An Attempt to Answer a Question on My Hesitancy Regarding Obama - Updated

At the previous post here,  "Time for a 'Mic Check' Moment with Obama," an anonymous commenter asked a fair question.  I'll try to answer it as fairly:

Phil,


I'm with you re the "mic" check of President Obama, and your response to Rahm Emanuel's speech is on target. 

 Thanks.

Nevertheless, I'm wondering.... You have written post after post after post lambasting Obama, thus conveying your writhing contempt for the man.

I've lambasted Obama, as I have every President of the United States since Lyndon Baines Johnson.  The term "writhing contempt" is highly inaccurate and unfair.  What have I written about this president that was untrue? 

So, I'm asking you to name a progressive--just one--who would have done a better job by now. Not a fantasy candidate such as Bernie Sanders, Dennis Kuchinch, or Elizabeth Warren--an actual, viable person who could have taken the job and run with it in a first term to solve the nation's problems and to undo the damage inflicted by eight the years of the Cheney/Bush regime. You mentioned Howard Dean above. Would Dean be a successful president at this point?

Dr. Dean may have been more successful as chief executive, but he would never have been elected.  The media would have treated him with far more disdain than they did Obama. 

It has become almost impossible for a real liberal or progressive such as the late Sen. Paul Wellstone to rise to the top tier of presidential aspirations through our two-party system.  Obama had to raise hundreds of millions to be elected, and then had to surround himself with staffers and a cabinet who would get more.  He now has to raise over a billion to get re-elected, and will have to make more shady deals like those that led to killing the UN climate forum in Copenhagen, relaxation of ozone pollution standards, going ever so light on BP re the Gulf, rejecting a cluster bomb treaty, and so forth.

It seems to me that so-called progressives might be part of the problem. Aside from seizing every opportunity to voice displeasure with Obama and indict him as "just another G.W. Bush," what have progressives really done to advance an agenda that the president can adopt as policy? 

During the health care debate, hundreds of thousands of us tried.   His staff, more concerned with continued campaign financial support from the health care and insurance industries than with playing LBJ-style hardball with congress, flipped us off.  On many environmental issues, we are making proposals that would be workable with full-blown White House support that included heavy duty arm-twisting on congress.

I'd say not much, because of infighting and disarray in their own ranks.

 Please provide a specific example of how that came down.

Progressives simply can't get their act together, beyond being the voice of doom and gloom. 

In my view, we only have a short time remaining in which to reduce CO2 emissions radically.  By the mid-2020's, the oceans will no longer be able to sustain life-producing environments as they have for hundreds of thousands of years.  2/3 of the planet's human population will then simply die off over a couple of devastating generations, during which time wars like we have never known will rage, further polluting the earth.

Playing two-party politics as we plummet to that point seems absurd.  And awfully immoral.

You may call this "doom and gloom," but thousands of scientists - more every day - agree with this assessment.

To my mind, it's significant that Matt Yglesias, who has left Think Progress for Slate, expressed a weariness with intra-progressive differences in his farewell blog post at TP.

Noted.

Since you seem to have all the answers here at Progressive Alaska, isn't it about time for you to toss your hat in the ring and run for president yourself?

I've been asked several times over the past 33 years to run for the Alaska Legislature.  So has my wife.  We've passed.

I'm 65, enjoy my work as a music educator, performer, composer and community volunteer.  I serve on three boards now, down from five. 

In 2008, my wife and I donated thousands of dollars to Democratic Party candidates, donated several hundred dollars to Obama's campaign, and hundreds of volunteer hours to him, as we opened up our house for weeks to his enthusiastic young campaign workers for their quarters and meals.

Now, my anonymous friend to whom I've responded, tell me why you think it is time for me to materially support this particular lesser of two evils?

He really doesn't seem to want my support, anyway.  I've responded to over 100 emails from his various fundraising arms, and have gotten no answers to any of my questions.  (I think they just wanted my check or credit card number.  What do you think?)

The GOP crop of clowns is so pathetic your dog or mine could do a better, or at least less harmful job, of running the country.  Barring something we don't know about yet, Obama will be president of the USA until January 20th, 2017.

Update:  Thanks for some of the civil comments.  I hope Peggy in OH, to whom this post is a response, feels better soon.

Don't you love it when somebody comes over here from another blog's commenters, and then writes:

I truly pity the people around you that have to stomach your continuous bile.

 followed by:

do your children hate you, do you have a teeny dick? What has made you such a foul individual?

 ... followed by more, uh, I guess one might call it "bile."

Nutzola, eh.....?

Gotta say, that and some of the other comments from Obama worshippers commenting here over the past few weeks remind me of this Onion video from the week after the November 2008 election:

Obama Win Causes Obsessive Supporters To Realize How Empty Their Lives Are