Hope Didn’t Fail — Sanity Did

By Judith Gayle | Political Waves

If you believe everything you read, the Republicans are in charge of the country and the Democrats are yesterday’s news. George Bush the Younger, schlepping his book of revisionist history around the country, seems to think that brother Jeb should be in the running for the 2012 election. Given the line-up of potential candidates — Christocrat Mike Huckabee, carefully-coiffed Mormon businessman Mitt Romney, aging political hack Newt Gingrich and syntax-challenged Sarah Palin, who says she’ll run if no one else will — Jeb seems rational, sensible, in short, almost normal. That’s where it gets really scary, citizen! When a member of the Bush dynasty seems to provide the only sane Republican alternative, and the GOP itself is caught in a storm of in-fighting between the most ideologically radical of its members and its corporate contingent, the party seems to risk complete meltdown.

It’s likely that the Baggers will shift the GOP farther to the right, and with our Blue Dogs reduced by half, this will further polarize our lawmakers. That means trouble for all of us, of course. A lame duck Congress hobbled by the specter of coming personnel changes is already giving us a taste of the future. Literally hundreds of waiting bills, passed by the House, are being sniffed at by a newly radicalized Senate, noses turned up. Obstruction is more blatant by the day. Women’s equality took a hit this week as the Paycheck Fairness Act only garnered 58 of the needed 60 votes to bypass a Republican filibuster threat. It will now pass into the void where bills go to die, given the intent of the conservatives.

How do I know? Consider the enormity of Jon Kyl, Republican from Arizona, derailing the new START nuclear arms control treaty with Russia by denying it a vote in this session. This is a non-controversial bi-partisan treaty to downsize our nuclear footprint by reducing arsenals. It’s supported by all sane people including Kissinger and Colin Powell. Its failure would have serious national security ramifications, especially given our ongoing nuclear concerns about Iran. None of this moves Senator Kyle as he stage-manages another attempt to render Obama unable to govern. According to Adam Serwer at the Washington Post:

It’s not like Kyl doesn’t understand the implications here. Last year, when he was criticizing the administration for dragging their feet on renewing START, he fretted on the Senate floor that “[f]or the first time in 15 years, an extensive set of verification, notification, elimination and other confidence-building measures will expire.” Now that the administration has a plan for extending those measures, he’s about to let them expire.

Republican leaders have been willing to entertain the notion, common among their base, that the president himself is an existential threat to the country, leaving little room for cooperation. Voting on START means making a choice between indulging the reflexive hatred of their base or acting in the U.S.’s basic national security interests.

There’s the poison pill, my dears — “reflexive hatred” — and while I object to being the person most likely to channel Chicken Little in this last decade, it remains my duty to point out that this is troublesome indeed. Dangerously so and growing. A friend mentioned a Righty pass-around that he got in his in-box today, telling of Obama’s emotional problems, covered up by his loyal minions in order to protect his fragile hold on leadership. Now that the Republicans have ‘taken control’ once again, declared this anonymous missive, the President’s growing erraticism and inability to govern will increasingly be coming to light. We can all consider this information the prelude to impeachment.

Because I have a nose for bad mojo I couldn’t let this one lie. My friend no longer had the e-mail for analysis, so I Googled the phrase “Obama over his head” and got 12,300,000 results in 0.46 seconds. While stunning, this is not new propaganda — with the legitimacy of his pedigree and the color of his complexion in question since the beginning — compared to this tsunami of vitriol, the meme that the Republicans have complete control of Washington is like a brief summer shower of ego-speak. During Bush’s tenure, when reports of tantrums and depressions circulated, we lefties did our own armchair analysis, speculating on how it might be playing out in the Oval. But what was obviously clear to us during those years was that even if George went barking mad or Uncle Dick brought his gun to the office, blithely spraying friends and acquaintances with birdshot, the Republican machine would continue to grind without hesitation.

The Democrats have no such machine. The machine — built on the blood of corporate kills and the bones of capitalist schemers — belongs primarily to the other guys. Liberals can manage it for awhile and with difficulty, if history proves correct, but never become its beloved master. The machine has obstructed the Democrats’ ability to govern, as Obama has been thwarted at every turn, even in making the necessary appointments he needs to function efficiently. His attempts to bring us back toward some kind of ideological balance have been sidetracked by emergency contingencies and compromises. And although he has performed what Rolling Stone has called ‘miracles’ given the problems he inherited, one could also say that we have yet to see what his own authentic liberal administration might look like. When the Minority Speaker of the Senate announces that his one goal is to deny Obama another term — and our in-box begins to reflect a growing paranoia from the right, news of homegrown militias and imagined appointments with an anti-Muslim destiny in the heartland — we need to take that very, very seriously.

The needs of the people are not as important as beating Obama, even as the unemployment extensions may fall by the wayside despite analysis that indicates record levels of poverty without them? The needs of the nation are not as important as beating Obama, even as the newly defiant banking establishments find work-a-rounds for the laws reigning them in? The needs of the planet are not as important as beating Obama, so Israel can be encouraged to impede peace talks, petrochemicals can still be sucked from fragile ecosystems and we must all turn our eyes to Heaven rather than validate the scientific evaluations of global warming? The public, the Pentagon and 70 percent of military service members do not care whether they serve with gays or not, but the right will never allow DADT to fold. Obama is pushing hard to get the DREAM Act through the Senate in this short session but it seems all but impossible to move those xenophobic Righty votes. They can’t let him win anything or prove himself credible. They will do anything, literally, to take him out.

There’s a kind of in-breath going on politically at the moment. The question seems to be, will Obama assert himself now in progressive or centrist colors. If those colors aren’t decisively blue, I think there will be big trouble in his already-shaken base who need reassurance. Our president seems shaken as well, but he’s a man who understands audacity. We have two years, minimum, left with this man who is our last, best hope — a man who needs to feel us lift him and push him. The base needs to adopt that audacity now, push him hard to use his remaining power to buoy the progressive agenda. That is his natural tendency, if you strip away the madness of these politics. And, because it’s the right thing to do, we need to lay down our cynicism and have Obama’s back because there appears to be over 12 million targets drawn on it already and they mean business.

It’s time to step into our own sanity now, to cooperate and collaborate, create and visualize a vast layer of protection around the man and support for the movement we believe in. The spiritual attributes that we use to stabilize our own lives must be lent to level and stabilize our national picture. We need to speak truth, boldly and confidently. There is no inevitability ahead of us except that this is a time of purging away what no longer works. What does not work to good will falter. The future is for the moral, the ethical — the sane. We will create it, one hopeful, audacious and yes, sane, thought and deed at a time.