CT Blue

Apparently, the Obama folks are prepared to play hardball on the jobs bill, or at least that’s what they are saying now. For the moment, it means they’re not bargaining with themselves, though that’s not to say that there’s no compromise built into the bill. Like so much of what Obama has proposed, it assumes he can get half a loaf, so that’s all he asks for. This time, though, they are signaling that they aren’t willing to slice any more.

My own opinion is that they have no expectation that the bill, or any bill, so conceived and so dedicated, will pass. It was proposed for rhetorical purposes only. It is, after all, election season. But if they actually do expect to pass something without giving up the store, one must ask how they expect that to happen. It will take the Republicans months to accept the fact that Obama is unwilling to cave. In the case of people, after all, past performance is a guarantee of future performance. Put that fact together with the further fact that Republicans believe a collapsed economy represents their ticket to power, and the outlook for the bill looks dismal. I continue to believe that he’ll drop the bill, win or lose, sometime after the first Tuesday of November, 2012.

And if, by chance, Obama does manage to pass the bill against all the odds, weak tea as it is, we must ask ourselves: what could the man have accomplished if he’d faced reality at the beginning of his term, when he had large majorities in both houses and the avid support of a substantial number of ordinary people. Did he condemn us to years of recession just to get Olympia Snowe and/or Susan Collins to vote with him?

My number two son refers his Facebook friends to Matt Stoller’s article at Salon, in which he urges the Democratic Party and its constituencies to start a conversation about ditching Obama. He puts the problem succinctly:

If would be one thing if Obama were failing because he was too close to party orthodoxy. Yet his failures have come precisely because Obama has not listened to Democratic Party voters. He continued idiotic wars, bailed out banks, ignored luminaries like Paul Krugman, and generally did whatever he could to repu diate the New Deal. The Democratic Party should be the party of pay raises and homes, but under Obama it has become the party of pay cuts and foreclosures. Getting rid of Obama as the head of the party is the first step in reverting to form.

Stoller suggests that party figures run as favorite sons or daughters in their home states as a way of forcing the issue to the forefront. From there, he suggests, real alternative candidates might emerge, or, I suppose, Obama could get religion (Democratic party style). There’s a lot of reasons this won’t happen, the general spinelessness of Democrats being in the forefront. But the reality is that it would get nowhere unless Obama’s core constituency-black voters- were behind it. That would mean that some influential black politicians would have to be among those taking on Obama in their home states. No one can blame black voters for being emotionally invested in Obama, even though his policies have wreaked disproportionate harm on the black community. The Black Caucus is rumbling, so who knows, if someone could put a coalition together, it just might work.

I continue to believe that Obama will win, since the Republicans are doing their best to throw the election. In fact, from their point of view, they’d be far better off if he remained as President. They will continue to control the government, so they could get everything they want, and blame the Democrats for the results. Were they to actually take the presidency and retain effective control of Congress there’s no doubt they would be massively repudiated in 2014, by which time, however, they might have permanently subverted what little is left of our representative government.