Revenge of the Loonies

Little India was among the first publications in the mainstream or the ethnic media to endorse Barack Obama’s quest for presidency, in February 2008, when he was still a long shot for the Democratic Party’s nomination. We now share the disappointment that so many who lent their support to his campaign have with his stewardship of the country.

We were inspired by the idea of Barack for President — by the historic character of his quest and the statement his election would make about the American promise of equality. That quest is now over and it alone is a greater national achievement than anything that any of his opponents from either party offered. So, we — as we suspect most others who embraced his candidacy — do not regret our choice. America is a better place, not as a result of any actions or policies of Pres. Obama, but simply by the fact of his election.

Our disappointment stems from the opportunities, unforeseen in early 2008, he has frittered away for major social and economic transformations of the country. The financial crisis and the national anxiety it engendered offered a once-in-a-lifetime chance to reframe the contours of public policy, reorient the terms of the post-Reagan debate on the role of government, and advance the progressive agenda that Democrats have long advocated.

Instead, the Obama administration tempered its political ambitions at the altar of bipartisanship in a laudable effort to alter Washington’s divisive political culture. But once those efforts were spurned by Republicans, his administration turned to narrow political and policy pursuits through backroom deals with senators and congressmen, hoping to leverage the large Democratic majorities in Congress. The public saw the unseemly spectacle of frenzied horse-trading with lobbyists and politicians for what it was — spineless, unprincipled and crass.

The political defeats the Democrats suffered in the gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey as well as the senate race in Massachusetts are not a repudiation of Pres. Obama’s radical policies, as the right wing machine would have us believe. If anything, his policies were overly timid and centrist, perhaps because that is who he truly is or wishes to be positioned politically. Rather, the political defeats reflect the anger that voters feel at the failure of Washington to deliver on jobs and the economy as well as their disgust at the continued stranglehold that lobbyists and self-serving politicians have over the broken system.

At this point, Obama has lost an historic opportunity to fundamentally reconfigure the social contract and exacerbated the public cynicism of government. He might yet redeem some political capital for his agenda, however, by returning to his netroots by mobilizing his millions of net volunteers so that political change is driven — as he was once won’t to say, but has seemingly forgotten — from the bottom up. He needs to spend less time fretting over his Washington hand and turn to reenergizing his base to take on the calculated, destructive “politics of no” that the Republicans and the Tea Party loonies have engendered. Their opposition cannot, and should not, be ignored; it must be countered. If Obama fails to do so, he is likely to discover himself working with a decidedly smaller deck in Washington after the mid term elections in November.