Washington – A couple of hours before President Obama offered a boffo revival of his 2008 campaign persona during a boisterous rally at the University of Wisconsin, Sen. Bernie Sanders was analyzing why the president was in a political pickle in the first place.
Sanders, the independent from Vermont who caucuses with the Democrats, speaks warmly of Obama. But unlike the man in the White House, Sanders actually is a socialist and believes devoutly in grass-roots, class-based politics.
And it is his faith in the power of a progressive movement organized around a clear set of commitments that lies at the heart of Sanders’ critique of where the president went wrong.
“Think back to two years ago,” Sanders said during an interview in the only Senate office decorated with a medallion of Eugene V. Debs, the legendary American Socialist leader. “There were rallies involving 80,000 to 100,000. Obama was running the best campaign I’ve seen in my lifetime — and I’m pretty critical.”
“Why are we where we are today?” he continues. “The most serious mistake the president made was not, in a sense, continuing the thrust of his campaign, and forgetting all he accomplished.”
Sanders does not discount what Obama and congressional Democrats achieved through the economic stimulus, health care and financial reform. But he argues that by replacing a mobilizing approach and clear progressive goals with an insider strategy aimed at compromising with a few moderate Republican senators, Obama deactivated his own enthusiasts. These are the very people the president was trying to motivate in Madison.
“While Obama and the Democrats have a large number of achievements, it was not enough,” said Sanders. “We needed to be bolder.”
Yet Sanders will do all he can to help Democrats win this fall, and therein lies the paradox for progressives. It’s true that many on the left are frustrated with White House calls for them to buck up and grow up. Jane Hamsher, who blogs at Firedoglake, sees the administration’s taunts as setting up the left as a “fall guy” if Democrats lose.
But progressives keenly understand how much their aspirations would be set back if an increasingly right-wing Republican Party wins one or both houses this fall.
That’s why liberal blogs are already rallying behind scores of Democratic candidates. It’s why “the enthusiasm gap” about this year’s election is slowly closing. It’s why labor and civil rights groups have organized their One Nation Working Together march this Saturday. (And, yes, it’s another sign of Fox News’ continuing ability to set the mainstream media agenda that you have heard far less about this rally than you did about Glenn Beck’s.)
And it’s why the polls have begun to show signs of a modest Democratic revival. Buried in the eighth paragraph of a Wednesday Wall Street Journal story on its survey with NBC News was this fact: When likely voters were asked which party they wanted to control Congress, Republicans led Democrats by three points, but that was down from a nine-point GOP lead just a month ago. Could the plates beneath this election be shifting?
Obama’s trip to Madison was therefore more than a journey down memory lane. It reflected the White House’s realization that Sanders is right that there is no substitute for a president making a coherent argument, taking on opponents who are eviscerating him daily, and acknowledging his dependence on those who brought him to office. “I need you fired up!” he declared in a stump line that could not have been more accurate. “You can’t lose heart!”
The president was not reluctant to draw class lines or ideological distinctions. He cast Republican support for a $700 billion tax reduction for the wealthy against the cuts it could force in Head Start and student loans. He criticized his opponents’ “blind faith in the market” and the idea of letting “corporations play by their own rules.”
Thus the irony: A president who largely disdained a mobilizing strategy for his first year and a half in office has returned to his community-organizer roots to try to salvage an election. Here’s the further irony: He has a real chance of pulling it off, which leads to a question. If Obama succeeds, will he continue to keep his supporters engaged and “fired up,” as Sanders suggests he should? Or will he go back to an insider strategy that helped bring him to the brink of this precipice?
E.J. Dionne’s e-mail address is ejdionne(at)washpost.com.
(c) 2010, Washington Post Writers Group
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
After the election, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment. We’re presently working to find 1500 new monthly donors to Truthout before the end of the year.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy