The amazing thing about this trailer is that it could be an ad produced by the Democrats against presidential candidate Mitt Romney. It makes all of the arguments that Democrats will ultimately make against Mitt: that he is a corporate raider who puts his own greed ahead of people (and who won’t show his tax returns but has used offshore tax havens to avoid paying income taxes…) and it features the kinds of working class, older folks who Republicans traditionally entice with pro-corporate messages. It’s an odd, odd tack for a Republican candidate, but it could prove ultimately devastating to Romney. Watch the trailer to the 27 minute film that will follow Mitt to South Carolina:
And then wonder this …
Who is the Winning Our Future PAC working for? Newt Gingrich? Does Newt really think he’s going to become the nominee of a fundamentally pro business party via a populist message that assails capitalist greed more effectively than most Democrats do at this point? Really? On the up-side for Romney, if there is one, it does give him several months’ lead time to fashion a response to the fundamental argument against him: that he is a rapacious, job killing plutocrat. Or as DWS puts it: a “job cremater.” If he can parry the pro-Newt super-PAC, he may have a sufficiently robotic answer prepared when President Obama’s team hits him on Bain Capital in the fall.
On the other hand, I don’t see how this helps Republicans, because the fundamental argument against Romney is in essence an indictment of the entire conservative ethos — which is stridently pro-capital and anti-labor. The idea of “creative destruction” growing the economy, even if it costs jobs in the short run — and the idea that the pursuit of self-interest is fundamentally good for the country (as explained by Jeb Bush in his “right to rise” op-ed, or as championed by George Will in his takedown of Gingrich last month that included the description of laid off workers as “dead weight…”) is GOP 101. How does a supposedly conservative political action community tear that down, even in the interest of tearing Mitt Romney down, and not make the 99 percent versus 1 percent argument stick against any Republican?
This past Saturday afternoon in Atlanta, the once jocular and front-running, now defiant and rapidly crumbling GOP presidential contender Herman Cain announced that he’s indefinitely “suspending” his bid for the White House — and in the process he killed black Republicanism.
That probably wasn’t his plan, but after running a race filled with gaffes and gimmicks and lacking any humility or substance, Cain left the conservative movement unharmed and the mainstream GOP alive and well, but he may have finally laid to rest the peculiar strain of political thought that’s been driving black Republicans ever since the kinder, gentler Rockefeller Republicanism of former Sen. Edward Brooke and the late NAACP President Benjamin Hooks was replaced by the talking-point parroting brand that found its ultimate distillation in Cain.
After Cain’s woeful run, American politics may have finally seen the last of the “I’m-not-like-those-other-blacks” candidate — and good riddance.
Cain called himself conservative, but he mostly encouraged supporters to see him as the ultimate anti-Obama — claiming to be the “real black man” in the presidential race and saying America needed “a leader, not a reader.” Yet when the time came, Cain couldn’t back those claims up.
For quite a long spell in African-American history, each of us has had to bear the burden of the race on our shoulders. Custom and tradition — and intense desire for equality — dictated that we mind our manners and avoid personal acts and activity that would make the entire race look bad. Thus, we were skittish about eating chitterlings and watermelon, especially in public. Washington activist Petey Green eased some of that with a riotous routine on how to eat watermelon (not properly with a knife and fork). Amos ‘n’ Andy was booted from both radio and television, a banishment spearheaded by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People that persists to this day.
We were also saddled with guilt about poor grammar and incorrect English, “bad” hair that we tried to ameliorate with conks (remember Malcolm X?), processes and other straighteners, skin whiteners and certain cuss words (in particular, the dreaded 12-letter, four-syllable insult that begins with “m”), and we were to avoid or chastise those who violated the unwritten rules of deportment.
We even tolerated and laughed along with a white comedian, Lenny Bruce, who evoked laughter with his shtick mocking Joe Louis’ inarticulate interviews after dispatching the white hope of the week.
“Well, Joe, what do you think about the fight?” went Bruce in his nightclub performance.
“Ahhhh, arrrrrah, ughhh, I glad I win … blah, blah, blah, Deetroit.”
Indeed, we were embarrassed.
But no more. That was then. In the interim, we progressed to the point where not even the buffoonery of a Herman Cain can make us shudder and shrink into the shadows to hide our faces. There was a time when such antics would have been comparable to Amos ‘n’ Andy. But declaring ultraconservative billionaires the Koch brothers his “brothers from another mother” and describing himself as “black-walnut ice cream” only drew snide snickers and disdain from many nonsupportive African Americans.
His ignorance of the war in Libya and President Obama’s foreign policy fell only on his shoulders, not the rest of us. His long pauses and poor answers to questions about policy issues that presidents confront daily reflected solely on him.
The United States logged yet another month of mediocre job growth in November.
The Labor Department said Friday that the nation’s employers added 120,000 jobs last month, after adding 100,000 jobs in October.
The unemployment rate fell to 8.6 percent, after having been mired around 9 percent for most of 2011.
“The unemployment rate has been stuck in the mud all year,” said Andrew Tilton, a senior economist at Goldman Sachs.
November’s jobless rate was the lowest recorded since March 2009. The rate fell partly because more workers got jobs, but also because about 315,000 workers dropped out of the labor force, and the jobless rate counts only people who are actively looking for work.
November’s jobs report reinforced how much President Obama needs additional stimulus, a tidy and fast resolution to the European debt crisis or some other economic miracle to reinvigorate the economy before the 2012 presidential election.
On the issue of government action to stimulate the economy, there has been some movement in Washington toward extending the payroll tax cut, which is currently scheduled to expire at the end of this month. Economists have said that allowing the expiration of the tax cut — which lets more than 160 million mostly middle-class Americans to keep 2 percentage points more of their pay checks — could be a severe drag on both job creation and output growth.
“If isn’t extended, it will have an impact on consumer spending in the first half of next year because it’ll put a big dent in consumer income,” said Conrad DeQuadros, senior economist at RDQ Economics. “To the extent that reduces spending, there will be second-round effects on hiring.”
The other major stimulus program schedule to expire by 2012 is extended unemployment insurance benefits, which allows some jobless workers to continue receiving benefits for as long as 99 weeks. The average duration of unemployment has been near record highs this year, and so ending extended benefits is likely to affect a sizable chunk of the unemployed.
Unemployment benefits are believed to have one of the most stimulative effects on the economy, since recipients of these benefits are likely to spend all of the money they receive quickly and so pump more spending through the economy.
“They say businesses are refusing to look at résumés from the unemployed,” said Esther Perry, 59, of Bedford, Mass., who participated in a recent report on unemployed workers put together from USAction, a liberal coalition. “What do you think my chances are? Once unemployment runs out, I don’t know what I will do.”
"The disappointment and disillusionment with President Clinton are widespread." —Bob Herbert, New York Times, 1993 (Photo: Steve Liss/Liaison/Getty Images)
If we trace liberal disappointment with President Obama to its origins, to try to pinpoint the moment when his crestfallen supporters realized that this was Not Change They Could Believe In, the souring probably began on December 17, 2008, when Obama announced that conservative Evangelical pastor Rick Warren would speak at his inauguration. “Abominable,” fumed John Aravosis on AmericaBlog. “Obama’s ‘inclusiveness’ mantra always seems to head only in one direction—an excuse to scorn progressives and embrace the Right,” seethed Salon’s Glenn Greenwald. On MSNBC, Rachel Maddow rode the story almost nightly: “I think the problem is getting larger for Barack Obama.” Negative 34 days into the start of the Obama presidency, the honeymoon was over.
Since then, the liberal gloom has only deepened, as Obama compromise alternated with Obama failure. Liberals speak of Obama in unceasingly despairing terms. “I’m exhausted [from] defending you,” one supporter confessed to Obama at a town-hall meeting last year.
“We are all incredibly frustrated,” Justin Ruben, MoveOn’s executive director, told the Washington Post in September. “I’m disappointed in Obama,” complained Steve Jobs, according to Walter Isaacson’s new biography. The assessments appear equally morose among the most left-wing and the most moderate of Obama’s supporters, among opinion leaders and rank-and-file voters. In early 2004, Democrats, by a 25-point margin, described themselves as “more enthusiastic than usual about voting.” At the beginning of 2008, the margin had shot up to over 60 percentage points. Now as many Democrats say they’re less enthusiastic about voting as say they’re more enthusiastic.
The cultural enthusiasm sparked by Obama’s candidacy drained away almost immediately after his election. All the passion now lies with the critics, and it is hard to find a liberal willing to muster any stronger support than halfhearted murmuring about the tough situation Obama inherited, or vague hope that maybe in a second term he can really start doing things. (“I’m like everybody, I want more action,” an apologetic Chris Rock said earlier this month. “I believe wholeheartedly if he’s back in, he’s going to do some gangsta shit.”) Obama has already given up on any hope of running a positive reelection campaign and is girding up for a grim slog of lesser-of-two-evils-ism.
Why are liberals so desperately unhappy with the Obama presidency?
There are any number of arguments about things Obama did wrong. Some of them are completely misplaced, like blaming Obama for compromises that senators forced him to make. Many of them demand Obama do something he can’t do, like Maddow’s urging the administration to pass an energy bill through a special process called budget reconciliation—a great-sounding idea except for the fact that it’s against the rules of the Senate. Others castigate Obama for doing something he did not actually do at all (i.e., Drew Westen’s attention-grabbing, anguished New York Times essay assailing Obama for signing a budget deal with cuts to Medicare, Social Security, and Medicaid that were not actually in the budget in question).
I spend a lot of time rebutting these arguments, and their proponents spend a lot of time calling me an Obama apologist.
Some of the complaints are right, and despite being an Obama apologist, I’ve made quite a few of them myself. (The debt-ceiling hostage negotiations drove me to distraction.) But I don’t think any of the complaints—right, wrong, or otherwise—really explain why liberals are so depressed.
Here is my explanation: Liberals are dissatisfied with Obama because liberals, on the whole, are incapable of feeling satisfied with a Democratic president. They can be happy with the idea of a Democratic president—indeed, dancing-in-the-streets delirious—but not with the real thing. The various theories of disconsolate liberals all suffer from a failure to compare Obama with any plausible baseline. Instead they compare Obama with an imaginary president—either an imaginary Obama or a fantasy version of a past president.
So, what if we compare Obama with a real alternative? Not to Republicans—that’s too easy—but to Democratic presidents as they lived and breathed?
One variant of liberal disappointment has taken the form of resurgent Clinton nostalgia. Hillary Clinton, removed from the undertow of partisan combat in her role as secretary of State, has enjoyed soaring approval ratings, while Bill has burnished his credentials with a book on fixing the economy. If Bill Clinton (or Hillary Clinton—admirers tend to blur their identities) were in charge, pine their devotees, they wouldn’t have rolled over on the economy. They’d have fought the Republicans on the stimulus and won. “If Hillary gave up one of her balls and gave it to Obama,” James Carville told a Christian Science Monitor breakfast last year, “he’d have two.” Clinton was known for his slogan “It’s the economy, stupid,” and has become one repository for frustrated Democrats who believe Obama failed to attack the economic crisis with enough vigor. “No one ever had to tell Hillary that,” a bitter Clinton primary supporter recently remarked to the Daily Beast.
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