If Never Hillary. . . Then why wasn't there anyone else? Part II
In the first part of this article, I began to explore the issue that should be on the mouths of millions of Americans. The Democratic Party has been in power for eight years, yet apparently there was only ever one person capable of being its next leader. That's not the way it usually works in a party that claims to represent everyone. I postulated that it was not ONLY the corruption of the process that allowed Hillary Clinton to reach the top. The truth is that not only was she the natural choice for party leader, but the party as a whole HAS no other leaders.
If in 2010 President Obama's first midterm election the Blue Dog Democrats were sacrificed as a means to ensure party loyalty, Obama's treatment of the progressive wing of his party has been cold, but not as ruthless.
Clarification: your author is no lover of progressive causes such as universal health care, higher minimum wages, equal pay laws, affirmative action, etc. But so long as people like me demand to be heard against the 2-party system, we have to accept that far left actors like Jill Stein and Bernie Sanders have a place too.
When he first came to the attention of the national press, then State Sen. Barack Obama was considered a refreshing, inspiring, youthful vision of the hope within the Democratic Party. In an election coloured by sniping between the Democratic nominee John Kerry and Republican George Bush, two white patrician Yale men, Obama also represented a bold new style and optimism that was lacking in the image (if not the message) of his party:
"I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible."
Even those of us that oppose Obama and his administration must acknowledge that 12 years later it was still one of the greatest speeches ever delivered and it can't be taken away from him. The phrase "Audacity of Hope", attributed to that speech, will remain attached to Obama just like "New Frontier" to JFK and "I have a Dream" to MLK.
So Obama's speech propelled him to a crushing victory in the Illinois US Senate race of 2004, where he gained 70% of the vote against a weak (black) Republican Alan Keyes, and the rest is history. He was within four years able to propel himself into the US presidential primaries. His record in the US Senate is not very relevant except in the context of his scathing criticism of the Bush Administration. For instance in 2006 he boldly opposed raising America's debt limit during the Iraq War.
As the 2008 Presidential Election cycle was coming round, there was excitement on both sides, but in particular the Democrats. This was because the White House would be open, and VP Cheney would not be a candidate. The road seemed open for Hillary Clinton, while on the Republican side there was a plethora of candidates. It is important to touch on that cycle, as it bears a startling contrast to our current one. Let's observe the Democratic candidates, in brief, and their positions on two issues dividing the electorate:
The primary campaign was a bruising affair, with debates that clearly showed a contrast between the mainstream candidates (Clinton, Obama, Edwards) and the fringe (Gravel, Kucinich) and the herd thinned very tellingly. Biden, Dodd, Richardson, and Kucinich all withdrew in January 2008, most of them siding with Clinton. Gravel would ditch the party entirely in March 2008 and endorse a Libertarian Party candidate. Those that were able to pass the gauntlet into the primary season soon became targets of the respective Obama and Clinton front-running campaigns. Case in point, the crucial endorsement of Mexican American Bill Richardson was snatched away from Clinton by Obama, and this gained him large numbers of Mexican American and other Latino voters.
In the same cycle one of the last dominoes to fall on the Democratic side was former VP candidate John Edwards, who dropped out after the South Carolina primary. In May he endorsed Obama, becoming a major fuclrum that boosted him during his efforts to defeat Clinton. Interestingly, as Obama was making his VP pick in August Edwards' extramarital affair with Rielle Hunter began to catch up with him.In terms of appearances, it would have looked very bad for Obama to campaign with Edwards whilst his wife Elizabeth was battling what became terminal cancer. Which brings us to. . .
Creepy theory time: Had Edwards won the VP nod, his youthful and personable demeanor would have made him a natural candidate for 2012 or 2016 depending on the result in 2008. Instead Obama was forced to choose the even safer pick, establishment candidate Sen. Joe Biden, a man who is so gaffe-prone that he's become lovable for it. Obama would never have trusted Clinton as his running mate so he gave her the secretary of state position. This compromise meant that by 2016 the next natural selection for nominee among the party faithful would be Clinton, because Biden was too old, and many of them would probably agree that he's kind of an idiot (an old liberal male version of Sarah Palin). My suspicion is that Edwards' marital troubles were kept under wraps by reporters until the proper moment when he needed to be disqualified for office, and it was Clinton's revenge for his endorsement of Obama.
One of the reasons that Obama's "revolution" was bound to come to nothing was that from the outset he depended on a class of established politicians that thrived on the status quo. But could he be blamed? The House of Representatives was dominated by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, so Obama could not have possibly locked horns on many issues with the first female to take that position. Harry Reid, the Senate Majority leader, was also a valuable ally to have and a difficult enemy to fight. Ultimately these chamber leaders are not accountable to the nation as a whole, they are chosen through connections and seniority. This is especially true in the House as the Speaker and other leading caucus leaders are usually from seats that are considered solidly safe for that party. Republican Speaker Newt Gingrich hailed from rural northwest Georgia, while Pelosi is from the staunchly Democratic Marin County, California. The ultimate case was Tip O'Neill of Massachusetts who served as head of the Democratic caucus both as a minority leader and Speaker of the House from 1973-87, the only person to serve five complete terms as Speaker.
In the Senate, a President typically has to deal with legislators that are so strongly entrenched in their states, that once one resigns there can be a mad scramble to replace them, as when Governor Rod Blagojevich attempted to auction Obama's vacant seat in Illinois in 2009 and was caught red handed and later convicted for soliciting bribery. Obama has had the same Democratic leader in the Senate since taking office, Harry Reid, who was Majority Leader from 2007-14 and has served as minority leader since then.
Remarkably, the Democratic Congress functioned remarkably similarly under Bush and Obama as illustrated by how it approved the legislative acts that would become the Troubled Asset Relief Program that both presidents would support. After Obama was elected the two houses of Congress had ample cooperation on several issues. The Travel Promotion Act of 2009, which created a government agency to promote tourism. This act passed by a margin of 78-12 in the Senate and by an 416-1 vote in the House, with Ron Paul being the lone Nay vote.
The main sticking point under Obama in Congress was the Affordable Care Act, and aside from this issue where the Republicans vowed to make his life miserable, there was very little else to speak of in terms of eventful pieces of legislation that Obama had to struggle for between 2009 and 2011. As mentioned in the previous piece, it was this act that divided the Democrats. It did NOT constitute a showdown only between the GOP and Obama but between the Democratic leadership and both the progressive and conservative wings of the party.
In 2010 the Democrats went to bat in the first Obama Mid-term elections after Obamacare, and many believed they would do well. One indicator that they hoped would help them was that the Tea Party had moved GOP challenger candidates rightward. The best evidence of this was the Florida US Senate election of that year where incumbent Governor Charlie Crist ran for the Republican nomination and was stunned by the young insurgent Marco Rubio, a Tea Party favourite. The Democrats believed foolishly that the Republican vote would be divided between Rubio and Crist, who would be in effect a liberal Republican running as a pro-Obama independent. Instead of dividing the Republican vote, it was a dramatic show of Democratic weakness that year. Rubio did not just win, the result was: Rubio 48%, Crist 29%, and Democratic candidate Kendrick Meek with a mere 20%. So in a 3-way race the state's incumbent governor won less than a third of the vote against a fresh-faced right-wing Republican.
In November 2014 the Democratic Party lost control of the US Senate by dropping 9 seats in the body. Although essentially all of the seats lost were in states that have heavy conservative influences it should be noted that the seats in Arkansas the Democratic incumbent Mark Pryor had been reelected in 2008 without opposition, and the one lost in West Virginia had not elected a Republican since 1942.
In the House of Representatives, the Democrats also dropped 13 seats sinking to a caucus of 188 only eight years after rising to 257 in 2008. Another embarrassing fact was that the Democrats lost gubernatorial elections in three "safe" states: Illinois (Obama's home state), Maryland, and Massachusetts.
The result after six years of Obama was that the Republicans now control the Senate (54-44-1, Bernie Sanders being an "independent"), House (247-188), and governors' mansions (31-18-1, the lone independent being ex-Republican Bill Walker of Alaska).
The truth is that no Democrat will ever admit what is evident not just from the above description of the unraveling of the party's traditional voting public during the Obama years, but he has weakened the party to such a degree not seen in recent history. Unlike James Carville and Andy Borowitz (jokingly), I'm not predicting a permanent collapse of the Democrats the way they have for Republicans. But in certain states that were at one point Democratic strongholds such as Arkansas and West Virginia where is the future of the Democratic Party? How have they built a more inclusive America by conceding such large areas of it away? Only time will tell, because to tell the truth, the Democratic Party may be more corrupt, but the Republican Party is more inept. Stay BOLD if you can, readers.
Progress ahead. . . straight into a wall
 |
| In 2004 Barack Obama stole the show at the DNC from an unimpressive mix of speakers headlined by John Kerry. At the time he was on the progressive wing of the party. Today? Well, depends who you ask. -- Photo: CSPAN |
If in 2010 President Obama's first midterm election the Blue Dog Democrats were sacrificed as a means to ensure party loyalty, Obama's treatment of the progressive wing of his party has been cold, but not as ruthless.
Clarification: your author is no lover of progressive causes such as universal health care, higher minimum wages, equal pay laws, affirmative action, etc. But so long as people like me demand to be heard against the 2-party system, we have to accept that far left actors like Jill Stein and Bernie Sanders have a place too.
When he first came to the attention of the national press, then State Sen. Barack Obama was considered a refreshing, inspiring, youthful vision of the hope within the Democratic Party. In an election coloured by sniping between the Democratic nominee John Kerry and Republican George Bush, two white patrician Yale men, Obama also represented a bold new style and optimism that was lacking in the image (if not the message) of his party:
"I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story, that I owe a debt to all of those who came before me, and that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible."
Even those of us that oppose Obama and his administration must acknowledge that 12 years later it was still one of the greatest speeches ever delivered and it can't be taken away from him. The phrase "Audacity of Hope", attributed to that speech, will remain attached to Obama just like "New Frontier" to JFK and "I have a Dream" to MLK.
From strength to strength: Obama 2004-08
 |
| Line-up of most Democratic Party candidates in the 2008 US Presidential Election. |
As the 2008 Presidential Election cycle was coming round, there was excitement on both sides, but in particular the Democrats. This was because the White House would be open, and VP Cheney would not be a candidate. The road seemed open for Hillary Clinton, while on the Republican side there was a plethora of candidates. It is important to touch on that cycle, as it bears a startling contrast to our current one. Let's observe the Democratic candidates, in brief, and their positions on two issues dividing the electorate:
- Senator Barack Obama (Illinois) -- Progressive, anti-Iraq War. Against NAFTA at the time. In fact Obama's stance on NAFTA was startlingly like Trump's. Funny how that works!
- Senator Hillary Clinton (New York) -- Centrist, pro-Iraq War during the outset. Pro-NAFTA (denies it now).
- Senator Joseph Biden (Delaware) -- Centrist, pro-Iraq War during the outset. Pro-NAFTA.
- Former Sen. John Edwards (N. Carolina) -- Centrist, pro-Iraq War during the outset. Opposed NAFTA during his 2004 campaign.
- Former Gov. Mike Gravel (Alaska) -- Libertarian, stridently anti-Iraq War and against NAFTA.
- Sen. Chris Dodd (Connecticut) -- Centrist, claimed to be anti-Iraq War, Pro-NAFTA.
- Former Gov. Bill Richardson (New Mexico) -- Centrist, No concrete Iraq War position, stridently pro-NAFTA.
- US Rep. Dennis Kucinich (Ohio) -- Progressive, stridently anti-Iraq War and anti-NAFTA.
The primary campaign was a bruising affair, with debates that clearly showed a contrast between the mainstream candidates (Clinton, Obama, Edwards) and the fringe (Gravel, Kucinich) and the herd thinned very tellingly. Biden, Dodd, Richardson, and Kucinich all withdrew in January 2008, most of them siding with Clinton. Gravel would ditch the party entirely in March 2008 and endorse a Libertarian Party candidate. Those that were able to pass the gauntlet into the primary season soon became targets of the respective Obama and Clinton front-running campaigns. Case in point, the crucial endorsement of Mexican American Bill Richardson was snatched away from Clinton by Obama, and this gained him large numbers of Mexican American and other Latino voters.
The most ruthless survive
 |
US Sen. John Edwards (D-NC) was a major star in the Democratic Party during the 2008 primary season both as a candidate and as an endorsement. Then in the summer his career was destroyed. Hmm. |
Creepy theory time: Had Edwards won the VP nod, his youthful and personable demeanor would have made him a natural candidate for 2012 or 2016 depending on the result in 2008. Instead Obama was forced to choose the even safer pick, establishment candidate Sen. Joe Biden, a man who is so gaffe-prone that he's become lovable for it. Obama would never have trusted Clinton as his running mate so he gave her the secretary of state position. This compromise meant that by 2016 the next natural selection for nominee among the party faithful would be Clinton, because Biden was too old, and many of them would probably agree that he's kind of an idiot (an old liberal male version of Sarah Palin). My suspicion is that Edwards' marital troubles were kept under wraps by reporters until the proper moment when he needed to be disqualified for office, and it was Clinton's revenge for his endorsement of Obama.
Loose steering wheel: The Democratic Party of Obama, Reid, Pelosi, and Crist
 |
| House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has been the Democratic leader in the House since after the 2002 election, yet only was in control for four years of waste and failure, 2006-10. |
| Former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist began his career as a middle-of-the-road Republican, swerving right and left depending on the times. He has been a Democrat now since 2014. |
In the Senate, a President typically has to deal with legislators that are so strongly entrenched in their states, that once one resigns there can be a mad scramble to replace them, as when Governor Rod Blagojevich attempted to auction Obama's vacant seat in Illinois in 2009 and was caught red handed and later convicted for soliciting bribery. Obama has had the same Democratic leader in the Senate since taking office, Harry Reid, who was Majority Leader from 2007-14 and has served as minority leader since then.
Remarkably, the Democratic Congress functioned remarkably similarly under Bush and Obama as illustrated by how it approved the legislative acts that would become the Troubled Asset Relief Program that both presidents would support. After Obama was elected the two houses of Congress had ample cooperation on several issues. The Travel Promotion Act of 2009, which created a government agency to promote tourism. This act passed by a margin of 78-12 in the Senate and by an 416-1 vote in the House, with Ron Paul being the lone Nay vote.
The main sticking point under Obama in Congress was the Affordable Care Act, and aside from this issue where the Republicans vowed to make his life miserable, there was very little else to speak of in terms of eventful pieces of legislation that Obama had to struggle for between 2009 and 2011. As mentioned in the previous piece, it was this act that divided the Democrats. It did NOT constitute a showdown only between the GOP and Obama but between the Democratic leadership and both the progressive and conservative wings of the party.
 |
| Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid is retiring now, but he has been a leader in the Senate mostly due to his seniority and connections with law firm and casino lobbyists. |
In 2010 the Democrats went to bat in the first Obama Mid-term elections after Obamacare, and many believed they would do well. One indicator that they hoped would help them was that the Tea Party had moved GOP challenger candidates rightward. The best evidence of this was the Florida US Senate election of that year where incumbent Governor Charlie Crist ran for the Republican nomination and was stunned by the young insurgent Marco Rubio, a Tea Party favourite. The Democrats believed foolishly that the Republican vote would be divided between Rubio and Crist, who would be in effect a liberal Republican running as a pro-Obama independent. Instead of dividing the Republican vote, it was a dramatic show of Democratic weakness that year. Rubio did not just win, the result was: Rubio 48%, Crist 29%, and Democratic candidate Kendrick Meek with a mere 20%. So in a 3-way race the state's incumbent governor won less than a third of the vote against a fresh-faced right-wing Republican.
2012: Irrelevant phase
 |
| Obama ecstasy pills. Used here to show IRONY. (Artofobama.com) |
There are those that will say, what about Obama's great reelection campaign of 2012? there's no connection between that event and the rest of his party's history since 2008. Barack Obama received an easy opponent that year; the bland, uninspiring, fabulously rich Mitt Romney. That race was a symptom of how out of touch the Republicans have been, NOT how popular the Democrats are.
We should never forget, Mr. Obama's personal popularity is so disconnected from anything else going on in politics or anywhere else, that it should have it's own segment and it will. Obama, more so than any other politician, has employed pop culture and pop media as a means to further not only his agenda but his personal image to a degree that is so obviously doctored that it validates all of the tropes about establishment corporate media. Without a Barack Obama type, a figure of charming, suave, and cultured demeanor, the Democrats would have been left in the same type of situation as the Republicans of having wooden and disconnected throw-away politicians that nobody identifies with.
Second term, same attitude
The Obama era will never be properly assessed for the main theme of it: Eight years of complete refusal by the three branches of government to work for the public interest, and the president should be given the proper responsibility for that. The presidency has always had to work with the Congress, and it was no different for any other president besides Obama. Somehow with him there has been this tendency to blame obstructionism and racist behavior. The architect of Obama's key policy Paul Gruber has been caught on video claiming that the "lack of transparency is an advantage" when referring to the public's lack of attention to the monstrosity that he created: the Affordable Care Act.
2014-16: Own goals all the way
 |
| Pat Quinn was governor of Illinois after the Rod Blagojevich scandal, and he was elected officially in 2010, yet his popularity tanked such that in 2014 he was recognized as a failed governor. |
In the House of Representatives, the Democrats also dropped 13 seats sinking to a caucus of 188 only eight years after rising to 257 in 2008. Another embarrassing fact was that the Democrats lost gubernatorial elections in three "safe" states: Illinois (Obama's home state), Maryland, and Massachusetts.
The result after six years of Obama was that the Republicans now control the Senate (54-44-1, Bernie Sanders being an "independent"), House (247-188), and governors' mansions (31-18-1, the lone independent being ex-Republican Bill Walker of Alaska).
2016: The Barren Harvest of the Obama Years
So let's compare the field for the 2008 Democratic nomination with that of this year's:
- Former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. Also had served as US Senator from New York and First Lady of the USA.
- Sen. Bernard Sanders (Independent-Vermont), who registered as a Democrat only for the primary bid. Also had served as a congressman and Mayor Burlington.
- Former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley, also had served as Mayor of Baltimore.
- Former Gov. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, a former Republican who had also served as a US senator.
- Former US Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia. Also has served as Sec. of the Navy and Assistant Sec. of Defense under Ronald Reagan.
- Other candidates that had dropped out included Harvard Prof. Lawrence Lessig, running on a progressive platform in lieu of US Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
During the first debate on Oct. 13, 2015 in Las Vegas it was clear from the outset that the focus of all the attention would be on Clinton, with the only other foil being Sanders. The other three candidates were virtually ignored and it showed when Jim Webb fought repeatedly with CNN's debate moderator Anderson Cooper (see video above). Webb and Chafee saw the writing on the wall and dropped out long before the Iowa Caucus that started the primary season. So for the actual primary competition Clinton had only two competitors: Bernie Sanders, who was not even a Democrat for most of his life and was supported mostly by independents, and Martin O'Malley a candidate with virtually no chance of winning and stained by the stigma of the Baltimore Freddie Gray riots.
 |
| Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley was one of many viable Democratic candidates that did not |
The Democratic field for this presidential run was quite obviously devoid of real challengers to Hillary Clinton. None of the candidates besides Sanders was at the time a serving official. Also, it should be noted that a number of seemingly viable Democratic candidates decided to forego the race: Sen. Elizabeth Warren (MA), Sen. Sherrod Brown (OH), Gov. Andrew Cuomo (NY), Sen. Jeff Merkley (OR).
Well the fact is that, as is a theme on my opinion page, these may be elected officials but they are not leaders, and to be frank neither have been Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Here are the reasons there was no field of good options for Democratic nominee:
- As outlined above, the Obama Administration's bungling has caused the rest of the Dems to be punished as his whipping boy.
- The DNC, corporate media and more, as justifiably stated both by other Republicans, Trump, and Sanders supporters, totally threw the election for Clinton and had an interest in showing the Democratic primary to be competitive but inevitably destined for Hillary Clinton.
Comments
Post a Comment