerity in saying so, aligns with conservative Christianity, whether Catholic or Protestant, an affiliation reflected in their policy preferences. (One solitary Republican is Jewish.) The Christian right might not own all 535 members of Congress, but with Republicans in the majority, the Christian right is also in the majority.

And yet, as New York Times writer Jason Horowitz explained in a recent profile piece about evangelical organizer David Lane, Lane feels quite similarly: “For Mr. Lane, a onetime Bible salesman and self-described former “wild man,” connecting the pastors with two likely presidential candidates was more than a good day’s work. It was part of what he sees as his mission, which is to make evangelical Christians a decisive power in the Republican Party.”

Say what, said any reader who has cracked a newspaper, the New York Times or otherwise, in the past four decades. Making the Republican Party beholden to the Christian right is like making the sky blue or making cats stubborn. Can you really make something be what it already is?

That the evangelical right already controls the GOP shouldn’t really be in dispute. Not only do the Republicans do exactly as the Christian right tells them on every social issue, such as reproductive rights or gay rights, but Republicans also pay fealty to the Christian right by targeting Muslim countries with their hawkish posturing or using [5] Christian language to rationalize slashing the social safety net. If you were trying to come up with a quick-and-dirty description of the Republican Party, “coalition of corporate and patriarchal religious interests” would be it. (Continued)

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Terror … and Racial Terror

 

By Bill Fletcher, Jr.

Progressive America Rising

This article was originally published at ZNet.

With all of the discussion about ISIS/ISIL, Al Qaeda, etc., one would think that the only terror on this planet is that derived from relatively small numbers of criminal fascists roaming the planet who claim to be Muslims.  Yet that is not the only location of terror.  In West Africa, for instance, millions live in terror as the horrific virus, Ebola, spreads, killing more than 3,000 people.  Due in large part to the devastation wrought by neo-liberal policies on the health care systems of West African nations, Ebola has been spreading at an unanticipated rate.

There are other forms of terror, of course.  Environmental devastation and climate change, which capitalism seems unable to stop but has also played a major role in advancing, threatens billions.  Islands across this planet are threatened as water encroaches on coastal regions.  And one need not be a rocket scientist to know that it is the working classes, the farmers and many other impoverished segments of society that will suffer on a scale beyond anything that will afflict the rich and powerful.

There is, however, a form of terror at work within the USA that is not named but are every bit as deadly and destructive as anything that ISIL and Al Qaeda can produce.  This terror is racial terror, a reality that shapes the lives of millions of people of color.  It is racial terror that helps to explain the shortened life spans of African Americans; the prevalence of various illnesses, or at least the high rate of illnesses, such as diabetes and hypertension, among people of color; and the flinch which we of color all experience in the face of racially-inspired insults, humiliations and micro-aggressions.

It is difficult for most white people to appreciate the racial terror with which people of color live.  There are certain things that do not generally concern whites.  They do not, generally, have to worry about the race or ethnicity of the person with whom they are driving.  They rarely have to worry about being pulled over by the police when driving through a neighborhood that is not their own.

I frequently tell the story of attending the first Labor Notes conference in Detroit, Michigan in 1981.  At the end of the conference a blond, Scandinavian woman was looking for a ride back to the East Coast.  I had driven to Detroit from Boston with another African American man.  We were asked if we could take her back to the East Coast.  My friend and I looked at one another and, at about the same time, shook our heads “No.”  It was not personal; the idea of two African American men driving across several states with a very attractive, blond woman was something that set off all sorts of bells and whistles.  Yet, this is an experience that most whites would find difficult to fathom.  In my mind’s eye, and that of my friend, we could imagine being pulled over by the police or being pursued by white men who were not particularly excited about the imagery, let along reality of two black men driving cross country with a white woman.

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The South’s Victim Complex: How Right-Wing Paranoia is Driving New Wave of Radicals

(Credit: AP/Dave Martin)

New wingnut neo-Confederates may be laughed at as they enter Washington, D.C. But here's why their anger is deadly serious

By Matthew Pulver

Progressive America Rising via Salon.com

Southern voters will go to the polls in November 150 years, almost to the day, after Gen. Sherman commenced his March to the Sea, breaking the back of the Confederacy and leaving a burnt scar across the South. The wound never fully healed. Humiliation and resentment would smolder for generations. A sense of persecution has always mingled with the rebellious independence and proud notions of the South’s latent power, the promise that it “will rise again!” Congressman Paul Broun Jr., whose Georgia district spans nearly half of Sherman’s calamitous path to Savannah, evoked the “Great War of Yankee Aggression” in a metaphor to decry the Affordable Care Act on the House floor in 2010. The war, in Broun’s formulation, was not a righteous rebellion so much as a foreign invasion whose force still acts upon the South and its ideological diaspora that increasingly forms the foundation of conservatism.

The persecution narrative deployed by Broun, so woven into Southern culture and politics, has gained national currency. Contemporary conservatism is a Southern politics. Ironically, the Southern persecution narrative, born of defeat, has spread nationwide to form the basis of Republican victories since Reagan and the conservative hegemony that moderated President Clinton, establishing through President George W. Bush nearly 40 years of rightward movement at the national level.

It is the South’s principal political export, now a necessary ideological substrate in Republican rhetoric. Lee Atwater, the Karl Rove of the Reagan era, explained the nationalization of Southern politics accomplished with the 1980 campaign and election of President Reagan: “The mainstream issues in [the Reagan] campaign had been, quote, ‘Southern’ issues since way back in the Sixties,” Atwater said in 1981. Likely the foremost representative of that Southern mood was Alabama’s George Wallace, who in his 1963 gubernatorial inaugural address, the infamous “Segregation Forever” speech, invoked Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis and raged that “government has become our god.” Just months later, that omnipotent force would defeat Wallace when President Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard and forced desegregation at the University of Alabama. Wallace, though, would be rewarded for his stand, and the governor carried five Deep South states in his 1968 presidential run.

A century after the Civil War and Reconstruction, the 1960s was a sort of second federal invasion, with the White House strong-arming Wallace, Supreme Court decisions finally implementing Brown’s desegregation order, and the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts radically reshaping Southern politics and culture. “The South went from being behind the times to being the mainstream,” Atwater said. It is helpful to consider the inverse: The mainstream GOP adopted the ’60s-era mood of the South. Atwater does not suggest that the South caught up with a modernized conservatism — i.e., that it ceased to be “behind the times” — but that the larger movement regressed, albeit with rhetorical coding to evade charges of old-school racism.

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Getting Inside the Heads of the GOP Base: Tea Party, Evangelical and Moderate

Inside the GOP: Report on focus groups with Evangelical, Tea Party, and moderate Republicans

By Stan Greenberg, James Carville, and Erica Seifert

Democracy Corps / Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research

If you want to understand the government shutdown and crisis in Washington, you need to get inside the base of the Republican Party.  That is what we are doing in the Republican Party Project and these focus groups with Evangelicals, Tea Party, and moderate Republicans. All the passion, nuances and divisions found expression when we conducted this work in the summer.

Over the last two months, we have been releasing initial findings from the first phase of research for Democracy Corps' new Republican Party Project.  This report details findings from six focus groups among Republican partisans-divided into Evangelicals, Tea Party adherents, and moderates.  All participants indicated that they voted only or mostly for Republican candidates and were screened on a battery of ideological and political indicators.  The groups were conducted in Raleigh, North Carolina (moderate and Tea Party), Roanoke, Virginia (Tea Party and Evangelical), and Colorado Springs, Colorado (moderate and Evangelical.)

Understand that the base thinks they are losing politically and losing control of the country - and their starting reaction is "worried," "discouraged," "scared," and "concerned" about the direction of the country - and a little powerless to change course.  They think Obama has imposed his agenda, while Republicans in DC let him get away with it. 

We know that Evangelicals are the largest bloc in the base, with the Tea Party very strong as well.  For them, President Obama is a "liar" and "manipulator" who has fooled the country.  It is hard to miss the deep disdain-they say the president is a socialist, the "worst president in history," and "anti-American."

For all that, this is a deeply divided base.  Moderates are a quarter of those who identify Re-publican, and they are very conscious of their discomfort with other parts of the party base.  Their distance begins with social issues, like gay marriage and homosexuality, but it is also evident on immigration and climate change.  Fiscal conservatives feel isolated in the party. 

Evangelicals who feel most threatened by trends embrace the Tea Party because they are the ones who are fighting back.  They are very in tune politically, but the Tea Party base is very libertarian and not very interested in fighting gay marriage. 

Republicans shutdown the government to defund or delay Obamacare.  This goes to the heart of Republican base thinking about the essential political battle. They think they face a victorious Democratic Party that is intent on expanding government to increase dependency and therefore electoral support.  It starts with food stamps and unemployment benefits; expands further if you legalize the illegals; but insuring the uninsured dramatically grows those de-pendent on government.  They believe this is an electoral strategy-not just a political ideology or economic philosophy.  If Obamacare happens, the Republican Party may be lost, in their view. 

And while few explicitly talk about Obama in racial terms, the base supporters are very conscious of being white in a country with growing minorities.  Their party is losing to a Democratic Party of big government whose goal is to expand programs that mainly benefit minorities. Race remains very much alive in the politics of the Republican Party.

These are strong common currents in the Republican base, but the thinking and passions are very distinct and telling among the key blocs - and those have consequences for those who seek to lead. We selected these three groups (Evangelicals, non-Evangelical Tea Party adherents, and moderates) because combined they represent almost all of today's Republican partisans. The focus group locations, demographic characteristics, and participants' ideological characteristics were all selected based on statistical analysis of our first survey for this project.  While these are focus groups, and not statistically representative, this analysis gives a real, robust, and serious snapshot of who these Republicans are, how they think, and what matters to them.

--Evangelicals.  Social issues are central for Evangelicals and they feel a deep sense of cultural and political loss.  They believe their towns, communities, and schools are suffering from a deep "culture rot" that has invaded from the outside.  The central focus here is homosexuality, but also the decline of homogenous small towns.  They like the Tea Party because they stand up to the Democrats.

--Tea Party.  Big government, Obama, the loss of liberty, and decline of responsibility are central to the Tea Party worldview.  Obama's America is an unmitigated evil based on big government, regulations, and dependency.  They are not focused on social issues at all.  They like the Tea Party because it is getting "back to basics" and believe it has the potential to reshape the GOP.

--Moderates.  Moderates are deeply concerned with the direction of the country and believe Obama has taken it down the wrong path economically.  They are centrally focused on market-based economics, small government, and eliminating waste and inefficiency.  They are largely open to progressive social policies, including on gay marriage and immigration.  They disdain the Tea Party and have a hard time taking Fox News seriously.

1. Focus groups as real life

When a Macomb County focus group participant shot back, "No wonder they killed him" after I read a statement by Robert Kennedy, that stopped me and led to a whole new analysis of Reagan Democrats - and what were the core blockages to working whites voting Democratic again.  These groups with core Republican voters had similar moments - but more important, these emerged as affinity groups where the participants worked through their alienation and isolation, not just from politically correct-liberal dominated media, but other Republicans, family members, and neighbors.  If you want to know why Republicans are at war internally, start with their voters who are in turmoil.

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America’s Descent Into Madness

America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.

    – John le Carré

By Henry A. Giroux
Progressive America Rising via Counterpunch

August 13, 2013 - The stories it now tells are filled with cruelty, deceit, lies, and legitimate all manner of corruption and mayhem.  The mainstream media spins stories that are largely racist, violent, and irresponsible —stories that celebrate power and demonize victims, all the while camouflaging its pedagogical influence under the cheap veneer of entertainment.

Unethical grammars of violence now offer the only currency with any enduring value for mediating relationships, addressing problems, and offering instant pleasure. A predatory culture celebrates a narcissistic hyper-individualism that radiates a near sociopathic lack of interest in or compassion and responsibility for others. Anti-public intellectuals dominate the screen and aural cultures urging us to shop more, indulge more, and make a virtue out of the pursuit of personal gain, all the while promoting a depoliticizing culture of consumerism.

Undermining life-affirming social solidarities and any viable notion of the public good, right-wing politicians trade in forms of idiocy and superstition that mesmerize the illiterate and render the thoughtful cynical and disengaged.   Military forces armed with the latest weapons from Afghanistan play out their hyper-militarized fantasies on the home front by forming robo SWAT teams who willfully beat youthful protesters and raid neighborhood poker games.  Congressional lobbyists for the big corporations and defense contractors create conditions in which war zones abroad can be recreated at home in order to provide endless consumer products, such as high tech weapons and surveillance tools for gated communities and for prisons alike.

The issue of who gets to define the future, own the nation’s wealth, shape the reach of state resources, control of the global flows of goods and humans, and invest in institutions that educate an engaged and socially responsible citizens has become largely invisible.  And yet these are precisely these issues that offer up new categories for defining how matters of representations, education, economic justice, and politics are to be defined and fought over. The stories told by corporate liars and crooks do serious harm to the body politic, and the damage they cause together with the idiocy they reinforce are becoming more apparent as America descends into authoritarianism, accompanied by the pervasive fear and paranoia that sustains it.

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The Right’s War on Democratic Rights

By Tom Hayden

Progressive America Rising

With the fiftieth anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington approaching, is the time at hand for mass protest and civil disobedience against the Republican/Tea Party's war against voting rights and immigrant rights?

That's among the immediate questions as the Roberts Court has dropped its hammer on the 1965 Voting Rights Act while a dubious "immigration reform" bill passed the Senate on its likely way to an even worse fate in the Tea Party-controlled House. Together with the Court's Citizens United decisions protecting secret money in campaigns, Republicans are doing everything possible to cement a grip on power as a numerical white minority bloc. Successful Republican efforts to gerrymander House seats to gain ground in the Electoral College, combined with the rising tide of anti-abortion restrictions in southern states, reinforce the drift towards a new civil war - one fought by political means with recurring episodes of mass violence. The Court's narrowing of affirmative action also guarantees a widening of the racial divide in education and economic opportunity.

The Court's composition reveals its underlying partisan character, with the decisive tilt occurring after the 2000 election between Al Gore, Ralph Nader and George Bush, in which the Court usurped the verdict of a majority of voters, thus becoming a de facto branch of the Republican apparatus. The Republican bloc now includes: Roberts [Bush, 2005], Alito [Bush, 2006], Scalia [Reagan, 1986], Kennedy [Reagan, 1988], and Thomas [Bush, sr., 1991]. The Democratic bloc includes Ginsberg [Clinton, 1993], Stephen Breyer [Clinton, 1994], Sonia Sotomayer [Obama, 2009], and Elena Kagan [Obama, 2010]. The Republican tilt is likely to continue indefinitely, with Obama only able to appointment replacements to retiring liberals. The tilt will become a lock if a Republican president is elected in 2016.

Lost in both the partisan spin and rhetorical legalisms is that the scale of political power is being tipped far to the right in spite of progressive majorities which elected and re-elected President Obama.

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The One and Only Cause of "Fiscal Cliff" Economic Crisis: Republicans Fear Tea Party Primaries

By Robert Creamer
Progressive America Rising via HuffPost

Dec 29, 2012 - Often, economic crises are caused by real physical problems - like draught, war, demography, or technological innovation that robs one economy of a competitive advantage over another.

Other times, economic crises result when asset bubbles burst, or financial markets collapse. That was the case of the Great Depression - and more recently the Great Recession.

The economic crisis of the moment - the "fiscal cliff" - does not result from any of these factors. In fact it is not a real "economic crisis" at all, except that it could inflict serious economic hardship on many Americans and could drive the economy back into recession.

The "fiscal cliff" is a politically manufactured crisis. It was original concocted by the Republican Senate Leader, Mitch McConnell as a way to get past the last crisis manufactured by the Republicans - the 2011 standoff over increasing the Federal Debt Ceiling.

Theoretically, "the cliff" - composed of increased taxes and huge, indiscriminant cuts in Federal programs - would be so frightening to policy makers that no one would ever consider allowing the nation to jump.

Now, America is on the brink of diving off the cliff for one and only one reason: many House Republicans are terrified of primary challenges from the Tea Party right.

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White Racial Resentment: The Elephant in the Room

AP Poll: A Slight Majority of Americans Are Now Expressing Negative View Of Blacks

By Associated Press
October 27, 2012

WASHINGTON — Racial attitudes have not improved in the four years since the United States elected its first black president, an Associated Press poll finds, as a slight majority of Americans now express prejudice toward blacks whether they recognize those feelings or not.

Those views could cost President Barack Obama votes as he tries for re-election, the survey found, though the effects are mitigated by some people’s more favorable views of blacks.

Racial prejudice has increased slightly since 2008 whether those feelings were measured using questions that explicitly asked respondents about racist attitudes, or through an experimental test that measured implicit views toward race without asking questions about that topic directly.

In all, 51 percent of Americans now express explicit anti-black attitudes, compared with 48 percent in a similar 2008 survey. When measured by an implicit racial attitudes test, the number of Americans with anti-black sentiments jumped to 56 percent, up from 49 percent during the last presidential election. In both tests, the share of Americans expressing pro-black attitudes fell.

“As much as we’d hope the impact of race would decline over time ... it appears the impact of anti-black sentiment on voting is about the same as it was four years ago,” said Jon Krosnick, a Stanford University professor who worked with AP to develop the survey.

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Republicans Out of Touch with Reality—And What We Can Do

By Bill Fletcher, Jr.
Progressive America Rising via Precinct Reporter Group

I saw this astounding figure that approximately 70 percent of Republicans believe that the poll numbers on the presidential race are biased towards President Obama.  In other words, they are asserting that because President Obama has been—at least at the time of this column—ahead in most polls, this cannot be correct and the media must be mucking around.

It is important to put this sentiment in context.  This is the same Republican Party where more than 60 percent of its members believe that President Obama was not born in the U.S. Despite the incontrovertible evidence, most Republican voters wish to believe otherwise.  I would love to think that this was a comedy routine but it is reality.

To understand how 70 percent of Republicans would believe that the polls are biased, you have to appreciate their inability to recognize the nature of the changes underway in the country.  To the extent to which they believe that this is a ‘White republic,’ where the rest of us are barely-tolerated visitors, the polls don’t make any sense.  After all, from their perspective, there is no way that the U.S.A. should have a Black president, and, more importantly, there is no way that the demographics of the U.S.A. should be changing in the manner in which they are – towards a society where there is no White majority.

There is no way of knowing how the elections will turn out. The fact that President Obama has been ahead in most polls is striking, particularly given the depth of the economic crisis.  Such ratings have to indicate that large numbers of people have little confidence in the vision articulated by Romney/Ryan, but also that there is a sense when looking at the pictures of the Republican National Convention in Tampa, that this gathering (and this Party) bore no resemblance to the reality of the nation.  It looked like something very alien and for that matter, something very scary.

While President Obama may be slightly ahead in the polls, the only poll that really matters is to be held on November 6 when we actually vote.  Despite all of the efforts by the Republicans to reduce voter turnout by the elderly, the youth, by people of color, by union members and by gays/lesbians, the bottom line will be the determination of those same constituencies that were not in evidence at the Tampa Republican Convention to mobilize in the interest of justice.  This will take us further down the road, away from the racist and archaic notion of a ‘White republic’ (for the rich), and instead in the direction of a more consistent democracy.

Forget the opinion polls and just make sure to vote on November 6.

Bill Fletcher, Jr. is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum, and the author of “They’re Bankrupting Us” – And Twenty Other Myths about unions.  He can be reached at papaq54@hotmail.com. Submit to Facebook Submit to Google Bookmarks Submit to Twitter Submit to LinkedIn Written by: Precinct Reporter Group

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Saving Obama, Saving Ourselves

 

By Tom Hayden

Progressive America Rising

The threat of a Romney-Ryan regime should be enough to convince a narrow American majority to vote for Barack Obama, including the disappointed rank-and-file of social movements.

A widening of economic and racial inequality. Cuts in Medicare and Medical. More global heating. Strangling of reproductive rights. Unaffordable tuition. The Neo-cons back in the saddle. Two or three more right-wing Supreme Court appointments to come. Romney as Trojan horse for Ryan the stalking horse and future presidential candidate.

The consolidation of right-wing power would put progressives on the defensive, shrinking any organizing space for pressuring for greater innovations in an Obama second term.

Where, for example, would progressives be without the Voting Rights Act programs such as Planned Parenthood, or officials like Labor Secretary Hilda Solis or EPA administrator Lisa Jackson?

But the positive case for More Obama and Better Obama should be made as well. History will show that the first term was better than most progressives now think. A second-term voter mandate against wasteful wars, Wall Street extravagance, and austerity for the many, led by elected officials including Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Barbara Lee, Raul Grijalva, Jim McGovern and Keith Ellison, would be a target-rich field of opportunities as they say in the Pentagon.

Why Obama's achievements are dismissed or denied by many on the white liberal-left is a question worth serious consideration. It may only be a matter of legitimate disappointment after the utopian expectations of 2008. It could be pure antipathy to electoral politics, or a superficial assessment of how near-impossible it is to change intransigent institutions. It could be a vested organizational interest in asserting there is no difference between the two major parties, a view wildly at odds with the intense partisan conflicts on exhibit every day. Or it could even be a white blindness in perceptions of reality on the left. When African American voters favor Obama 94-0 [that's right] and the attacks are coming from the white liberal-left, something needs repair in the foundations of American radicalism.

I intend to explore these questions further during the election season. The point here is that they cumulatively contribute to the common liberal-left perception that Obama is only a man of the compromised center, a president who has delivered nothing worse celebrating. The anger with Obama on the left, combined with broad liberal disappointment with the last three years, results in a dampened enthusiasm at the margins which could cost him the election.

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What to Do in November, and Beyond

The 2012 Elections Have Little To Do With Obama's Record … Which Is Why We Are Voting For Him

The 2012 election will be one of the most polarized and critical elections in recent history.

By Bill Fletcher, Jr. and Carl Davidson
Progressive America Rising via Alternet.org

August 9, 2012 - Let’s cut to the chase. The November 2012 elections will be unlike anything that any of us can remember.  It is not just that this will be a close election.  It is also not just that the direction of Congress hangs in the balance.  Rather, this will be one of the most polarized and critical elections in recent history.

Unfortunately what too few leftists and progressives have been prepared to accept is that the polarization is to a great extent centered on a revenge-seeking white supremacy; on race and the racial implications of the moves to the right in the US political system. It is also focused on a re-subjugation of women, harsh burdens on youth and the elderly, increased war dangers, and reaction all along the line for labor and the working class. No one on the left with any good sense should remain indifferent or stand idly by in the critical need to defeat Republicans this year.

U.S. Presidential elections are not what progressives want them to be.

A large segment of what we will call the ‘progressive forces’ in US politics approach US elections generally, and Presidential elections in particular, as if: (1) we have more power on the ground than we actually possess, and (2) the elections are about expressing our political outrage at the system. Both get us off on the wrong foot.

The US electoral system is among the most undemocratic on the planet.  Constructed in a manner so as to guarantee an ongoing dominance of a two party duopoly, the US electoral universe largely aims at reducing so-called legitimate discussion to certain restricted parameters acceptable to the ruling circles of the country. Almost all progressive measures, such as Medicare for All or Full Employment, are simply declared ‘off the table.’ In that sense there is no surprise that the Democratic and Republican parties are both parties of the ruling circles, even though they are quite distinct within that sphere.

The nature of the US electoral system--and specifically the ballot restrictions and ‘winner-take-all’ rules within it--encourages or pressures various class fractions and demographic constituency groups to establish elite-dominated electoral coalitions.  The Democratic and Republican parties are, in effect, electoral coalitions or party-blocs of this sort, unrecognizable in most of the known universe as political parties united around a program and a degree of discipline to be accountable to it. We may want and fight for another kind of system, but it would be foolish to develop strategy and tactics not based on the one we actually have.

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Challenge to the Left: Obama Sinks to Historic Lows Among Blue-Collar White Males

 

By Ronald Brownstein
National Journal

The new Quinnipiac University and ABC/Washington Post national surveys out this week converge on one key conclusion: as the election nears, President Obama is sinking to historic lows among the group most consistently hostile to him.

Throughout his career on the national stage, Obama has struggled among white men without a college education. But in these latest surveys, he has fallen to a level of support among them lower than any Democratic nominee has attracted in any election since 1980, according to an upcoming National Journal analysis of exit polls from presidential elections.

Though pollsters at each organization caution that the margins of error are substantial when looking at subgroups such as this, each poll shows erosion within that margin of error for Obama with these working-class white men. The new Quinnipiac poll shows Obama attracting just 29 percent of non-college white men, down from 32 percent in their most recent national survey in April, according to figures provided by Douglas Schwartz, April Radocchio and Ralph Hansen of Quinnipiac. The ABC/Washington Post survey found Obama drawing just 28 percent of non-college white men, down from 34 percent in their May survey, according to figures provided by ABC Pollster Gary Langer. Romney drew 56 percent of the non-college white men in Quinnipiac and 65 percent in the ABC/Washington Post survey.

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Why Trump and the Birthers Won't Go Away

The GOP's Race Card:

Real Issue Is Obama's Not 'White'

By Earl Ofari Hutchinson
Progressive America Rising via HuffPost

June 1, 2012 - President Obama was indeed prophetic when he said at a press conference a year ago that his release of his long form birth certificate would not convince countless numbers of anti-Obama skeptics that he was a bona fide American.

Nearly a year after the president called it right on the bogus issue, the Public Policy Polling survey of GOP voters in Georgia, Tennessee and, more troubling, Ohio, because it's the key battleground state, found that more than one third of GOP voters still didn't believe he was born in the U.S.

The same high degree of doubt about Obama's birth likely would be found among GOP voters in other states. Billionaire professional Obama basher Donald Trump almost certainly knew that, and that he spoke for untold millions when he calculatingly lashed out at Obama again with the phony birther charge.

Before Trump shoved the issue back into public debate, the hope was that despite the president's warning and fear, and the negative poll findings, that birtherism had become a nonissue. This seemed even more the case when GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney, and the top GOP presidential contenders during the GOP primary campaign, all publicly rejected the birther claim about Obama.

But their public rejection of it as Trump has amply shown won't put the issue to rest simply because birtherism is a serviceable political chip for the GOP. In the months immediately before and after the president released his long form certificate, bills were introduced in 14 states that required presidential candidates to show iron clad proof of their U.S. birth. None of the bills passed. However, the mere fact of introducing the birth certificate requirement legislation in these states was just enough to continue to fan the flames of anti-Obama sentiment. There's even more to this apparent crackpot stuff.

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Will Romney Turn Center-Left? Don’t Count on It…

If He Were President, the Far Right Would Lead Romney Around by a Ring in His Nose

By Robert Creamer
Progressive America Rising via HuffPost

May 6, 2012 - Believe that, as President, Mitt Romney would revert to his days as a "Massachusetts Moderate?" Think again.

Every bit of evidence indicates that if he were President, the Far Right would lead Romney around by a ring in his nose.

Just last week, we saw it clearly on display. It didn't take but two weeks for the Far Right to force the Romney campaign to sever its ties with openly gay Richard Grinnell, who it had hired as its foreign policy spokesman. The campaign itself argued that it had begged Grinnell to stay. But right wing talk show host Brian Fischer of the American Family Association, who had led the drive to force Grinnell's resignation, declared it a major victory.

On his radio show, Fischer bragged that Romney had learned his lesson and would never again hire a gay or lesbian in a major campaign role. And you certainly didn't see Romney contesting that assessment.

Instead we've seen Romney lined up shoulder to shoulder on TV with Tea Party icon Michele Bachmann, and Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell -- a potential Romney VP pick and a champion of "trans-vaginal ultrasounds."

The reason why there is not a chance that Romney will ever reinvent himself once again as a "moderate" is that he wasn't really a "moderate" in the first place. He's always practiced one version or the other of ultra right wing, "let Wall Street run wild" Romney economics. And he's never given one thought to firing workers, cutting pensions, loading companies with debt and bleeding them dry of millions of dollars.

But you can't really say that he is a committed believer in any economic principle or political value. Mitt Romney is committed to one thing and one thing alone -- his own success. He has shown he has no core values whatsoever.

That's why it wasn't hard at all for Romney to shed his "moderate" past positions on issues like abortion rights, contraception, gay rights and immigration and to become what he himself calls a "severe conservative."

Why will he remain a "severe conservative" if he is elected President? Because people who have no core values have no backbone. You won't find Mitt Romney taking a stand against the dyed-in-the-wool ideologues that dominate the Republican caucus in Congress.

Those Republican ideologues may be way out of the mainstream, but they definitely have core values. Some of them were so committed to those values that they were willing to take our country to the brink of bankruptcy last year due to their unwillingness to give an inch of compromise.

The plain fact is that people with no core values never stand up to people who have core values. The fact is that Mitt Romney has the backbone of a jelly fish and that is precisely why the first time the ultra right wing pulls his chain and demands that he heel, he will fall right into line.

Even if he decided he wanted to challenge the right wing agenda propounded by the committed minions of the Tea Party, in a confrontation he would fold in an instant. When you have no core values, it's always much easier to go along with the demands of passionate, committed true-believers than it is to stand your ground.

And the Far Right knows this is true. Last week, right wing icon Grover Norquist was very clear. He said he was not looking for presidential leadership from Romney. He believes that the leadership of the Republican Party will continue to come from right wing Republicans in Congress. All he asked of a president, he added, was enough digits on his hand to hold a pen to sign the bills embodying Congress' right wing agenda.

Watch how Romney behaves when he delivers the commencement speech at far right Liberty University on May 12. Liberty University was founded by the late Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell. Now it's run by his son, Jerry Falwell Jr.

After the 9/11 attacks, Falwell Sr. said that "abortionists," "feminists," and "the gays and the lesbians" helped cause the 9/11 attacks. According to CNN:

On the broadcast of the Christian television program 'The 700 Club,' Falwell made the following statement: 'I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen.'

Until recently, Liberty University banned inter-racial marriages between its students. Today it requires parental permission.

As recently as 2010, Liberty University Law School withdrew as a co-sponsor of the Conservative Political Action Conference in protest after the conference allowed the homosexual group GOProud to co-sponsor the event.

When Romney speaks at Liberty University will he speak out against that kind of intolerance? Or, true to form, will he instead worship at the altar of ultra-right wing ideology and say just what the leadership of Liberty University wants to hear? I might be wrong, but I'll bet that not one critical word escapes his lips.

Romney's unwillingness to challenge the far right does not pertain solely to the social conservative right. It also goes for economic right wingers like Grover Norquist, who want to return America to the bad old days of more Bush-like tax cuts for the wealthy, and the deregulation of Wall Street that did such damage to the middle class and led to the Great Recession that cost 8 million jobs.

And it also goes for the Neo-Con foreign policy right. Seventy percent of the 40 individuals identified by the Romney campaign as its foreign policy advisers served in the Bush administration and were responsible for the catastrophic Neo-Con foreign policy.

No, in exchange for the Republican nomination, Romney has sold his soul to the extreme right. He has willingly walked into the right wing inner sanctum, and even if he wanted to, he doesn't have the backbone to escape.

Robert Creamer is a long-time political organizer and strategist, and author of the book: Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win, available on Amazon.com. He is a partner in Democracy Partners and a Senior Strategist for Americans United for Change. Follow him on Twitter @rbcreamer.

Follow Robert Creamer on Twitter: www.twitter.com/rbcreamer

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Warning on ‘Santorum Derangement Syndrome’

Believe It or Not, Santorum's Surge is Scary

By Tony Norman
Progressive America Rising via Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Feb. 21, 2012 - I've been told that it is way too early to begin showing signs of Rick Santorum derangement syndrome.

A well-meaning reader suggested that even if the Republicans were suicidal enough to hand the former Pennsylvania senator the nomination, his defeat in the general election would dwarf the blowout Barry Goldwater suffered at the hands of Lyndon Baines Johnson.

The argument goes like this: Rick Santorum is such an implacable foe of modernity that casting a vote for him is only possible if one shares his nostalgia for the chauvinism, authoritarianism and unbearable whiteness of the 1950s.

According to this argument, Mr. Santorum is a protest vote writ large across the Republican firmament by grass-roots conservatives repulsed by former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney's malleability and phoniness. It isn't a vote for Mr. Santorum's political theology as much as it is a rejection of the likely apostasy of the Republican frontrunner.

This also happens to be the prevailing view of the pundits toiling daily in newspapers and the cable news commissariat. The assumption that Rick Santorum can't be elected president is axiomatic in the circles I frequent, too. He was a punch line long before he lost his Senate race by 18 points in 2006.

Yet, a mere half dozen years after what should have ended his dreams of ever holding elected office again, Mr. Santorum is poised to steal the Michigan primary from Mr. Romney, although the polls have tightened in recent days.

Many Democrats are salivating over the prospect of an Obama/Santorum showdown in November. The only contest that could possibly make a Democrat happier would be one in which Newt Gingrich or Donald Trump were the Republican nominee.

Ironically, Mitt Romney, the gelatinous Gibraltar of Republican politics, stands the best chance of making the race for the White House competitive among independent voters he has alienated in recent months. After a hard tack to the right, Mr. Romney wouldn't lose an ounce of sleep embracing the middle to beat Mr. Obama in November. It's that kind of mercenary pragmatism that enrages conservatives who value principle over short-term electoral victory.

Because Mr. Romney has residual appeal with independents, Democrats would rather Mr. Obama faced someone with more extremist views -- someone like Rick Santorum. I understand the logic. I just don't buy it.

I think it is irresponsible to underestimate the appeal of a demagogue when so many Americans are suffering and the public mood is so mercurial. All it would take would be a few weeks of $5 a gallon gas and a Democratic electorate demoralized because of some administration misstep to put even the strangest protest candidacy into play.

Mr. Santorum is a principled culture warrior who doesn't believe in evolution, man-made global warming, sex for purposes other than having children, separation of church and state, tax-financed public education (except by Penn Hills of his home-schooled kids), a Constitutional right to privacy, contraception, some forms of prenatal testing, or freedom of conscience if it contradicts his church's edicts or his party platform.

Mr. Santorum would like to see doctors who perform abortions criminally prosecuted. He has said that war with Iran to thwart its nuclear ambitions is in America's best interests, despite the painful lessons of the past decade and the skepticism of our own generals.

If he is elected president, women should expect an administration openly hostile to their interests on a number of fronts. As for "blah people" -- union members and academics -- well, they can just forget it.

The former senator's comments about Mr. Obama's "theology" over the weekend make it clear that his version of environmental stewardship is more about exploiting the earth than respecting it. It is a mentality closer to that of a 19th-century robber baron than someone informed by modern science or concerns about environmental integrity.

So, how did Mr. Santorum make it this far? How is his candidacy even possible in the modern world? Some pundits refer to his "likability" compared to his rivals. What are they talking about? What has he said or done during his surge that paints him in any way as likable?

There's some Rick Santorum derangement syndrome going around all right, but it's not affecting me.

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Task for 2012: Monkey-Wrenching the White United Front

What Too Few Progressives

are Prepared to Discuss

By Bill Fletcher, Jr.
Progressive America Rising via BlackCommentator.com

May 18, 2011 - In the context of the criticisms that many of us have of the Obama administration for what it has not accomplished, for its advance of a corporate agenda and for the unacceptable compromises it has made with the Republicans, there is something that I have seen few progressives address. To borrow from a comment offered by television commentator Tavis Smiley, the 2012 elections are likely to be the most racist that most of have seen in our life-times. Given this, what are the implications?

It has been striking that many progressives, particularly those who have not only written off President Obama but also written off all those who offered critical support to the Obama campaign in 2008, have said so little about race, racism, and the discourse of right-wing populism in the context of the upcoming elections.

We have witnessed the first Black president of the United States questioned about his citizenship and birthplace, yet I have seen precious little from many friends on the left side of the aisle (particularly those so critical of Obama) responding to this. If you put your ear to the ground, however, you hear the murmurings of Black Americans furious that Obama was put in a place where he had to file a petition in order to obtain his Hawaii birth certificate. The murmurings do not stop there. When Donald Trump and other opportunists started asking questions about how it was that Obama got into Columbia University and Harvard Law School (i.e., was he REALLY qualified to have gotten into those schools), for most of us enough was enough. Because this was no longer about Obama and it had very little to do with criticisms of Obama and his policies.

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Book Review: ‘Mom. Sex and God’

Insider: The Christian

Right Aims to Destroy

All Things Public’

By Frank Schaeffer
De Capo Press
Progressive America Rising Via Alternet - May 17, 2011

The following is an excerpt from Frank Schaeffer's new book, Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics -- and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway (Da Capo Press, 2011). Raised in Switzerland in l'Abri, a utopian community and spiritual school his evangelical parents founded, Schaeffer was restless and aware even at a young age that "my life was being defined by my parent's choices." Still, he took to "the family business" well, following his dad as he became one of the "best-known evangelical leaders in the U.S." on whirlwind speaking tours. While rubbing shoulders with Pat Robertson, James Dobson and Jerry Falwell, Schaeffer witnessed the birth of the Christian anti-abortion movement, and became an evangelical writer, speaker and star in his own right.

****

Ironically, at the very same time as Evangelicals like Dad and I were thrusting ourselves into bare-knuckle politics in the 1970s and 80s, we were also retreating to what amounted to virtual walled compounds. In other words we lashed out at “godless America” and demanded political change—say, the reintroduction of prayer into public schools—and yet also urged our followers to pull their own children out of the public schools and homeschool them. The rejection of public schools by Evangelical Protestants was a harbinger of virtual civil war carried on by other means. Protestants had once been the public schools’ most ardent defenders.

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Denounce This Crap: Glenn Beck and Faux News Using ‘Big lie’ to Incite Violence vs. Left Professor

The Smearing of Frances Fox Piven

Progressive America Rising via socialistworker.org

January 24, 2011 - Frances Fox Piven is a professor of sociology at City University of New York, longstanding advocate for the rights of working and poor people and an author of numerous books studied in universities across the country.

In recent months, Fox News' Glenn Beck has repeatedly described Piven as an advocate of violence and "enemy of the Constitution." As a consequence, a torrent of death threats against Piven has appeared on Beck's Web site The Blaze--threats that went unopposed on Beck's site for weeks.

In response, Vincent Warren and William Quigley of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) wrote a letter to Fox News President Roger Ailes calling on him to rein in Beck and stop the campaign of misinformation against Piven. Fox News responded, but left no doubt that it didn't share the CCR's concerns, claiming that Warren and Quigley didn't make "a sincere effort...to stop hostile public speech, but rather an attempt to create ill will for our company."

Here, we reprint the Center's letter to Ailes and Fox News.

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Dear Mr. Ailes:

We are supporters of Prof. Frances Fox Piven. We request your immediate help in stopping false accusations by Glenn Beck that are putting Prof. Piven in danger.

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