Trey Smith
I have no animosity towards people who supported and voted for President Obama. Well maybe a little, but only because I know your energy could have been put to better use. But if you vote, then given the options available, which is insanity or maybe slightly less insanity, then you could argue that it was perfectly reasonable for you to vote for what you perceived to be slightly less insanity. Maybe there was a time when there was some truth to this logic, and many would argue that there still is. This prevailing logic of supporting the lesser-than-two-evils, fitting for an era of diminished expectations, is the most important political resource of the Democratic Party and the typical cop-out for its “progressive” supporters.As I am certain that readers are aware, I'm not a Barack Obama fan. While I did applaud the symbolism of the election of the first black president -- I will be equally proud when we elect a woman -- I had not drunk the kool-aid of "hope" that he would be significantly different than his predecessor and I haven't been disappointed in this regard.
It’s a useful cop-out. After all, how can we say a McCain Presidency, or now a Romney Presidency, wouldn’t be worse? How can you disprove such a statement? How can you compare Obama’s policies to the non-existent policies of some hypothetical Republican Presidency? Obviously, you can’t. Sadly, progressives have been reduced to comparing Obama’s record, atrocious by any measure, with what one of those crazy, rightwing nutjobs might have done, or might do in the future. That’s right, they’re using the counterfactual to explain away the cognitive dissonance induced by the reality of supporting a pro-corporate imperialist Democrat.
This is the state of the mainstream American Left today. After all, we do have a rightwing lunatic to compare Obama to: George W. Bush, whom progressives proudly held in contempt as he plundered and blundered his way into the history books. What do we find when comparing Obama’s record to Bush’s? Nearly perfect continuity, even on policies that many people assumed were peculiar byproducts of a uniquely criminal Bush regime.
~ from The Obama Syndrome by Collin Harris ~
What gets me is that there are many, many substantive reasons for a citizen not to be enamored with this guy, but most people who don't like him do so for one of two non-substantive reasons. The first of these is obvious: he ain't white!
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said that he hoped that one day people will be judged by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin. That day may come in the distant future, but it sadly is a long way off in America. There is a sizable portion of the American populace that opposes Obama simply because he's black. They, of course, dress up their opposition in a number of creative ways, but the pigmentation of his skin is THE motivating factor.
There is another sizable portion of Americans -- somewhat intertwined with the first -- that hate Obama based on fictions -- stuff they themselves or others make up out of thin air. The most delusional of these fictions is that Obama is a socialist!
A socialist? Corporate profits are at all-time highs. Corporate criminality isn't being investigated. Important health and safety regulations are being rolled back. His administration is doing next too nothing about the impending environmental crisis. The guy is a leading cheerleader of austerity (gutting what's left of the social safety net in order to "save" the rich from suffering any consequences for their reckless behavior).
As comedian Bill Maher remarked a few weeks back, if Obama is a socialist, he's not a very good one!
And yet, while there are countless substantive reasons to oppose Obama -- I share them with you frequently in this space -- his supporters are just as annoying as the sort of folks mentioned above. While his right-wing opponents conjure up reasons to loathe him, about the best his supporters can come up with is "At least, he's not a Republican!"
Had McCain won the race in 2008, we are told, things would be much worse today. How can anyone KNOW that? My guess is that things wouldn't be this bad because liberals and progressives would have opposed the nefarious initiatives -- the ones Obama has instituted without as much as a peep -- McCain and Palin championed. If McCain had announced that he alone has the sole power to decide which Americans live and which Americans die, there would have been loud and sustained opposition from the very same people who today sit on their hands.
In this election season, the same lesser evil rationale has been and will continue to be trotted out. Yes, Obama has been a supreme disappoint to progressive-minded citizens everywhere, BUT we must vote for him to protect us from the likes of Mitt Romney! We must be protected from this man whose positions aren't all that different from our supposed protector!
I understand why some people might choose to vote for Obama this year, but I hate it when people support him blindly simply because he is the "lesser of two evils". Many "liberals" out there are not aware of Obama's dark side or choose to throw a blind eye to it, and that is a dangerous thing.
ReplyDeleteAfter taking a political science class in college last semester, I have become thoroughly convinced that American's are too stupid (or just too uninformed) to elect their own leaders. If American's were well informed, they wouldn't stand for such candidates and maybe third parties would have more power. There is no such thing as a two party "democracy" because those two parties are usually part of the same coin.