krebscycle

First published in DailyKos June 2011. (minor edits in this version)

A Daily Kos diary implicitly asks the question – why don’t President Obama and other Democratic politicians say the things that Marcy Kaptur says – the kind of “down and dirty” attacks on the plutocracy that so many “progressives” want to hear? That kind of question is pretty common on progressive blogs, but it’s kind of a puzzle to me both why the answers are not obvious and what purpose is served by asking the question over and over. The answers are clear:

1. The don’t agree with Congresswoman Kaptur.
2. Their constituents would react negatively to that type of rhetoric.
3. Congresswoman Kaptur’s rhetoric doesn’t accomplish anything positive.

Barack Obama wrote –  on DailyKos in 2005 – a straight up and uncompromising rejection of confrontational class struggle politics. When people on DailyKos and other “left” sites say they are disappointed that President Obama does not talk like Marcy Kaptur and that his “hope and change” campaign led them to expect otherwise they are revealing a serious inability to distinguish reality from wishes. Obama made his approach abundantly clear in that diary and his books and in his campaign. “Progressive” fantasies that Huey Newton was hiding behind that Clark Kent exterior are as deluded as Fox news fantasies of the same thing. The voters chose a non-confrontational moderate who campaigned as a non-confrontational moderate. He didn’t offer to change the tone in DC to one where Democrats hit back harder, he offered to reach out across the aisles. You may not like that strategy, but you are in a small minority. In the 2007-2008 Democratic primaries, the left wing candidates didn’t break 10% in sum. Alan Grayson’s constituents dumped him for Tea Party wacknut. Progressive hero Russ Feingold lost – in Wisconsin. If you want more politicians to sound like Marcy Kaptur, figure out a way to convince your fellow Americans to vote for politicians who sound like Marcy Kaptur. Neither yelling at the President nor explaining that it’s all hopeless is going to get you there. American Leftists have isolated themselves into an echo chamber that seems to deafen them. According to a recent poll 15% of Democrats consider President Obama “too liberal” and 12% consider him “too conservative”. Does that seem like a constituency for sounding more like Marcy Kaptur or Professor Cornel West? If you think there is a class struggle constituency, go out and elect local officials and congress members who believe as you do. I’m sure Marcy Kaptur would like to have some company in the House – where she’s been able to author a big THREE laws since she was first elected in the 1980s. Barack Obama has done more to create manufacturing jobs in Toledo in two years than Congresswoman Kaptur has in 3 decades in office. I should also note that for people like me, you know compromising immoral centrists, who supported the Health Care Reform because it provided a huge expansion of health care to poor people and a start in taming insurance companies, Congresswoman Kaptur’s fiery rhetoric about banks has little appeal because she was willing to kill Health Care Reform and her opposition forced weakening of the bill. Anyone who wants to deny poor women access to cancer screening because she’s worried they might exercise their constitutional right to get an abortion has a long way to go to recover credibility with me – but of course, your priorities may be different.