Obama's conservative pandering

Paul Rosenberg, Opinion, Al Jazeera English:

The debt-ceiling disaster was merely a symptom of much deeper problems with America's ruling class.

In mid-April, the House passed Paul Ryan's Budget Plan, complete with its provision to privatise Medicare. In late May, Democrat Kathy Hochul won an upset special election in upstate New York, winning what had been over a 70 per cent GOP district just six months before. The issue that did it was her Republican opponent's expressed support for the Ryan Plan. Afterward, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi laid out the Democrat's campaign strategy to retake the House next year: "Medicare. Medicare. Medicare."

There was just one problem: President Obama had different ideas. Although he always speaks in carefully modulated tones, he has repeatedly placed cuts to Medicare and Social Security back onto the negotiating table, tossing politically suicidal Republicans a lifeline they will surely use to try to strangle him with next year - along with the rest of the Democratic Party.

Obama seems pathologically drawn to "move to the centre", somehow never noticing that Republicans are constantly moving the "centre" farther and farther to the right. How far to the right, exactly? Consider this: since 1984, the General Social Survey has asked Americans 18 times whether our spending on Social Security and health care is "too much", "too little" or "about right". Among self-identified conservative Republicans, just 3.4 per cent think we are spending "too much" on both.

Since Obama has repeatedly floated the idea of cutting both programmes, he seems to think that the political centre is somewhere to right of 96.6 per cent of all conservative Republicans in the population at large. When the so-called "professional left" is screaming at him not to do this, they are actually speaking for almost the entire Republican electoral base as well

In the New York Times Magazine, psychologist Drew Westen, author of The Political Brain, asked "What Happened to Obama?", and while most might take this question to mean, "What happened to the progressive leader we thought we voted for?", in a much more basic sense it simply means, "What happened to the competent politician we thought we voted for?" Or, "What happened to the Democrat we thought we voted for?" Or even, simply, "What happened to the rational human being we voted for?"

As Westin points out, from his inaugural address onward, despite his obvious abilities displayed while campaigning, Obama has consistently failed to present a narrative explaining the challenges we're facing and what he wants to do about them. And because of that failure, the political landscape has once again been shaped by those who played a leading role in creating the multiple catastrophes America finds herself struggling with.

Clearly, the issue here is not whether Obama stands for "progressive leadership", but whether he stands for basic sanity. And the answer is clearly "no". He will plead for sanity, but when push comes to shove he will not draw a line in the sand to defend it.

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