November 13, 2012

The re-election of the President - An analysis

PART I - Positives and Negatives

Barack Obama won re-election last week (6 November 2012). And, what was the Left’s reaction?  “So what?”  Well, we are spared four years of Mitt Romney.  Again, “so what?  They are both two peas from the same pod.”  Well maybe, but even peas can vary.  Here are some positive differences to consider.  These will be followed by some negative similarities to Romney and his conservative advisers.  We will start with the bright side:

-- In terms of probabilities, under Obama the U.S. is less likely to find itself at war with Iran then would be the case with Romney.  On such issues as war in the Middle East, Obama seems to be able to think relatively independently while Romney, by his own admission, can’t tell the difference between U.S. interests and those of racist Israel.

-- Obama took a sensible attitude toward the Arab Spring uprising except, of course, in Bahrain where its support for the monarchy was lamentable to say the least.  Romney’s reaction would have been to ring up Netanyahu and ask him what to do. 

-- On issues of women’s rights, Gay rights, environmental and educational concerns an Obama administration is much preferable to a Romney one.

-- If there are Supreme Court vacancies in the next four years we are much less likely to have extreme conservatives nominated than would have been the case under Mitt Romney.

-- Obama dropped Bush’s torture directive.  Given Mitt Romney’s neoconservative advisers, he might well have been tempted to reinstate it. 

These are only some of the positive things and they are far from unimportant.  Nonetheless, Obama has a definite dark side that sometimes echos the conservative Republican mindset.  For instance:

-- Throughout his first term Obama went after “illegal aliens,” deporting them in high numbers, and only modified this policy as the election neared.  He cannot be trusted on this front.

-- Obama has continued to enforce President Bush’s criminal policies many of which are institutionalized in the Patriot Act.  These include unconstitutional practices such as indefinite detention and warrantless eavesdropping.

-- And while Obama’s foreign policy in the Middle East probably will not lead to the war so ardently desired by Romney’s buddy, Israel’s Prime Minister Netanyahu, he is still willing to kill innocent people with drones and harm even more with draconian sanctions.

Part II -- Romney’s 57,591,058

1. Were most of these folks just motivated by a desire to vote against Obama rather than for Romney?  Or were they good hypnotic subjects who were easily mesmerized by expertly choreographed flip-flopping?

Part III -- After the Victory

1. Obama and his advisers probably feel that progressives are just a fringe group who will support the Democrats anyway and so they don’t have to take their goals and values into consideration.

Thus all the early indicators are that the second term Obama will be a lot like the first term one. Yet there are so many of his supporters who are sure this will not be the case.  They swallow whole that teasing line “the best is yet to come.”  As one 2012 supporter said, “things are going to be different in Washington now that Obama proved he has the majority of Americans on his side.”  I thought he had already proved that in 2008. 

Part IV - Conclusion

Well, all right, for those who count on the “real progressively inclined” Barack Obama showing up for his second term, here are a number of things the president can do to prove that things will be different.  I take many of the following points from Juan Cole’s recent column “Top Ten Wish List for President Obama.”

-- Obama can propose and fight hard for legislation that will overturn the horrible “Citizens United” law that, among other things, reinforced the farce that corporations are really people and Superpacs somehow have the right to try to buy elections.  And, simultaneously, the “real” Obama can expend some political capital pushing hard for meaningful campaign finance reform. 

---He can fight to strengthen union rights both in the public and private sectors.

-- He can fight for legislation that will make illegal conservative efforts to restrict the franchise through such gambits as required picture ids.

-- Finally, specific to the Middle East,  Barack Obama can: a) get out of the way of Palestinian efforts to achieve more meaningful membership status at the UN and b) he can pardon the Holy Land Foundation leaders who have been unfairly convicted of supporting terrorism in one of the 21st century’s most outrageous miscarriages of justice.

Will the Barrack Obama who shows up for the second term fight for any of these things?  My own guess is that what efforts there are in these directions will be lukewarm at best.  They will be watered down by incessant compromise.  Not because that is the way politics must be played (certainly the Republicans haven’t met anyone half way this side of the Tea Party), but because that is the way the real Barack Obama wants to play politics.