Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Friday, December 12, 2008

Still in the Tank for Obama



And just so you know, I'm still hopeful.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Why so hopeful? He's not even President yet and he and his people are already saber-rattling. He snowed us.

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=atfd4sWMzlxI&refer=home

Dale Carrico said...

Snowed "us"? I'm considerably to the left of Obama as far as I can tell, but I knew exactly what he stood for, I knew exactly who I was voting for and cried with joy when he was elected, and I have been surprised by not a single decision he's made so far except to marvel from time to time at his consummate skill as a politician, especially in appropriating center-right rhetoric and strategies in the service of center-left possibilities. Of course, these are usually the very moves that have ineffectual ideologues most in a lather about Obama at the moment. I'm not sure that I would have gone the same route, but I might very well be wrong not to do so, and so far I am more impressed than appalled by Obama's efforts, which seem to me enormously pragmatic, but facilitative of the most progressive possible outcomes in a given circumstance and its given limitations and larger and longer-term entanglements.

The US has a lot to change for everyday people, a lot to atone for, and a lot of messes to clean up, as I'm sure you'll agree if you are a decent democratically-minded person. I expect Obama to make a go of all this, as well as to make the left wing of the possible more pragmatically possible than it has been my entire voting life time.

If you actually aren't a right-wing tool pathetically attempting to sow dissension in order to demoralize and undermine the overwhelming support for Obama, a truly historic and actually progressive, articulate, intelligent, decent, pragmatic Presidential Administration in a time of flabbergasting crisis, then the question is, why are you doing exactly what you would if you were such a right wing tool?

Stop whining about betrayal and "his people" (we the people are "his people," if you want it) make a case for different, more democratic policies. He has more of an ear for actually possible change demanded by an organized citizenry than any President you're likely to meet otherwise any time soon.

How complacent, how foolish, how self-marginalizing, how frankly bonkers it is to pick at tea leaves at a time like this, scouting for signs of compromise and betrayal and crypto-corporatism rather than educating, agitating, and organizing to push from the left a man of the left elected by a Nation hungry for change to the joy of a grateful world.

It's not about Obama. And it's not about you. Get you head out of your ass and keep your eye on the ball.

Oh, and if you really are just a right wing tool, sowing discord and nit-picking at an Administration orders of magnitude more competent and decent than anything your appetite for destruction, er, "movement" has ever or could ever offer, I'm hear to tell you, with every utterance, with every mis-step you reveal yourselves more palpably for what you are to a world that's had enough of your mean, scared, brainless, hypocritical, greedy crap. Learn the lesson, grow up, become part of the solution rather than the problem, re-invent your party into a force that can partner with people of good will to your left who really do share the world with you and with whom you really do have to come to some terms, peer-to-peer, just as we of the left have to come to terms with you as peers.

That's politics, the ongoing reconciliation of an ineradicable plurality of stakeholders to establish justice, ensure order, resist tyranny, provide security, promote general welfare, protect the scene of informed, nonduressed consent, and hence collaboratively substantiate freedom for ourselves and for posterity.