Today’s Almanac-November 4, 2010
What a difference two years make. On November 4, 2008 American voters disgusted with four years of George W. Bush and Republican control of the Senate swept Barack Obama to the White House and handed him a supposedly filibuster proof majority in the Senate.
It was not even close. Obama won 69,456,897 popular votes against John McCain’s 59,934,814, a 52.9% to 45.7% margin. He carried 28 states plus one Congressional District in Nebraska and the District of Columbia. That included the Eastern Seaboard from Maine to North Carolina, Florida, all of the industrial Mid-West, Colorado and New Mexico, and the entire West Coast and Hawaii. The Republicans were left with the Deep South, Border States, and the sparsely populated states of the High Plains, Mountain West, and Alaska.
Those of us who worked hard and long for this outcome were understandably euphoric that night. Who can forget the scenes of the Victory Rally that night in Chicago’s Grant Park? Even the national media was caught up in the excitement and was gushing about the election of the first Black President, and spouting a bunch of non-sense about inaugurating a post-racial era. Through most of the President’s first year in office, despite set backs and controversies, he remained enormously popular.
But from the beginning there were dark omens. The approximately one third of the American electorate that categorize themselves as hard core conservatives said from the beginning that Obama “will never be our President.” A handful of lunatics and conspiracy theorists were circulating charges, despite overwhelming evidence, that Obama was not born in the United States but in Nigeria or elsewhere and was ineligible to be elected President. The panoply of right wing radio ravers quickly picked up the story and usually without openly endorsing it allowed the Birthers, as they became known, to have free rain on their programs. The shills at Fox News breathlessly reported every new version of crack-pot theory and every doomed lawsuit. “Responsible” Republican leaders tepidly said that they “would take the President at his word” that he was born in the United States. Within months polls were showing that more than 40% of the public believed that he was not born in this country.
A similar campaign, based on his name and his childhood in Indonesia led many to believe that Obama was a Muslim and perhaps secretly hoping for a victory by terrorists.
The President came into office at a moment of high economic emergency. The Bush Administration had launched the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) as an emergency effort to prevent the nation’s biggest banks and brokerage houses from collapsing and creating an unprecedented crisis. TARP was quickly slapped together and not well thought out, but Obama felt he needed to continue it. He subsequently would take other actions, including a rescue of the domestic auto industry, an emergency Stimulus Act that would rely heavily on public works projects, and funneling fund to cash strapped state and local governments to prevent wide spread lay-off of teachers, police, and other public employees. All of these emergency measures added substantially to the already large deficit and public debt. Most of these programs, even the poorly conceived and executed ones, succeeded in stabilizing the markets and preventing even deeper unemployment. But they did not rescue the millions of Americans who found their homes in foreclosure or the value of their homes slashed by a third or more. Nor did it put much of a dent in long term, chronic unemployment.
The Tea Party Movement may have begun as something of a genuine expression of discontent fueled by long-standing economic libertarians. Its quirky eccentricity made it an attractive media story in its infancy and the encouragement of the coordinated right wing disinformation machine helped it to mushroom. Meanwhile Obama and the Democrats were split and helpless to focus righteous indignation and populist rage against the forces of plutocracy that had created the crisis in the first place.
Instead those very same plutocrats, with an assist from a Supreme Court ruling that scraped regulation of campaign finance, were soon pouring money into the Tea Party, co-opting its original founders and purposes, starting its own Astroturf front groups, providing well paid instant leaders, and backing candidates. It was a masterful operation which soon had worried and stressed-out lower middle class folks demanding that banks be deregulated and taxation of the rich prevented. Social conservatives soon hitched their wagon to the same star and the Tea Party was transformed into a force not just to lead a revolution against Obama and the Democrats, but to capture the Republican Party and drive it even further to the right than ever before. Yesterday’s conservative darlings were among the first victims of the Tea Party insurgency, claiming that they somehow accommodationist.
Obama’s single minded dedication to enacting some kind of health care reform added fuel to the fire. He angered much of his own base by flatly rejecting a single payer plan and then spending months making compromises in fruitless effort to achieve bi-partisan support. In the end he settled for reforms based largely around existing insurance companies that in many way mirrored Republican proposals from as little as two years earlier. The same plutocrats poured billions of dollars into a campaign to convince the public that “Obamacare” was a government take-over of the medical system, that death panels would condemn the elderly, that care would be rationed, and that Medicare would be destroyed. And it worked, particularly among older voters simply because the phase-in time for the reforms meant that few people had yet to see its benefits.
Well, you know the story as well as I. It was a perfect storm. Two years after that euphoric election night, Obama and his party took one hell of beating,
He has two more years in office with the Tea Party fueled crazies in Congress to recapture the hearts and minds of Americans. Can he? Well, Obama is a pretty smart guy and has shown that, unlike George W., he can learn from is mistakes. My guess is that he can. And two years from now I may be writing another blog entry marveling how things have changed in such a short time.