In the end, Team Obama pulled out a
victory. The victory is a tribute to the best organized presidential
campaign in history, to a massive get out the vote effort, to
organized labor support, and to the campaign's messages of economic
fairness and inclusivenss. Democrats will increase very slightly
their non-filibuster-proof Senate majority. The House, as expected,
remains in the firm control of the Tea Party wing of the Republican
Party.
In an election held in the midst of a
struggling economy with high unemployment, the Republicans should
have easily won a majority in the Senate and likewise defeated the
incumbent President. They did not. All their Citizens United
cash and their voter suppression efforts failed to take down
President Obama and the Senate Democrats. Several of the extremist
Tea Party candidates for Senate lost their races. The Republican
portion of the non-white vote in the general election remained at
just 20% - what it was in 2008.
Whether Republicans learned anything
about the political downside of extremism on the national stage
remains to be seen. While the moderate corporate media and leading
Democrats are saying “surely the Republicans will stop being
obstructionist” and while some in the Republican party are
supporting a bipartisan approach - notably as evidenced by Romney's classy and
gracious concession speech and New Jersey Governor Christie's
response to President Obama's support for the hurricane-ravaged
Garden State – most of the public talk from the Republican
“pundits” remains the same: “Obama really has to do more to
reach across the aisle. It's his fault that we've had gridlock in
these miserable economic times.” They continue to be deluded
about the causes of the Great Recession and their own obstructionist
role in prolonging it. Most of their talk for the 2016 presdiential
campaign has been on how can they recapture the 20% of Hispanic
voters they've lost since W's years – not on how they can help
instead of hurt the economic recovery.
Will wiser heads prevail or will last
night's ranting of Donald Trump be the norm for Republicans? I would
like to say I'm cautiously optimistic but I am not yet there. Where
is the leadership going to come from in the Republican Party? As a
defeated candidate, Mitt Romney will certainly not be the leader of
the Republican Party any more than defeated candidate John McCain
was. Representative Boehner has shown zero ability to reign in the
Tea Party extremists in the House. We will likely continue to see
Paul-Ryan-Draconian budgets cutting up the social safety net,
increasing military spending, and continuing the advantages of the
wealthiest from that house of Congress. What about the Senate?
Well, thanks to Presidential term limits, Senator McConnell no
longer can have his number one goal be preventing another Obama term.
Maybe he should declare victory here – “See we did it, President
Obama will never have another term after this one.” But that
doesn't necessarily mean that McConnell will be any more willing to
compromise. The only sure way to prevent the Senate from obstructing
is to change the Senate rules on the filibuster – maybe requiring
55 votes instead of 60 to pass legislation (Senator Reid – please
note.)
Given this state of affairs, what will the next four years look
like and what has to be done to improve the country?
On the plus side, Obamacare survived,
we won't be getting a voucher system for Medicare, we won't be
privatizing Social Security, and we will be able to keep the
Republican Supreme Court majority at 5-4. The financial reforms of
Dodd-Frank will remain in place. We will be out of Afghanistan in
2014 and probably will not go to war with Iran.
The challenges will be to maintain the
social safety net for the neediest in our society – the Food Stamp
Program, the Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and Medicaid,
to improve educational opportunities, and to create jobs (including
rebuilding our transportation infrastructure) to get us out of the
Recession. None of this will be possible without increasing the
taxes on the wealthiest and without reducing wasteful and
unnecessary military expenditures.
More leadership from Obama and the
Democrats is needed on the environment and climate change. This is
the major long-term challenge for America – to lead rather
than lag on this issue which continues to worsen with time. That the
issue was virtually ignored by both campaigns was somewhat
understandable – politically this issue is yet to resonate with
Americans. That's why leadership is needed. If Hurricane Sandy was
“unprecedented” in 2012, it may well become the norm by 2020 if
nothing is done.
Where else is leadership needed?
Campaign finance reform plus a constitutional amendment to overturn
Citizens United and to
reassert Americans' right-to-vote are must's if we are to prevent
what one WBAI commentator rightly called the “desecration of
democracy” seen in this election. Real movement towards a
two-state Israel/Palestine solution in the Middle East would go a
long way to improve America's relations in the Middle East and
restore our moral ability to lead globally. It would also allow
Obama to earn his admittedly premature Nobel Peace Prize. Finally,
we have seen a serious erosion of civil liberties since 9/11. The
policies begun under Bush have continued under Obama. To point out
two of the most glaring examples: Guantanamo is still open and the
President has the right to indefinitely detain Americans without due
process. If the Tea Party really cares about “freedom”, they
should turn their attention here rather than to their freedom to not
have health care and to carry guns. As attributed to Benjamin
Franklin and as inscribed on a plaque in the stairwell at the Statue
of Liberty, “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a
little safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Links
Also see The Left Bank Cafe's four posts on Global Warming from August 2011: Link to the first of these posts.
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