Slip Sliding Away

Paul Krugman has an excellent column today arguing that progressives have backlashed so intensely over the prospect of Obama's dropping the public option because -- for reasons extending far beyond specific health care issues -- they no longer trust the President. Citing Obama's steadfast continuation of Bush/Cheney Terrorism policies, the administration's extreme coziness with crisis-causing banks, and the endless retreats on health care, Krugman says that "a backlash in the progressive base . . . has been building for months" and that "progressives are now in revolt. Mr. Obama took their trust for granted, and in the process lost it."

  Glenn Greenwald

I’m nost sure I agree with that last part, in that I’m not sure he ever was concerned about the progressives. The progressives haven’t been a part of the political equation in Washington since who knows when. He began and continues on the path of trying to get the right wing’s approval, which he never will. He’ll figure that out. Quite possibly too late.

Greenwald goes on to accurately describe the White House M.O.

In essence, this is the mindset of Rahm Emanuel, and its precepts are as toxic as they are familiar: The only calculation that matters is maximizing political power. The only "change" that's meaningful is converting more Republican seats into Democratic ones. A legislative "win" is determined by whether Democrats can claim victory, not by whether anything constructive was achieved. The smart approach is to serve and thus curry favor with the most powerful corporate factions, not change the rules to make them less powerful. The primary tactic of Democrats should be to be more indispensable to corporate interests so as to deny the GOP that money and instead direct it to Democrats. The overriding strategy is to scorn progressives while keeping them in their place and then expand the party by making it more conservative and more reliant on Blue Dogs. Democrats should replicate Republican policies on Terrorism and national security -- not abandon them -- in order to remove that issue as a political weapon.

[...]

all that matters is that we beat the Republicans and we should do anything to achieve that, including serving corporate donors to ensure they fund Us and not Them and turning ourselves into war-making, civil-liberties-abridging, secrecy-loving GOP clones in the national security realm

[...]

In a superb post the other day, Digby recounted what fueled the Naderite movement in 2000 and warns, presciently I think, that the willingness of Obama/Emanuel so blatantly to disappoint those to whom they promised so much (especially young and first-time voters who were most vulnerable to Obama's transformative fairy dust) will lead them either to support a third party or turn off from politics altogether.

Which would suit the GOP just fine. I know it will take a miracle to get me to waste my time in the voting booth again. And I didn’t even believe Obama was the great liberal he was talked up to be. Nor am I young. Of course I also didn’t believe our voting system is fair and honest. But a lot of young people got excited enough and thought they could actually make a difference, and that was a group that I thought this country had lost to political apathy a long time ago. It will be interesting to see whether they turn out again.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.