Obama's Rhetoric VS What Was Said to Our Great-Grandparents to Attract Their Votes..
 

What has changed since Woodrow Wilson said this, just the year before he was elected president as the democratic party candidate?:

Have we veered away from the sentiments and concerns of our great grandparents, and grand parents....why?

This was the reaction to high oil prices, just a generation ago:

The other day, responding to this:
http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthr...02#post2464402
(It made me wonder....later...where are Obama's sentiments, and those like the 45 senators who nearly came up with the votes to beat back the corporate/republican alliance, in circumstances so similar to those that exist today?
....)


I put the following together, in part of my response to roachboy:

....Wouldn't that require electing candidates who stood for proposals like the following one, 32 years ago, from Birch Byah, instead of the choices we have to vote for now? McCain is same old, same old, and Obama is a "uniter". Don't we really need someone to represent the great numbers of us who are against the hidden concentration of wealth and power that wants to remain hidden, is using Obama as a means to remain unaccountable, uninvestigated?
Isn't "#2" in Nader's six years old piece....an indictment of the Bear Stearns bailout?
Are we "sheeple", today? We used to exert our political power to successfully pressure congress to investigate the concentration of wealth and power in this country, at least every 20 years, in the first half of the 20th century. As recently as in 1976...there was still "tough talk", and 45 senate votes to accompany an attempt to take on "big oil".

In 1976, one presidential candidate, Birch Bayh, at least published a pamphlet calling for a renewed "Temporary National Economic Committee" investigation of monopoly and concentration of wealth and corporate control in the US.

By 2002....only Ralph Nader was still talking about....I had never even heard of the "monopoly investigations" of the 1937 "TNEC", until last year. It's records of it's 1937 to 1940 investigations of the wealthy are still sealed today.....why?

Why are we so complacent today....what has changed? Who influenced the change the most, was it the Reagan era? Will the demanding political nature of our recent ancestors, reflected in the actions and positions of those who they voted to send to congress and the white house, resurge as economic conditions worsen?

Has Obama said nearly enough, compared to Wilson and Roosevelt, and if he hasn't.....the comparisons show the economic conditions to justify speaking similar to Wilson and Roosevelt, but Obama has not...... what would influence Obama to suddenly talk openly and aggressively against the concentration of wealth and power that still persists, still divides, still acts as a negative force on "our way of life", and expecially on keeping a lid on actual, "beneficial to the masses", political discourse?

Here is Roosevelt, during his first campaign for the presidency, in 1932:
Where is Obama....where are we?

host...I really dont know what you are looking for.

I think Obama balances his progressive agenda with the reality of politics today. Its ridiculous to make comparisons to Woodrow Wilson.

he has introduced legislation that provides criminal sanctions for predatory or abusive mortgage lending practices and provides the first federal definition of mortgage fraud

he has proposed similar legislation to deal with credit card predatory lending practices

he has co-sponsored contracting reform to end the abuse of most no-bid contracts

he supports letting the Bush tax cuts for the top bracket expire in 2010 and support other corporate tax reform to eliminate many tax shelters in order to provide greater middle class tax relief

he has supported unions by opposing legislation that gives employers more opportunities to prevent works rights to organize.

he supports stronger enforceable labor and environment standards in trade agreements

he supports ending most tax relief for oil companies and promoting alternative energy r&d at an expanded level

he supports health care for all children and recognizes that as the most important first step towards universal health care

he has proposed or co-sponsored expanding the family medical leave act to cover workers caring for a wounded returning vet from Iraq

he supported or co-sponsored the 21st Century GI Bill

he has promoted changing the focus of affirmative action from race based to class or income based

he has supported full or expanded funding for community development programs and enhanced workforce retraining programs.....I could go on

and he also has acknowledged that he will have to deal with a $10 trillion national debt that will require a balancing act of implementing his priorities while attempting to reduce the debt....not an easy task for anyone.

_dux, take away effortless home price appreciation, cheap gasoline, and the ability to zip over, in a new SUV, to the suburban shopping mall to charge that gasoline and those shopping trip purchases on a plastic card with a credit balance, along with the loan payments on that SUV, rolled over to zero, time after time with "cash out refis".....then take away that "cashed out" home in a foreclosure, and it won't be long until many identify with this description:
Huey Long was an SOB. and he did the things described above, during the economic status quo that fostered the economic and power distribution described above.

The people trying to maintain and defend the status quo are big SOBs, too, and there are lots of them, with lots of lawyers, compared to a Huey Long. They also have the option of killing the political irritant.

"Nice", pragmatic, and "compromising", get you crumbs, dc_dux, because it's all about giving away only the appearance of compromise, not the substance. Obama is the appearance....Nader gave a "people's" answer to the Bear Stearns bailout question, Obama gave the status quo, at the expense of the people, answer.

Maybe if you could comprehend how bad it's going to get for lots and lots of formerly middle class Americans, and how quickly it will happen, you could better see what I want. Most have the bulk of their non-liquid assets in their home values, and in retirement funds. The wealthiest have only a small percentage trapped in those holdings.....the inequity in wealth distribution is going to get much worse.....and there is no left of center political element to counter the Obama "center" window dressing.....none!

There was in the 1930's....yet even then, those at the top were able to stuff the investigative revelations of the Temporary Committee, back in the box, information sealed for the rest of the century......

They concede crumbs, _dux, but you see it as "progress".

The unfortunate reality with presidents is that you have to wait and see. When I even made the suggestion that a candidate be under oath about their intended policies, I was nearly laughed out of the forum.

I'm concerned about a lot of what Obama may or amy not do. Obama has yet to say he opposes invading Iran. He voted to continue funding the Iraq War. He has yet to talk about the IRS or Fed. He has mentioned legalizing pot, but what about retroactively so we can get some room in prisons? What about the entire prison system?

We'll have to wait and see.

Great points....about forcing campaign promises to be sworn on an oath....and force is the right word, and about the prison system....I overlooked it, I am ashamed to say...

That's just it:
That is only true if we settle for that. We need to make demands on both candidates....force them out, on the record.

If the press was not dysfunctional....attending BBQ weekends at McCain's "cabin", providing "the best venue" for a despised, war criminal vice-president, as Russert was believed by Cheney's former press secretary, to provide for Cheney.....we might have already pinned Obama down on many issues:

Again, I come back to the eulogizing of Mr. Russert. It's bullshit:
...And this is "mainstream"....coming from the adopted son of a former president.....but discussing the need for radical confrontation, ala Huey Long, with the controlling corporate interests in this country, is verboten!

I'm glad you agree about requiring candidates to lay down their policy under oath. I can only imagine how simple it would have been to impeach Bush, who promised not to engage in nation building.

But I digress, demanding anything of Obama right now will at best secure a campaign promise, which still leaves us in the "wait and see" boat. Obama would probably not be interested in presenting campaign promises under oath unless there was a huge part of his constituency demanding it. Which there isn't.

The rhetoric I am listening to would be coming from Dennis Kucinich, who presented a mere 35 of the total of what Bush has done and is managing to garner attention, finally. While it's a futile move, you can tell he is a man of his words. I only wish that level of certainty could come with Obama.

will...a man of his words like Kucinich is great to have as a voice in the House of Representatives.

But, reallistically, do you honestly think he could get many of his progressive programs through Congress if he were president?

I take Obama at his word that he will balance his priorities with the realities of the budget and the support of the Congress.

I never had any illusions about Kucnich's odds of being president. I am simply saying it's nice to see a progressive actually stick to his guns. It's a shame that such behavior is so rare.

I dont think you will see it anytime soon in a president..the country and the Congress are too divided.

I think the best that progressives can hope for is a president who shares their ideals but accepts the fact that it is better to get half of loaf (not just crumbs) than be so rigid in his ideology and fight to the end for "all or nothing" and get nothing from a divided Congress.

I agree with this.

The neo-cons have controlled the framing of the discussion for so long that the public at large is not yet ready to accept the sorts of things that someone like host might push for, regardless of whether they are right or wrong.

Progressives, first need to get power. Then they need to do well in power. To follow DC's analogy they need to start baking their own loaves and those loaves need to be damn tasty.

Once the public starts to get turned onto the progressive bakery's output, they can start offering things like Clafoutis and Croissants.

Those who try to jump to esoteric too soon, before building trust, do so at their peril.

This is called being responsible and pragmatic.

The problem is, you don't have the luxury of the interminable amount of time, dc_dux and Charlatan, doing it "your way"....will take. Events will overtake the country, and Obama, unless he starts addressing what he will do to "shake things up", and "the man", Obama's elite sponsors, won't like that....won't like it at all.

I don't think Obama has it in him....and I'm not alone.....

"The answer" to solving this crisis won't be to move in the direction of the "Harvard men", or the men from Goldman Sachs, who helped cause it !
I think you are going to be surprised about how bad it gets. It would be nice to have a president who is on "our side", when the shit storm lets loose and the soup and unemployment insurance office lines extend for blocks.....

I think you are clueless as to how power is attained in the US. Attaining the role of President in this day and age would be an impossibility if someone were to try and implement all the programs (pogroms?) that you would like to see, host.

I stand by the fact that it is fine to rail against the wind if that's all you want to achieve. If you actually *want* to make change, you have to work within the system. Change does not happen overnight.

Yes, it's callled "responsible" and "pragmatic", but does it really work? Take Bob Rae. (...Please!) He was so pragmatic and responsible that he's now a Liberal. This is what the Confucians call "rectification of names." And how much progressiveness did Tony Blair's "pragmatism" and "responsibility" win him? He ended up as Bush's justly-despised lap dog. "Responsible" Democrat William J. Clinton was an ineffective president, whose lasting mark on the US was a semen stain.

Bob La Follette, the very archetype of the progressive politician, built his power and reputation by stubbornly sticking to a progressive agenda. FDR didn't sit around trying to prove himself in his first term. The New Deal came almost immediately. And what Tommy Douglas established in the beginning was that he could get his agenda through -- not someone else's.

La Follette was a great Senator, but he was a failed presidential candidate.

FDR's New Deal programs rightly benefited from the Great Depression. While many now are worried about the economy, the country is in a far different place and far more divided about the solutions than it was in 1932.

The Democrats will pick up seats in both houses of Congress...but it is the Senate that matters most.... where the Dems need to pick up at least nine seats to gain a true working majority (60+ to prevent filibuster by Repubs). Few predict that is likely. If it does happen, I would expect Obama to be more aggressive in pursuing his progressive agenda while still balancing budgetary contraints abd demonstrating a respect for the minority..something sorely missing for the last eight years..

I love and support how host focuses on what we should do. That voice needs to be heard...both in Congress with guys like Kucinich and Feingold and among the citizenry like host. I think the country would suffer if we lose those voices in either forum. They remind us of where we should be heading.

I prefer to focus on what we can do, giving the political climate of 2008.

well, it's pretty clear at the semantic level that the term "responsible" compresses the structure of a tautology into a little form when it's used to gloss the inside/outside the "system"---but let's assume that the united states does, despite all evidence, resemble a democratic regime in some way--where does "the system" start and stop in a context of popular sovereignty?

it also seems pretty clear--to me anyway--that in the larger scheme of things, we collectively are heading into one of those ideological problematiques in the course of which the underlying statements that shape other statements start to wobble--so if in the us we operate in a neoliberal context--which still has no name--and if one way of thinking about the present situation is as a crisis of neoliberalism itself--and if neoliberal assumptions function (because of repetition, say, unmarked repetition, say) are the kinds of statements that enable other statements (about tactics, say) to be enunciated---and if neoliberal assumptions are themselves increasingly THE problem (to the extent that most of the institutional and economic "issues" we collective are or are not facing)---it would follow (wouldn't it?) that we are surfing a kind of cognitive problem in addition to an ideological problem (there's really no difference between the two, cognitive and ideological)

let's say that the dominant discourse of american political life is itself entirely neoliberal--when you get down to it, most statements about, say, economic activity are passed through the metaphyics of markets and their glorious self- correcting capacities, their ultimate rationality the greatest good for the greatest number yes yes depending of course on who is doing the counting on what counts and what does not yes yes---let's say that it is that discourse itself which is in trouble. let's say that as the americans have functioned beneath the warm and fuzzy blanket of market ideology for the last 28 years or so, that among the outcomes of the institutional correlates of this ideology has been the development of patterns of capital flows that cannot be coherently regulated at the nation-state level.

let's say that we, collectively, are beginning to see the consequences of this.

let's say that we, collectively, have no way of talking about either cause or effect or remedy--not really.

let's say that the dominant political discourse in the united states is shaped almost entirely by neoliberal premises and that these premises are going to begin shaking. they already shake in other places, some of which are characterized by a plurality of dominant discourses. this would enable the naming of neoliberalism.

i am not sure that american political life at this particular juncture would allow for a coherent approach to these basic problems. if you behave "responsibly" at the talk talk talk level, you exclude yourself from being able to raise, much less address, fundamental problems. if you do not behave "responsibly" at the talk talk talk level, you erase yourself as a speaker.

what to do?
what to do?
crash and burn maybe?

it's a curious situation.

La Follette made his reputation as governor of Wisconsin where he was effective. What's is "failure" anyway?

That's not really true. You're telling me and host what can't be done. By your calculations, the progressive movement of the '20s or the New Deal would never have occurred because thinking outside the dominant political ideology leads to defeat. So what happened to FDR in '36?

The New Deal and FDR are interesting in that FDR was more or less like Obama ideologically, at least during the '32 campaign. Quite mainstream.

I agree with rb that we are now in a crisis of neo-liberalism. I don't know how he and his neo-liberal advisers will react to deepening of the crisis. We shall see.

Failure is getting 10-15% (?) of the vote for President....in large part because the population of Wisc did not reflect the more diverse population of the US. He couldnt sell the populist programs that worked in Wisc to the rest of the country.

The same holds true today. I dont think you will find a majority of Americans supporting the populist agenda that host proposes by any measure.

The key to winning a presidential election today is attracting the growing number of Independents who do not support either extreme. The key to governing effectively is maintaining that popular support.

Nope..I am just offering my opinion as a Congress watcher on what I think is achievable in an Obama first term, particularly with a fillbuster happy republican minority....again based on the facts that those populist positions do not have wide spread support among the electorate.

Time will tell if Obama is a man of his word, but we already know that generally speaking Democrats talk a good game while their actions are different.

Obama says this:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?p...Jnk&refer=home

Now another Democrat comes out of the closet regarding getting favorable treatment from Countrywide. Democrats talk about wanting to look out for people facing foreclosure today, but "yesterday" they were in bed with the very people they now say are responsible.

http://www.latimes.com/la-na-country...,2854727.story

And we are supposed to believe these men did not know about the benefit they got...wow!


Are these matters worthy of further investigation to determine the extent of Contrywide's influence in Washington? As long as Democrats control the agenda, it won't happen in my opinion. Will Obama stand up against his own party for his stated principles? I think the answer to that question will tell us where we are. "Money" in the context of Wison's quote is not the problem in my view, it is the pretense that some have that your "money" is corrupt but my "money is o.k. - "money" is "money", people can be honest or corrupt.

Ace...I really dont understand how Countrywide really has anything to do with Obama.

If Countrywide engaged in fraudlent practices that violated federal law, the DoJ should have been investigating it for the last few years. Several states have done so for violating state laws.

If any Senators recieved any special benefits from Countrywide, the Senate Ethics Comittee can examine that...and the current Republicans on that committee can initiate it now if they believe it merits investigation....it doesnt require approval from the Democrats on the Committee.

Here is what Obama said about Contrywide. He also said somethings about CEO compensation that is indirectly related.

Obama as the presumptive nominee of the Democratic party as now assumed a leadership role. He spoke out against Countrywide before these revelations, now he is dismissive of what could be very unethical or illegal behavior.

I don't know how to spell this out more simply. If you don't see what it has to do with Obama, there is nothing more I can do to help you at this point.

Obama said that Countrywide is responsible for a crisis in foreclosures. You post that Countrywide is behaving unethically and illegally.

If Countrywide acted in a potentially illegal manner, the Dept of Justice, not Congress, should investigate.

Even before his remarks on Countrywide, Obama introduced legislation last year in response to predatory lending practices in the housing finance market (STOP FRAUD act).

On the issue of CEO compensation, he is also preparing to sponsor legislation in the Senate (that passed in the House last year) that would give company shareholders a say in how much executives get paid by requiring corporations to have a nonbinding vote by shareholders on executive compensation packages.

I dont know what more you would expect him to do as one member of Congress.

And I dont know how to spell it our more simply than that.

I started a new thread on this topic. I expect corporations to try and have influence over lawmakers. Lawmakers will either be unethical or not. If a corporation or law maker violates the law, they have Constitutional rights and should be presumed innocent, however I favor investigation in this situation.

Who investigates the potentially unethical behavior of Congress? Please educate me.

Senate (or House) Ethics Committee....see my post in your other thread

(repeating myself here):
Do you want Democratics in the Senate to demand ethics investigations on the basis of every claim of Republican unethical behavior in liberal editorials....or would you prefer that such claims has some substance first?

And feel fee to ignore my post about Obama's bills to address predatory or fraudulent lending in the housing market and CEO compensation generally. :)

If you really want a response, here it is. The legislation in my view further shows that Obama does not get "it". In this case the legislation is on the fringe of what was really at the root cause of the housing crisis. I guess it sounds good to the people who will vote for him, but the legislation, if passed, will actually hurt the people he wants to help, further indicating that he does not get "it".

LOL....ok!

I guess your preference is to let abusive, misleading, and confusing lending practices continue with no criminal sanctions.

I agree it does not offer a comprehensive solution, but it does more than any Republican response to the housing financing crisis...and it certainly sends the right message.

What has McCain and his chief economic adviser, (Phill Gramm, former Senator and banking lobbyist) offered in the way of any proposals?

We already have laws in place protecting people against fraud and criminal behaviors in the mortgage and real estate industry.

What federal law currently defines mortgage fraud?

Can you please post the definition.

I am not going to go through a step by step explanation of the protections afforded mortgagees and purchasers of real estate against fraud. If you are interested you can start with a basic contracts course at a local junior college.

Basic contract law has nothing to do with federal criminal sanctions for mortgage fraud.

And as far as I know, that is because there is no federal definition of mortgage fraud in the US Code.

so let's see if we might go back to the op for a minute.
what it seems to me to be about, really, is more the shift in political discourse away from a posture of anything remotely like critique of the dominant capitalist order to one of repetition of its ideological underpinnings. host connects this to a new form of concentration of wealth, but doesn't make the next move and link that to, say, transformations in the ownership of the major media in the united states or the shift from print to radio to television as primary infotainment source--though in general the connections are easy enough to make.

seems to me that obama's campaign is already operating de facto at two levels: at the level of what obama actually says, which is interesting if dis-spiritingly tepid given the magnitude of the fiasco that he would be facing once he got into office---and at a sound-byte register, in the context of which politics is basically a matter of dueling memes.

it's hard to say if this large-scale shift in the posture of the press, which is linked to the nature of political discourse, is a function of the shift in dominant media first and then of a trend toward concentration of ownership, or if it's more complicated than that.

what seems pretty clear, though, is that you have the rise of neoliberal ideology...within that, the rise of the conservative media apparatus, unfolding since the middle 1970s. the rationale for deregulation and concentration of ownership begins to emerge in earnest under reagan. the conservative media apparatus is a product of its period of opposition under clinton. the bush period has in part been characterized by a convergence of the two. while the past 3 years have seen a moderate separation between the explicitly reactionary press (fox, for example) and the more "moderate" fellow-travellers of the post-2001 period, fact is that political debate remains dominated by neo-liberal characterizations of the economic sphere with a slight shift to the center in terms of "security" and its correlates and social questions (obviously this is too broad, but hey, what to do?)

obama's campaign at the meme-level operates within this space.
i think what he actually says is more interesting than the meme-space version would have you believe.

maybe this is why folk like ace prefer to see if, by throwing shit his way, whether something will stick.

i gave linking this back to the op a shot.
your turn.

*ducking out of the way of the flying shit!

carry on.

I graduated from a state school - All I want is to know if his word means anything. I have already made conclusions regarding main stream Democrats who have a track record.

roachboy, simply and briefly, while as recently as in the 1976 presidential campaigj, a democratic candidate, a senator, proposed in a campaign brochure, a new congressional investigation concerning concentration of corporate control, and private wealth, and relationships of these holders of wealth and control, as the TNEC did in 1938. By 2002, only third party politician Nader was still proposing this. Now we have Obama as the probable democratic nominee. Even though wealth and power are even more concentrated today than 32 years ago, with a trend towards increasing inequity as foreclosures rise and property values fall and unemployment rises, Obama is not going to mention TNEC or propose any investigation. We are left with two major party candidates...McCain, a right leaning militarist, and Obama, a center right militarist...and we'll get posts to read here that Obama is not a center right militarist....not a 'status qyo, window dressing offering from the PTB'....those posts will confirm for me that the PTB's consolidation of the media and 50 years of the republican mighty wurlitzer have succeeded in making a center right militarist seem like a left of center 'change agent'...nice work...and if you buy into 'Obama as change', I hope you're correct....

for what it's worth, i don't particularly think obama to be terribly promising as an Answer to much of anything--an alternative to another period of disastrous republican control--perhaps more curious and flexible than mc-cain would be in addressing what i take to be quite deep structural problems that will play out over the next few years. some of the initiatives he has outlined seem to me little more than necessary--doing something to make the american health care system less barbaric---but mostly, he offers a relatively bland variant on the same.

i don't know if i am right in my understanding of the shoals toward which the boat we float in is heading--i think i can see some aspects of the problems, but am sure i don't see others. i try to remain a bit optimistic, which is why i point to moves like beginning to dismantle the national security state as a way to counter at least the administrative and politial center of the soft authoritarian system into which we have drifted or been pushed, depending on your view of the history of the last 30 years. (personally, i think it's been a combination of the two.)

obama isn't even a social democrat. the issues you raise are mainstream social-democratic questions and your approach to them is as well--if the states was a pluralist context, this would be part of the actual debate rather than a position advanced in messageboards. because of the tightly controlled debate, because of its narrowness, because of the poverty of information that circulates within the mainstream infotainment empire, because soft authoritarian rule relies upon opinion management that uses the trappings of exchange to consolidate and extend its narrowly pitched worldview, it seems that we approach structural problems from a crippled position. the "choices" between candidates reflects this.

but i nonetheless would maintain the obvious: obama is infinitely preferable to another period of republican domination.

host.....do you think Obama's 6 point plan to "establish a 21st century regulatory system" is a step in the right direction to address part of the problem?
Granted, more details are needed...but that could come with input from a broader group of experts (as he proposed in the speech) than those within his inner circle who crafted this general proposal.

I dont know how you get comprehensive reform more quickly than that. You cant just impose it from above and expect to have wide spread support.

dc dux, I posted the reports that Obama had appointed Furman and thus rhe influence of Rubin as his economic advisor. I want a candidate who is not to the right of Eisenhower, in military policy, and I dont want a candidate who seems like crumbs offered by the PTB to the rest of us. I want a candidate who is the PTB's opposition, who wants to investigate their wealth concentrations and interconnected business and political relationships. What has changed since Bayh's 1976 TNEC campaign brochure is that those who were 10 years old or older in 1930 were only 56 years old or older and now the youngest are 88. The loss of a mass memory of the will, the way, and the results of investigating the PTB has died with those who lived through the depression years. Combined with 32 more years of subjection to the brainwashing of the PTB's mighty wurlitzer, the recognition that the PTB must be confronted and exposed by our elected officials has been wiped away. Obama is acceptable to the PTB....he talks like he is, and so does the PTB owned media.

Obama is a joke, he makes his supports look foolish!
 

Obama is a very busy man....carrying water for the PTB is a fulltime job. Now, today, as he failed this test of leadership...(last night, his aids said they had to study the FISA "reform" bill)....we have the real measure of the man. Another flash in the pan, an empty suit. The silence from his supporters on this forum is noted.

PTB? What's PTB?

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