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Doug Henwood’s weak dishonesty and Left irresponsibility

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Here’s a tweet from left intellectual Doug Henwood with the always popular Bush=Gore theme.

The link is to President Obama’s speech in Ohio on June 14 in which Obama said:

So, no, I don’t believe the government is the answer to all our problems. I don’t believe every regulation is smart or that every tax dollar is spent wisely. I don’t believe that we should be in the business of helping people who refuse to help themselves.

But I do share the belief of our first Republican president from my home state, Abraham Lincoln, that through government we should do together what we cannot do as well for ourselves.

That’s how we built this country – together. We constructed railroads and highways, the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge. We did those things together.

We sent my grandfather’s generation to college on the G.I. Bill together. We instituted a minimum wage and rules that protected people’s bank deposits together.

Together, we touched the surface of the moon, unlocked the mystery of the atom, connected the world through our own science and imagination. We haven’t done these things as Democrats or Republicans. We’ve done them as Americans.

As much as we might associate the G.I. Bill with Franklin Roosevelt or Medicare with Lyndon Johnson, it was a Republican, Lincoln, who launched the Trans-Continental Railroad, the National Academy of Sciences, land grant colleges.

It was a Republican, Eisenhower, who launched the Interstate Highway System and a new era of scientific research.

It was Nixon who created the Environmental Protection Agency; Reagan who worked with Democrats to save Social Security and who, by the way, raised taxes to help pay down an exploding deficit.

Yes, there have been fierce arguments throughout our history between both parties about the exact size and role of government, some honest disagreements. But in the decades after World War II there was a general consensus that the market couldn’t solve all of our problems on its own; that we needed certain investments to give hard-working Americans skills they needed to get a good job and entrepreneurs the platforms they needed to create good jobs; and we needed consumer protections that made American products safe and American markets sound.

Let’s look at that Doug Henwood summary again

Obama reveals his philosophy of government – downsizing, tax cuts, dereg

What a shoddy and dishonest “summary”. In fact, like many “left” critiques of Obama speeches it reads like it is based on TV pundit commentary.  But this is a critique that was wildly applauded by a number of “progressives” on Twitter who will go out and work on the guerrilla marketing campaign that there is no substantial difference between Romney and Obama, no point in getting involved in the election, that electoral politics is for chumps. That is they will be selling Sheldon Adelson’s message: stay home, let the mobilized right dominate even though they are a minority, you are wasting your time by getting involved.

If we had a “left” that would perhaps advocate for radical reform of the economic system that would be a great advance. Instead, we have a “left” that as Henwood’s colleague Bob Fitch once observed, has given up on socialism but has remained sectarian. It’s a left that doesn’t even pretend to be trying to change the world, but instead is satisfied with explaining how everyone else has got it wrong. And we have a left that has given up on actually trying to understand the world either, but is content with slogans and dogma.  Does Henwood really believe that Romney, Adelson, Rove, and Norquist are pushing an economic program that is the same as Obama’s? Does he think that FDR and Father Coughlin were both the same? If so, he doesn’t seem to be able to articulate an argument. Instead we are treated to snide twitter asides like one above or

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One could argue that saving the largest industrial union from total collapse (the UAW), re-animating the NLRB over bitter GOP obstruction, forcing Boeing to back off from destruction of the IAM, enforcing minimum wage laws, and so on were inadequate return for labor’s investment. But such an argument would require actually coming to grips with Obama’s record as President, something that is apparently as foreign an idea to “the left” as listening to his speech. What we have is a narrative in which Obama is a glib, fast-talking black figurehead for a “neoliberal” administration, worshiped by naive doltish supporters whose arguments are based on ignorance of correct dogma. In fact, the openly racist right wing theory that Barack Obama was propelled to office by guilty liberals in a kind of affirmative action election seems to have a lot of adherents on the “left”.

 For those committed to the narrative mere empirical data is irrelevant. Philosophers want to understand the world, “leftists” want to sneer at it. Here’s Henwood working the “Gore=Bush"  doctrine again using some impressive three card monte technique:

All good Democrats are busily hating on Bain Capital right now. What they’re forgetting is how many Bain-affiliated political contributions have gone to Democrats.

Plug the words “Bain Capital” into an OpenSecrets.org search and you learn that while Bain people have lovingly contributed to their former CEO’s presidential campaign, almost ¾ of their contributions to other candidates, 72% to be precise, have gone to Democrats. That’s a higher percentage to Dems than the AFL-CIO!

And among the top recipients are Dem headliners like Al Franken, Claire McCaskill, John Kerry, Mark Udall, Nancy Pelosi, and Sherrod Brown. They were also major contributors to the Democratic National Committee and the national Democratic party. There are very few Republican candidates on the OpenSecrets list, and no major gifts to the GOP itself.

This boils down to an argument that if you ignore the 70% of Bain affiliated donations that have poured into GOP super-PACs that don’t have a donation limit, 2/3 of the remaining money went to an assortment of Democrats – that is, 20% of Bain affiliated donations went to Democrats. This to support an article headlined ”Bain Loves Democrats“.  The narrative states that those bad neoliberal Democrats are essentially the same as Republicans, and only dim Obamabots who lack rigorous class analytics are deceived by that glib black guy. The data shows that Wall Street management is profoundly hostile to the Obama administration. The solution to this problem: cook the books by pretending 7/10 dollars are irrelevant! Bernie Madoff would be so proud.

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