Nader Supporters for Obama

[DroppinScience]

To me this is the most impassioned case for third party-leaning voters to consider voting for Obama. I have a strong feeling that yeahwho will approve of this message and that sazi will not be happy. But hey, give it a read.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/10/07-11

Published on Tuesday, October 7, 2008 by CommonDreams.org
Lefties for Obama

by Ira Chernus

If you have decided to vote for a third party candidate for president, or not to vote at all, because you can't stand voting for the "lesser of two evils," this message is for you. Though I'm supporting Obama and the Democrats, I understand and respect your choice.

You may be taking a lot of criticism for standing on your principles. I know how the criticism can hurt. I took the same kind of heat eight years ago as a Ralph Nader supporter in a razor-thin election. I've never regretted that choice. I felt totally comfortable with it in 2000, partly because the outcome was a foregone conclusion in my home state. My vote would not make any difference one way or another.

This year is very different, because in my state the Obama - McCain race is much too close to call. If that's true in your state too -- or if there is any chance Obama might not win your state -- please consider carefully the other big difference between 2000 and 2008. Back then, I failed to imagine how much damage eight years of Republican rule would do. Now, the thought of another eight or even four years of the same seems intolerable.

Imagining what the Supreme Court might look like four years from now under a President McCain makes the thought even worse than intolerable. And if a President McCain were to die in office . . . Well, golly gee, sometimes the good old English language just doesn't got the words to express the horror.

When the greater of two evils gets bad enough, the lesser is so much less that it really is the better choice. So I am out there working for Obama and the Democrats. I won't scold you or look down on you for taking the opposite course. But I'd like you to consider changing your mind.

No, Obama is not the kind of crusader for progressive causes that you and I would like to see lead this country. But he has a different view than you or I might have about how government works. In his years as a community organizer, he learned that you should never expect government officials to initiate change. That's not their job. This is a democracy, and they are elected to do the will of the people, to bend whichever way the political wind blows.

Obama really means it when he says, in effect: "Making change is your job. I want you to pressure me. If you put a lot of pressure on me, I'm willing to bend to your will. But the conservatives are always out there putting pressure on me from the other side. You have to create a political wind strong enough to blow the opposition away and blow your elected leaders to the left."

With Democrats in power in Congress and the White House, the doors of power will be open at least a little bit to progressives. We won't get all, or even most, of what we want. But there will be people in Washington willing to listen to our views. Some of them will be in pretty high places. And they'll know that our movement will get attention -- even in the Oval Office -- if it's massive, well-organized, and highly visible.

McCain and Palin aren't going to move an inch to the left no matter how powerful the political winds are. They'll claim that their victory gives them a mandate for right-wing intransigence. And if they win, the disappointment may take all the wind out of the progressives' sails. After eight years of fighting Bush, who will have the energy left for another four years of the same? A McCain victory might convince a lot of people, across the political board, that we are just fated (or doomed) to have Republican presidents forever.

I'm especially concerned about the huge numbers of young people supporting Obama, thousands of them working full time on his campaign and learning invaluable political skills. If he loses, most of them may be so dispirited that they'll give up on politics altogether for a long time, perhaps forever. If he wins and then doesn't produce the change they want, they may turn their energy and skills to the left, as so many did in the '60s.

And it's pretty predictable that a President Obama would not produce nearly as much change as most of his young supporters want. He has chosen to be a compromiser. He understands how much power conservatives have these days. A president who wants to get anything done must have a working relationship with those conservatives, or else they'll simply block everything.

So he has taken all sorts of moderate stands to let conservatives know that he doesn't plan to shut them out. The alternative is to stand on principle and paralyze the government, insuring there won't be any progressive change at all.

The few changes the Dems would bring may not seem very significant to you. But they could mean a great deal for those who have no voice and no power at all.

Here at home, there are millions of poor people who depend on government programs for their basic needs; Democrats will respond to some of those needs, while Republicans will ignore them and blame the poor for their own suffering. There are nearly 50 million without health insurance; Democrats are at least moving toward covering all the children and most of the adults among them. The number of unemployed grows daily; Obama's talk about giving them jobs, by rebuilding the infrastructure and creating alternative energy technology, won't all be translated into action, but some of it will.

On the other side of the world, people in Iraq are suffering daily under a U.S. occupation that Obama would significantly reduce and perhaps eventually end completely. Around the world there are government leaders eager to talk with the President of the United States, talks that Obama would have but McCain would reject. Then there are all the non-human species who are at risk every day from the Republicans' callous disregard for the environment. Democrats won't save all of them, but they will give many species a better chance to survive.

The voiceless depend on us to speak up for them -- not just on Election Day but every day after that. We have to keep pushing relentlessly to the left. We have to recognize that in politics no one wins all the time. But even a small victory on one issue can make a huge difference for a lot of people, most of them people we will never see. Yet all our pushing for victories will do little good unless Obama and the Democrats win.


Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin. chernus@colorado.edu

[DroppinScience]

There's a follow-up to this article where he outlines the true differences between the Republican and Democratic parties to those who would say: "There's no difference between them!"

Even the question of what would have been different under a Gore presidency compared to the current Bush presidency. I gotta tell ya, it's impossible to think Gore would have been worse.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2008/10/16-2

Published on Thursday, October 16, 2008 by CommonDreams.org
Lefties for Obama, Round Two

by Ira Chernus

I've written a lot of columns for Commondreams over the years. But I don't recall any that got as much response as a piece I posted recently urging lefties to support Obama. Many of the responses were heartfelt outbursts of emotion; some of them were surprisingly angry, even venomous, attacks. Hey, I thought we lefties were supposed to be the tolerant ones.

But some of the responses were quite thoughtful, and they call for a response in kind.

Most of the thoughtful writers offered a list of ways the Democrats were quite similar to the Republicans, and they challenged me to give some specific issues on which Dems are demonstrably better than the GOP. Fair enough. So here are just a few highlights. To name all the meaningful differences would take far too long for one column.

Let's start with the big economic picture. Noted economist Larry Bartels has run the numbers for the past sixty years and here's what he found: "Real incomes of middle-class families have grown twice as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans, while the real incomes of working-poor families have grown six times as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans."

There's no mystery about it. Republican economic policy aims, above all, to protect the interests of the very rich. They make nearly all their money from investments. Inflation is their greatest enemy, because it eats up the profits they expect from their investment. So Republicans regularly throw the economy into recession. Lots of people lose their jobs, which means wages go down, which means inflation stays low.

That's why we had major recessions during the first Reagan administration, the George H.W. Bush administration, and the current Bush administration. Republicans are happy to see the middle class and the poor suffer, as long as they damp down inflation to protect the rich.

On top of that, of course, the GOP gives massive tax cuts to the rich, much larger than the Democrats. That runs up budget deficits. With government having to borrow huge sums, there's more competition for investment capital, so interest rates go up. Working people have to pay more on their mortgages and credit cards, but the rich get better returns on their investments.

Labor unions give huge sums to the Democrats because they understand these significant differences between the economic policies of the two parties. In return, of course, Dems are much more likely to support legislation that protects the rights (and the safety) of workers and helps unions build their strength. Republicans have a long record of supporting laws that gut labor's efforts to organize.

Perhaps the biggest single group of workers who are consistently pro-Democratic is not a union but a professional organization: the National Education Association. Teachers know that Republicans pursue all sorts of strategies for de-funding and weakening public schools. Democrats consistently support public education, which in effect means the right of poor children to get as good an education as the rich.

All of this points to a larger pattern that is sad but true. When you ask "What have the Democrats done that's clearly better than the Republicans?", it can be hard to find powerful answers, because Democrats spend most of their political energy and capital just preventing Republicans from doing even worse things. So the biggest differences between the parties are often most evident when you ask what the Democrats have not done.

Consider Bill Clinton's presidency. When the Republicans took control of Congress in 1994 they had a horrendous program called the Contract with America. Clinton risked his political career by throwing the government into gridlock to prevent most of that Contract from becoming law -- one of the many cases where Democrats saved us by making sure nothing got done.

In foreign policy, Clinton resisted pressures for sending U.S. troops out to kill people for a number of years. Finally, tragically, he ordered the attack on Serbia that many of us protested loudly. But he refused to launch the attack on Iraq that the neoconservatives demanded in 1998, even though it would have been politically popular. And Clinton certainly needed to take politically popular steps, to counter the political attack that got him impeached and largely paralyzed his administration. Again, a Democrat spending nearly all his time playing defense.

Now consider Clinton's Supreme Court appointments: Ginsburg and Breyer. They are hardly the true progressives many of us would like to see on the court. But sandwiched in between Republican appointments like Scalia and Thomas before them, and Roberts and Alito after them, they look relatively good. At least they've been able to prevent terrible things that would have happened if their seats had gone to conservatives in the Scalia to Alito mold. Most notably, of course, they've staved off the overturning of Roe v. Wade and protected a woman's right to choose.

Unfortunately they could not prevent the Court's worst moment, handing George W. Bush the presidency in December, 2000. Which brings us to the question: Would things have been different if Al Gore had been president for the last eight years? Much might not have been different. But once again, the question is not whether either party is perfect. The question is whether one party is demonstrably better than another.

Yes, Gore probably would have attacked Afghanistan after 9/11 too. But the war against Iraq was a neocon project from the beginning. Since Clinton had resisted it, and the Pentagon resisted it too, there is no reason to think Gore would have done it.

There's every reason to think Gore would have stuck to the bipartisan, multilateral tradition of foreign policy, as Obama will -- which prevents the worst excesses of the Bush - McCain style of unilateral, preemptive attack. When Obama pledges to consult allies more and negotiate with "enemies," he's not pandering for votes. It's a politically risky position to take. So he probably really means it.

The other area in which Gore probably would have made a real difference is the one that has proven to be his real passion: the environment. A Democratic administration would have signed the Kyoto protocols long ago and given us precious years to begin reducing greenhouse gas emissions, years that have been lost under Republican rule.

As it was, the Dems have been forced to spend all their energies for the last eight years just preventing things from getting worse. Remember, the centerpiece of Bush's second term was supposed to be the privatization of social security. It didn't happen, partly because of public outrage, but partly because the Democrats worked to turn that outrage into politically effective resistance.

We saw something similar in the last month, when the administration was ready to hand $700 billion of taxpayers' money to the Wall Street investment firms pretty much as an outright gift, with only a few strings attached. And even that was too liberal for many Republicans. They wanted no strings at all. The conservatives' "insurance" plan would have let the Wall Street gamblers continue on their merry way, knowing that they'd get to keep all the profits, while the government stood ready to reimburse them for all their losses.

The plan that emerged was not good, to be sure. But the Democrats did manage to buffer its worst excesses by insisting on giving the taxpayers some assets in return for their money, some oversight, and at least a hope of some help for beleaguered homeowners.

A President Obama might have to spend most of his political energy just preventing things from getting worse. But that should be reason enough to support him.

More than that, a Democratic victory -- especially when the Democrat is an African-American -- would move the political center back toward the left, not nearly far enough, but quite perceptibly. It would create an opening for real change and a mood of expecting change, as Kennedy's election did in 1960. We on the left could channel our energies into pushing the Democrats in our direction -- which is precisely what the theory of community organizing tells us to do.

If Obama and the Dems fail to fulfill the expectations for change, they could trigger the same kind of grassroots activism in the streets that we saw in the '60s. At least the possibilities would be there.

A McCain victory, on the other hand, would reverse the current leftward creep of the political center. It would create a huge impression that America really is an immovably conservative country, which would foster the expectation that nothing will or can change for the better. Once again, we'd all have to put all our energy into merely preventing the very worst. That kind of negative politics has been the hallmark, and the curse, of our national life for some 35 years now.

Some lefties seem to get a perverse pleasure from it. Apparently they enjoy feeling like an oppressed minority, always on the defensive, bewailing their powerlessness, hurling invective at anyone who suggests a more moderate view that opens the way to small but meaningful changes. I don't understand it. But I know that it won't help the poor, or the unions, or the Iraqis, or the environment, or the women fighting to protect their right of choice.

A vote for Obama is a vote for the possibility that we might begin creating positive visions and working to turn them into reality. Not a guarantee -- but at least a possibility. And then we'd have to start doing the hard work of give-and-take politics. Not voting for Obama means four more years (at least) of accepting powerlessness and working frantically just to stave off the worst political disasters. Isn't that enough of a difference to matter on Election Day?
Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder and author of Monsters To Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin. chernus@colorado.edu