Robert Reich thinks he knows why Democrats lost the 2014 midterm elections.
Robert Reich (The Choice of the Century):
"The President blames himself for the Democrat’s big losses Election Day. ‘We have not been successful in going out there and letting people know what it is that we’re trying to do and why this is the right direction,’ he said Sunday.
In other words, he didn’t sufficiently tout the Administration’s accomplishments.
I respectfully disagree.
If you want a single reason for why Democrats lost big on Election Day 2014 it’s this: Median household income continues to drop. This is the first “recovery” in memory when this has happened.
It’s worth a read.
Logging you in...
v1car 40p · 547 weeks ago
The only thing the Obama administration has genuinely accomplished in the last six years which is even mildly positive has been the Affordable Care Act, and that is only positive in the sense that forcing everyone to buy bad products from a corrupt industry is, in this case, marginally better than excluding some people from having the product at all. And the reason the ACA forces everyone to buy bad products from a corrupt industry? Because Obama kept anyone from mentioning Single Payer in public, and specifically forced anyone who was holding out for the Public Option to give up on that. If anything, we should blame Obama for not permitting the ACA to be a better bill; all the things he did to make the whole thing worse were officially to try and get Republicans to vote for the thing, and in the end none of them did — he wasted everyone's time by even trying. (And anyone paying any attention could tell you at the time that that was how it was going to turn out, because it was obvious as early as March of 2009 that the Republicans were not acting in good faith and weren't going to compromise.)
On other fronts? He has deported more people than any previous president. He has prosecuted more journalists under the controversial Sedition Act from a century ago than any previous president. He has kept up our drone bombing program — the one which we now admit doesn't work and actually creates terrorists instead of killing them. He started bombing Libya even though Congress voted against it, and was going to do the same thing with Syria (until Putin outmaneuvered him). He was okay with making Bush's tax cuts for the rich permanent, and loaded the budget process with people who favored austerity — the economic policy Europe had already been pursuing, and which has failed everywhere. He approved increased subsidies for fossil fuels. He tried desperately to renegotiate Bush's original timetable for pulling out of Iraq, and when the Iraqi government refused to give American troops indemnity from war crimes trials (that's what the deadline really was — and it tells you everything you need to know that we knew we would have to leave if they started tracking war crimes) beyond 2011, he suddenly turned around and pretended that 2011 — the deadline set by Bush — was somehow something he had been working for all along. He has been the one defending the NSA spying programs, and his legal team has been trying to keep the Justice Department from investigating — and also has prosecuted whistleblowers, and tried to keep citizens from being able to sue corporations for various and sundry violations of law. In nearly every way, he has been trying to push far-right-wing policy, and only the Republican unwillingness to let him accomplish anything has prevented him from doing more damage than Bush did in just about every way. (At one point, he VOLUNTEERED to decimate Social Security and Medicare. If the Republicans hadn't been mindlessly recalcitrant, we would have lost those programs.) Heck, even the ACA was basically used as an excuse to avoid doing anything about the financial meltdown — anyone who asked (as I did) when they were going to do something about that, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Gitmo, or anything else, was told that they couldn't possibly consider anything else while working on the ACA, which conveniently used up all the time the Democrats had a supermajority in the Senate. Then they spent the next two years carefully making sure to blame the Republican MINORITY for their own useless inability to do a thing. (And then they lost the House completely and had an even better excuse.)
The man is a sociopath and a warmonger. Yeah, the Republicans are racist creeps because they hate him for his skin color. But he has not been a good, or even a mediocre president; he is an awful person, and the other Democrats, who have permitted him to do all this without any significant criticism, are just as bad. The past six years have shown that Nader was right — Democrats really AREN'T any different from Republicans, except that they lie about feeling bad for doing bad things. (And now we're going to get Hillary Clinton — Barack Obama melted down and recast as a white woman — as the next Democratic presidential candidate, so that they can keep screwing us over if they win.) The national-level Democrats, frankly, are not worth voting for; they do whatever the Republicans want them to do, and are basically coasting on a reputation for leftism which ceased to have any grounding in reality thirty years ago. The state- and local-level Democrats are marginally better, but not by very much. It's time to admit that the party has outlived any vestige of utility to the average person and abandon it. Continuing to vote Democratic when in practice their policies are against you is every bit as stupid as voting for Republicans when THEIR policies are against you. We left-ish people need to get over our idiotic fear of voting for the Greens, because they're the only people who actually have any interest in doing anything at all about problems.
Jack 119p · 547 weeks ago