Left Strategy Highly Questionable

On the Internet recently I have run across a rising tide of criticisms from the left aimed at President Obama. Yes, they are frustrated with him, as I am over his lack of fight on very fundamental issues. I can go back to the single payor issue on health care through his collapse on the budget deal with the GOP leaving the tax cut for the rich etc. I am very fearful of the kind of deal he might cut with the GOP to raise the debt ceiling. He has absolutely no feel for the economic beating the American worker has been taking for the last two decades. Obama got to where he is by being nice to white men. That's what he knows how to do.

As I have written before Obama, is not a fighter. There is nothing in his life experience that would have taught him that a good hard tough fight is how we bring about change. Remember how he promised “change”? His major strategy was seducing the GOP to learn the love of compromise. I wont dwell on it. You have watched with horror as he got snookered on one issue after the other trying to just be nice to his adversaries. Look, the GOP conservatives just hate that Black man in the White House. If tomorrow he walked on water it would make absolutely no difference.

Perusing through the left oriented Web-sights I noticed a rising tide of, “we gotta do something to move this President so he starts to put up a real fight for workers rights.” One proposal was to run a candidate against him in a primary fight. If that didn’t move him then run a third party candidate. Ralph Nader was mentioned but I think he’s to old and tired. This sort of thinking reveals the frustration that Progressives have with Obama. I understand it.

However in face of the present relationship of political forces I do not think it serves a useful purpose. There is a critical danger that a strategy of attacking Obama from the left simply lends support to his extreme enemies on the right. Yes the ones who simply hate him no matter what, I hear some of my best friends saying. “So what are we suppose to do? Just sit here and watch as the right wing destroys all that we built in the last 100 years?”

I do not underestimate the dilemma. Permit me to use my long life experience to again go back to similar situation. First we need to agree that the threat from the far right could have very serious consequences for this country of ours. Back in the 1930s we had similar far right schemes that would dump the cost of the depression on the backs of the working class. We didn’t think that FDR was really the best fighter against the crazies on the right. (Our fear of fascism was critical to our thinking.)

We don’t characterize our present right wing extremists as fascist. A close analysis of what some of them are saying gets you very close. This is precisely why we need to be careful that our frustration with Obama doesn’t help elect Michelle Bachman. Yes I seriously believe that’s a possibility.

So what’s to do? The best example comes from Madison Wisconsin. Organized resistance against the attacks on the working people of America is the most effective way to pump some fighting spirit into our representatives in Washington as well as the State Capitals across the country. That’s what the Wisconsin workers are doing. Moaning about what Obama is doing wrong will be counterproductive. We need to demonstrate with action what are the right things to do.

Back in the 1930s we had intensive arguments about “the lessor evil problem.” Okay, I can deal with that. Is Obama a lessor evil than Bachman, Pawlenty, Romney etc. Yes of course he is. Is he an ideal candidate for the Progressive cause? No. BUT, He’s the best we got so we had better run with him or we could be very very sorry with the alternative. Comes November 2012 I don’t want to be writing a piece I have had to do a few times before about why progressives should not leave the country because of McCarthy, Nixon and yes, Reagan.