krebscycle

Congresswoman Barbara Lee and David Sirota on the health care bill

Sirota this is a telling indictment of the health care law itself, strongly suggesting that it was constructed by the Obama administration – as some progressives argued – as a massive taxpayer-financed giveaway to private insurers like Wellpoint.

Congresswoman Lee: our vote tonight carries significance similar to the passage of the Civil Rights Act in that it fulfills a dream that has been elusive for far too long and for far too many Americans. “This bill is a victory not only for our constituents, but for all Americans because it will make us a stronger and healthier nation.[..] “By passing this ground breaking legislation, we have finally given the power back to the people. No longer will the insurance companies have a strangle hold on the American people and their health care.

Who is the progressive? Some say that those who agree with Congreswoman Lee are unprincipled, blindly loyal cult followers of the President, while those who agree with Sirota are morally superior, clear eyed, progressives. Au contraire, pardner, as we say here in Texas. At best, Sirota is just a tedious condescending crank with an axe to grind. Sirota has never liked Obama’s approach, never understood it, always thought it to be weak-kneed insufficiently macho and unnecessarily accomodationist. His current analysis is essentially the same thing he explainedto the hundreds of readers of The Nation in 2006.

However, he appears to be interested in fighting only for those changes that fit within the existing boundaries of what’s considered mainstream in Washington, instead of using his platform to redefine those boundaries.

Ok, that’s an argument. Not necessarily the most interesting or incisive one, but it’s an argument. However in the spirit of comradely constructive criticism, I’d like to offer the following advice.

1. Making the same argument for 4 years, over and over again in often wildly vitriolic language, becomes unbearably tedious and offensive. Those of us who disagree are not going to be persuaded by more invective. Here’s Sirota in December 2006 in an essay that can only be found on Google cache now:
   

   For progressives, this situation is perilous indeed. Obama is a candidate who has kept his record deliberately thin, who has risked almost nothing for the bigger movement, and in fact who has sometimes gone out of his way to reinforce dishonest stereotypes about the left. This is a man who has helped launch the Hamilton Project designed to undermine Democrats pushing for fairer trade deals. This is a man who belittled Paul Wellstone as merely a “gadfly.” This is a man who refused to lift a finger for Ned Lamont. Flocking to a candidate like that without demanding that he change only reinforces the damaging concept that our movement is a Seinfeld Movement about nothing. http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:gOa4CMya0D0J:www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sirota/the-ridiculousness-dang_b_35334.html+sirota+obama+laugh&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

   Ok, ok. We get it. At some point, however, maybe a “progressive” could come up with something more interesting than the same explanation of why Obama’s approach sux. How about a positive political program with action itemsthat do not depend on Obama or other people suddenly admitting you were right? The President follows a political approach you think is bad, we get it, but what the fuck do you propose that should be done? Otherwise you just keep presenting:

   the welled-up anger of what we might call professional disgruntleists: people on the left who “just knew” that Obama wasn’t all that he was cracked up to be–or, more pointedly, that he cracked himself up to be–and have taken each apostasy and sell out, on single-payer or the banks or the Copenhagen summit or what have you, as proof that they were right all along. http://democracyjournal.org/article2.php?ID=6760&limit=0&limit2=1500&page=1

2. Sirota’s analysis of what will work in American politics that events have shown to be, what we in Texas call, wrong. You can see what Sirota wants Obama to say by looking at his praise for Edwards.
   

   Now, in the last two weeks, Edwards has ratcheted up his People Party vs. Money Party campaign to a place that truly suggests his candidacy could be transformative. He’s moved away from merely the traditional checklisting of positions that we’ve gotten used to from candidates to start articulating a broader critique of the fundamental problem facing America in a way that few – if any – politicians really ever articulate. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sirota/edwards-obama-labor-will-_b_58551.html

   After the 2008 elections, you’d think it would be useful to consider why the Edwards style confrontational approach did not work. Obama’s clearly made the calculation that pounding on the rostrum, denouncing the sins of the rich, is not a winning strategy. And he’s President. So please don’t explain that in a different world, with a better media, more populist population, less wimpy bunch of liberals like me, Edwards would have lead the march of pitchfork wielding revolutionaries down K-street. Explain what can be done in our own world of sin.

3. Stop lying about Obama’s support. The following is an all too typical bit of fabrication from Sirota style “progressives”.
   

   Obama, meanwhile, is Wall Street’s darling, according to campaign finance reports. These contributions to both candidates come from industries that have a stake in preserving the NAFTA-style status quo – and, as anyone who has worked a day in politics knows, big campaign checks come with an expectation of complicity. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sirota/obama-clinton-the-nafta-k_b_72620.html

   This assertion is just shabbily dishonest. Here’s a scoop. New York City has a lot of Democrats and liberal Democrats who live in it. Financial services is still over 35% of the jobs in New York. So when thousands of clerks, secretaries, programmers, and janitors who work for Goldman-Sachs contribute to a political candidate, that does not mean he is captive to the management of Goldman-Sachs (who were bigger investors in Hillary Clinton’s campaign). So please shove this type of argument somewhere else.

4. Stop with the racist sounding condescension. When white liberals keeps explaining that an incredibly successful obviously brilliant top graduate of Harvard Law is “naive”, “stupid”, “feckless”, failing to understand something obvious to any chucklehead with a newspaper, or controlled by shadowy white people who work for him, they may not in their hearts be racist, but they sure sound like it.
5. Please stop pretending that nobody can disagree with you without being an unprincipled blind loyalist. I suggest you read Congresswoman Lee’s web site to see how a strong, principled, smart woman can both praise President Obama and the historic victories that his administration has brought us, and make principled stands against, for example, his policies in Afghanistan.

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