Tag Archives: 2012 Presidential Election

2016 Presidential Election, Alt-Right, American democracy, American Politics, Climate Change, Conservatives, Democracy, Democratic Party, Economics, Elections, Electoral Cynicism, Fear, Free speech, Health care, History, Immigration Reform, International Politics, Liberals, medical reform, Medicare, Obamacare, Peace, Plutocracy, Political scapegoats, Politics, President Barack Obama, Presidential History, Republican Party, Scandals, Science, Science-Denial, Scoiliosis, Social Policy, Society, U.S. Government, U.S. History, US Domestic Policy, US Economic Policy, US Foreign Policy, Voter Fraud, Voter Suppression, Voting, War, Washington D.C., White Nationalism

Trump the Bad Neighbor and Fighting His Lies

Leave a comment

Allow me to present a metaphor that I feel may help explain the way I look at the situation Americans currently face in a Trump Administration that lies more often, more frequently, and about more things than any Administration in US history.

You leave your house and walk down your driveway where your neighbor stops you and begins to talk. He tells you that the tree in your yard is not really a tree, but is actually a crashed alien escape pod that will open any day to reveal alien monsters who will kill and eat your family. You calmly point out that this is not true. You walk him over to the tree and inspect it with him. You show him pictures of other trees of the same species and type, and present detailed facts to prove that, it is indeed a tree. Your neighbor is not very convinced, and walks away. The next day, your neighbor is back, and he again says that the tree is a crashed alien escape pod. You are puzzled and exasperated, and while you don’t have the same enthusiasm, you again walk him through the overwhelming evidence that yes, it is just a tree. Your neighbor presents you with information that describes why your evidence doesn’t convince him. Your neighbor angrily stomps off, while you sigh and go to work; while at work, you read the information he presented you with and find that it is nonsensical ramblings that might even make you laugh if you did not know how serious your neighbor took it, or hear the echoes of fear-driven hatred and violence behind it.

The next day your neighbor’s back at the foot of your driveway. He again says that your tree is a crashed alien escape pod that will open any day to reveal alien monsters who will kill and eat your family. You are annoyed, and explain to him that the arguments he shared with you have no basis in fact and you feel he should discard them. He says that you are either a naïve tool who cannot detect that you are being lied to and hypnotized by some vague frightening entity (maybe it is a world-wide conspiracy, maybe it is ‘the media,’ maybe it is scientists, maybe it is minorities, maybe it is ‘elitists.’) or that you are actively in on ‘it,’ and you’re simply a liar. This is too much for you after the last few days; you explode and tell him off for being a hateful, stupid, disgusting bigot. He then smiles in triumph, “That’s how it is with you and people like you: you don’t have facts on your side, so you simply call me a racist or a bigot. You can’t beat me by argument, you sink to attacking me!” The debate you had been having has now become about name-calling and whether or not you crossed the line, and your initial point about your neighbor’s conspiratorial paranoia has been obscured; your neighbor leave and you head to work fuming and at the end of your patience with this person.

The next day, your neighbor is back at the foot of your driveway and ready to resume the fight, but you have no more stomach for this debate; you know that nothing you will say can possibly convince him, and that you will likely wind up screaming at him again, and that you’ll get nowhere. “Whatever,” you say, “Just leave me the hell alone,” and you go off to work. You don’t want to keep having these confrontations because they are negatively impacting your quality of life: you are angry and stressed all the time and you dread simply walking to the edge of your driveway because you expect that if you do, you’ll wind up in an endless, un-winnable argument. You become withdrawn and you cede more and more ground to your neighbor because you don’t want to have constant fights about what you consider to be simple good sense and objective reality. You and your neighbor were actually friends before he began spouting nonsensical lies, and you enjoyed talking about sports, movies, and pop culture, and you both genuinely care for each other’s families. Now you don’t even want to be in your yard if he’s outside because you don’t want to be around him; there are no more ‘safe’ topics because your neighbor thinks that you are stupid, naïve, and blind to reality while you think that he is being dangerously misled, believes in crackpot conspiracy theories, and that he has become a mean bully. You feel that the less you see him and have to deal with him, the better.

Other neighbors who are your friends and know that your tree is just a tree are puzzled because they no longer see you standing up for what they know is common sense and sanity. They know your tree is a tree, but now that you’ve ceded the argument to your neighbor, they’re not going to contradict your neighbor either. Your neighbor has convinced almost no one, but he has succeeded in muddying the water in the eyes of many in the neighborhood. People still don’t believe your neighbor when he comes out a few days later and tells the person who lives across-the-street that her swimming pool is filled with water poisoned by the government to turn swimmers homosexual, but you have already decided to stay away from your neighbor, and each day and with each ridiculous new assertion, fewer people are fighting back even against things that they know are demonstrably untrue. Objective reality in the neighborhood is no longer agreed upon, and people start to avoid one another because it is as if the neighborhood has been littered with invisible landmines, that will explode if someone walks over them. The neighborhood is now less safe, less civil, less sane, less kind, and tension is lurking everywhere, as people struggle daily in a figurative fight to keep from having a literal fight.

Forgive me for perhaps stretching this metaphor a bit far, but if Donald Trump is our bad neighbor, how do we fix that situation? How do we save our own national neighborhood from his lies and his hate? How do we stand up for objective reality, and build a safer, happier place for ourselves, our children, and their children?

Donald Trump has been president for just over three weeks, but he has already bombarded the nation with an avalanche of dishonesty and disinformation so thick and powerful that he has actually weakened the idea of objective reality! Even for someone such as myself who always looks to history for precedent to make sense of current events, Trump is moving in a direction that is unprecedented in our nation’s history. His assault on the truth and reality itself has grown out of a massive explosion of hyper-polarization unlike anything the nation has seen since directly before the American Civil War. Until relatively recently Republicans and Democrats agreed on many issues but disagreed and debated the ways to deal with those issues, but that all changed during the Barack Obama Administration. Under President Obama the two Parties no longer debated about what was the best plan to deal with problems like how to fix our health care system, our immigration system, or to counter global warming, instead Democrats continued to propose solutions to what they believed were serious problems, while Republicans offered no competing proposal because they denied that there was anything wrong with health care and immigration in the first place, and they claimed that global warming was a hoax. Conservatism and Republicanism became defined not by adherence to an ideology – not even to the old ‘small government,’ orthodoxy that was at the heart of Republicanism from 1980 to 2008 – but by opposition to President Obama and the Democratic Party.

The new Grand Old Party’s disdain for President Obama led to an atmosphere where literally nothing the President said or did – not even the legitimacy of the President himself – would be accepted at face value. This was seen in a Republican Party that refused to believe falling unemployment numbers in 2012 because those numbers were bad for Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s campaign, refused to believe numbers that violent crime was down, refused to give any credit to Barack Obama for approving the operation that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden, and refused to believe that neither the President nor Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was not personally to blame over the terrorist attack in Benghazi, Libya in 2012 that resulted in the death of 4 Americans. Republicans were so certain that Obama or Clinton did something wrong in Benghazi that they conducted 7-tax-payer-funded investigations into the event that cleared both President Obama and Secretary Clinton; when the GOP disliked that result, they refused to believe the findings of their own Congressional investigations.

But the real seed of the legendarily dishonest Trump Administration was in the racist ‘Birther’ lie that held that Barack Obama was not really the president of the United States because he was not born in Hawaii, in the USA, but in Kenya. While much of ‘Establishment’ Republicans, from Speaker of the House John Boehner to Mitt Romney and Republican 2008 presidential nominee John McCain loudly distanced themselves from the myth, a large part of the Republican and Conservative base refused to believe that Barack Obama was the legitimate president of the USA. One of the public faces of this racist lie was Donald Trump, who flirted with a presidential campaign in 2011-12 based almost entirely on the issue of ‘Birtherism.’ Trump publicly proclaimed that Obama was not born in Hawaii and that he had hired a team of investigators that was producing irrefutable evidence that Barack Obama was not an American. President Obama believed that he had successfully answered this nonsensical claim in 2008, and reluctantly released his ‘long form,’ birth certificate in 2011 to shut down the myth for good. Trump’s burgeoning campaign fell apart when his lie was exposed, but he never admitted that he had lied and that he was wrong. It was the first of the many lies of Donald Trump the politician, which have included lying about personally witnessing ‘thousands’ of Muslims celebrate the 9/11/2001 terror attacks, lying about why he would not release his tax returns, lying about his admission that the Birther Lie was a lie, lying about having publicly come out against the Iraq War, lying about his business career, and on and on and on.

Of course, President and President-Elect Trump did not abandon his lies when he won the election last November. Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 3 million votes, 66 million to 63 million, Trump is unable to accept that he received 3 million fewer votes than Clinton, so he lied (and continues to lie) that he actually won the popular vote because ‘3-5’ million people voted ‘illegally.’ He lied about the crowd at his inauguration and the weather that day; he lied about stepping down as the head of the Trump Organization and putting his assets in a blind trust. He lied that he would release his tax returns after the election, and that Mexico would pay for the wall. He has lied about his Muslim travel-ban. Donald Trump now represents the United States of America both at home and abroad, and not even a month into his Presidency there appears nothing too big or too small for him to lie about. It can be overwhelming to try to contend with an Administration that is spreading new falsehoods every day. Trump is using the strategy of the bad neighbor in the metaphor above: muddying the water around every single issue and challenging the validity of everything that he dislikes or disagrees with. This is so that the resistance to his authoritarian regime is disorganized and divided, and so that each group or individual trying to sift through the river of bullshit that Trump’s Administration spews 24 hours a day, 7 days a week cannot possibly keep up. Trying to address single lies, whether the biggest or the smallest, means that some are getting through every day because it just isn’t possible for any one person to stop them all.

But there is hope for those who will fight for truth and objective fact – there is a way forward. We have tools that the victims of past authoritarian regimes did not possess, and thanks to the Internet, we are more connected than ever before. If we work together we can stand against hatred, ignorance, dishonesty, fear mongering, cowardice, greed, and short-sightedness. Just because the task before us is difficult, and the way is unclear does not mean we will fail. The first thing we have to do is organize ourselves. It is almost impossible for one person, regardless of his or her intellect, to combat every one of Trump’s lies, so what we need to do is work together and organize strike teams. One team can fight his lies about the popular vote and push back his naked attempt at voter disenfranchisement; another team can fight back on lies about crime and criminal justice reform; another can work on his lies about immigration and anti-Muslim lies; another on digging up his tax returns and keeping track of his ties to foreign governments. Maybe we can’t fight Trump’s lies as individuals, but we have the advantage if we can organize together.

Besides mobilizing together, there are some other things that we can do that will help us save our democratic republic from an authoritarian coup.

1.) No matter how warranted it may be, we must never shout names and allow Trump and his lying followers to try to get us to act out, because the facts, evidence, and morality are all on our side. We should say ‘here’s proof that Trump lied’ to Trump’s followers instead of saying, ‘Trump and his orders are racist and stupid, so you are racist and stupid too!’ which will just lead to the old Conservative standby of ‘you called me a racist! That is just what Liberals do when they can’t win an argument!’ Fighting even the most egregious lies or hate speech by attacking someone who believes the lies will get us nowhere, since it will turn the debate into an argument about racism itself, leaving the initial topic completely forgotten in the dirt. You are now arguing about insults and not about Trump or his actions.

2.) Don’t take the bait if/when a Trump supporter says that you are biased and that you believe that President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, or some other Democrat or Liberal was/is perfect. This is another trick, and the Trump supporter is trying to bait you into listing your own (likely legitimate and fact-based) reservations about a Liberal politician, and whether it be Obama, Sanders, or anyone else, the topic will no longer be what Trump has done or said and why it is wrong; it is now about the flaws of Obama/Bernie/whomever. And if you think that the Trump supporter is reasonable and he/she will then say, ‘Well, I have reservations about Trump, too, and here they are,’ then you’re likely going to be disappointed with the result. You are now arguing about Obama/Bernie/a Liberal politician and not about Trump or his actions.

3.) We cannot have any more arguments about hypocrisy or alternate realities where we say things like ‘If Obama was as cozy with Russia, as Trump is, the Republicans in Congress would move to impeach him,’ because they don’t matter. Many of the biggest Trump supporters and Trump himself are hypocrites – in one of the alternate scenarios we should cease to use going forward, try to imagine Trump and his supporters’s reactions if Hillary Clinton had been the one who received 3 million fewer votes than Trump did, yet she won by the exact same numbers in the Electoral College – but it doesn’t matter. How the Republicans may have reacted to Obama or to Hillary doesn’t change the fact that now Trump and the GOP hold the power, and many of the highest-ranking Republicans, like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (as seen in his recent comments about how shocked and upset he is about Democratic obstruction in the Senate of late), either have a complete and total lack of self-awareness or have no shame or integrity. McConnell in particular is responsible for creating a new Senate operating procedure where the Senate Majority Party will no longer allow the president who is of the opposing Party to fulfill his/her Constitutional duty to appoint Justices to the Supreme Court. The new reality apparently is that Democratic presidents will be denied that duty if the Republicans hold the Senate and if he/she does not nominate the identical person that a Republican president would nominate. McConnell has done unprecedented and as yet unquantifiable damage to the Judicial Branch of government and in particular to the highest court in the land, and we’ll have to wait and see if that damage is fatal or not to the Judicial Branch as it currently exists. The point, however, is that the fact that McConnell is a hypocrite is not important right now, all that is important is stopping him and Donald Trump from stealing our democracy out from under us.

4.) No lie, no matter how big or small, can go unchallenged. We need to be organized well enough that we have people able to respond to any and all lies – if Donald Trump says it is 68 degrees outside and it is really 66, we need to counter it and share the truth.

5.) No more politeness. We must follow rule one and never engage in ad hominem attacks (no matter how justified we may be), but it is vital that we stand up and argue for what we believe in. We need to publicly respond to every Trump lie, but we also need to call out lies in our own lives, too. If a friend says that Trump actually won the popular vote, explain why that is untrue and wrong. If you hear a total stranger in the supermarket say that Barack Obama is a Muslim from Kenya, do not let it go unchallenged. Pointing out the lies of strangers is both uncomfortable and impolite, but we need to fight for the truth and for objective reality. I have always hated the phrase ‘history is written by the victor,’ because the Confederacy lost the Civil War but, after the period of Reconstruction ended in 1876, the North stood aside even as the South taught its students the ‘Lost Cause’ Mythology that lied about the War and its causes and helped perpetuate Jim Crow segregation for almost another century. We cannot allow history to be written by the person who yells the loudest simply because we find it too inconvenient to argue even when we know we are right.

6.) We must seek the acceptance of potential moderate Republicans who either did not vote for Trump or who voted for him just because he was not Hillary Clinton. The idea that moderate Republicans are going to support Democratic candidates or Liberal policies/ideas is unrealistic, but only the most committed Trump supporters believe in his core lies, like that 3-5 million people did vote illegally and that Trump is the true winner of the popular vote. Only the most committed Trump supporters agree with every word of Trump’s Executive Order on immigration. To protect the very idea of objective reality and honest governance, we are going to have to work alongside people who we disagree with on about 7 issues in 10, and even though we fought against them in November and will fight against them tomorrow to defend Medicare and Social Security, right now the overriding concern must be the marginalization and removal from power of a regime that does not view George Orwell’s masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four as a cautionary tale of the nightmare of unchecked authoritarianism, but as a blueprint from which to operate. We will never give up our desire to expand Medicare, achieve single-payer health care for all Americans, and fighting for a more Progressive, open, free, and inclusive society, but right now the most important battle is the one against a Trump White House that says 2 + 2 = 5.

I may come off as preachy or hyperbolic, but I assure you that I am sincere and I believe this is an incredibly important moment for the state of California, the nation, and even the world, and it is not the time to do nothing. Fortunately I am not the only one who has been motivated to act, and I have been humbled to watch and work alongside some of the most capable, empathetic, intelligent, generous, hard-working, dedicated, tireless, and just all-around incredible people that I have ever met or hope to meet. I am inspired every time I see the level of commitment from these people, the vast majority of whom are unpaid volunteers, and who have jobs and families, yet somehow find spare time that they use to fight to make the lives of others better. The majority of people in just my town, let alone the county, city, state, or nation will probably never know the sacrifices that are made every single day in their names.

Whether in my metaphorical neighborhood or in the real world, by encouraging people to stand up to this government, I know that I am asking them to take on potential risks in their personal and professional lives, and even asking people to do very uncomfortable or unnatural things like arguing with strangers if we hear them spreading lies. However, I vow to you that I will never, suggest that other people should risk anything if I am not also willing to pay the same price myself. I was born with the joint disease Arthrogryposis (which is coincidentally the New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski was mocked by Trump for having in December 2015), having in December 2015) and the spinal condition Scoliosis, and I have had several major spinal surgeries and spinal fusions throughout my life. I have not spent even one solid hour out of intense back pain since September 1998, and as such I must always weigh the impact any particular action might have on my back, but I will endure extreme agony to fight for our nation, for the truth, and for freedom. My most recent surgery took place during Barack Obama’s campaign for the Presidency in 2008, and I did phone banking for the then-Senator from my hospital bed. I am ready and willing to pay this price, and I hope many are willing to join me in this uncomfortable, inconvenient cause. And know that I will gladly stand and march and fight even for those who will do the same against me, and I’ll endure days of recovery time and of bitter pain for you, too. This is about more than Republicans and Democrats, and more than Right and Left. This is about right and wrong, and if you choose to defend and propagate lies and tyranny, history will not look at you very kindly, and if I live long enough, I’ll be the one to write it down so our children and their children will mark down those who stay seated and silent alongside those who fought to propagate dishonesty, corruption, and meanness, and not with those who stood against an autocrat and risked the consequences.

2016 Presidential Election, American Politics, Democratic Party, Elections, Electoral Cynicism, History, Liberals, Politics, President Barack Obama, President George W. Bush, Presidential History, Republican Party, U.S. Government, U.S. History, US Domestic Policy, US Economic Policy, Voting, Voting Rights Act of 1965

Bernie, Hillary, and the False Choice

Leave a comment

Few things make me angrier than being condescended to or patronized. Arguments and disagreements don’t bother me because I enjoy debating and I always try (though I admit that I do not always succeed) to keep an open mind; being patronized is different, and is sure to get under my skin. I have encountered a LOT of condescension this election cycle – more than I can ever remember experiencing before – and almost all of it has come from one side: the supporters of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. From Rolling Stone Magazine’s official endorsement of the Secretary last month to New York Times columnist and Liberal icon Paul Krugman, and to many others both within and outside of the Clinton Campaign, Bernie Sanders supporters, such as myself, are being branded as naïve idealists who don’t know what we’re doing. At best they treat us as unrealistic dreamers with good intentions, and at worst as either rampant sexists or unwitting dupes of some anti-Clinton conspiracy. But regardless of which insulting way these Hillary supporters are branding our support for Senator Sanders, the message is consistent: Hillary supporters ‘admire’ our idealism, but we are blind and must listen to them and support Hillary because they know what is best for us and for the nation.

I am a proud registered Democrat, and this November I will vote for the Democratic nominee regardless of whether it is my personal choice of Bernie, or if it is Hillary, but the arrogance of so many Hillary supporters towards Bernie’s supporters is making it harder and harder for me to have even a teaspoon’s worth of enthusiasm for her. Hillary does not seem to be running on an optimistic message, but instead on a cynical one, claiming that Bernie would be unelectable and, if/once she wins the Democratic nomination, that she is a far better choice than Republican frontrunner Donald Trump or his chief rival for the Grand Old Party’s nomination, Texas Senator Ted Cruz. That argument is logical, and Hillary is light years better than any Republican candidate, let alone the two clowns Trump and Cruz, but logic is not a great way to win elections, and it doesn’t bring people to the polls; we have a lot of evidence for that and we don’t need to look back very far.

In 2008 then Senator Barack Obama beat both Clinton and eventually Senator John McCain to win the presidency running on a message of hope and a change from the dreadful George W. Bush Administration. In the general election, Obama received 70 million popular votes (the most any candidate has received in US history), beating McCain by 10 million votes. In 2012, now President Obama had a lot of achievements that Liberals were excited about, but the only way to make sure that those achievements were not overturned was to help Obama win a second-term and defeat former Governor Mitt Romney. President Obama was reelected, but he received 5 million fewer votes than in 2008, winning 65 to 60 million. People want to vote for a candidate who they can get excited about, and while I believe that Hillary Clinton is amazingly intelligent, hardworking, and competent, none of that is very exciting for me.

The key example that Wenner and others like him consistently point to as the one that taught them the limits of idealism is the 1972 presidential election between incumbent President Richard Nixon, a Republican, and North Dakota Senator George McGovern for the Democrats. McGovern and his anti-Vietnam War platform excited many young Democrats, and because the 1968 election had been close, those young Democrats believed that they could beat Nixon with McGovern just four-years later. But those idealistic Democrats who believed that McGovern might win were proved shockingly wrong and were devastated when Nixon won reelection in one of the largest landslides in history, winning 49 of 50 states, getting 47 million popular votes to 29 million for McGovern (60.7% of the vote, and a victory of 18 million votes, which are both records that have not been equalled since, not even by Ronald Reagan in his own massive landslide over former VP Walter Mondale). Wenner, Krugman, and others like them believe that they learned a valuable lesson in 1972 about the kind of candidates that can win elections in America; I believe that they learned the wrong lesson.

It seems obvious to point this out, but 2016 is not 1972 and Bernie Sanders is not McGovern. Our country has seen different realignments and dealignments of political Parties from the 1790s to today, and 1972 was a huge realigning election. Most southern states had been staunchly Democratic from before the Civil War through the midpoint of the 20th century, but things had begun to change with Civil Rights. The Democratic Party expanded beyond just the South with Woodrow Wilson, and then when the New Deal Coalition formed around Franklin D. Roosevelt, it brought large amounts of northern Liberals and Blacks into the Party, and led to an uncomfortable alliance between the new arrivals and the old south. Racist whites had been able to keep the Democratic Party from getting too invested in Civil Rights, but the coalition began to fray as the Party naturally moved in that direction anyway, and when Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he figured it would be the final nail in the coffin of the ‘Solid South,’ being a large part of the Democratic Party. After signing the bill, he said ‘We just lost the south for a generation,’ and he was correct. But leaving the Democratic Party did not mean instantly joining the Republican Party, which many southerners still viewed with deep suspicion, so in 1968 the Solid South ran its own pro-segregation candidate in Alabama Governor George Wallace. Nixon won that close ’68 election against Wallace and Democratic Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, and had the south not defected from the Democratic Party, it is likely that Nixon would have lost. By 1972 the Solid South had indeed found a new home in the Republican Party, and their addition en masse greatly strengthened the Republican Party and weakened the Democrats, and while from 1932-1964 the Democrats had won every presidential election except for the popular war hero Dwight Eisenhower’s wins in 1952 and ’56, the Republican Party would win every presidential election from 1968-1988 except for Jimmy Carter’s win in 1976 (which was only possible due to voter anger over Watergate, Nixon’s resignation, and Ford’s pardon of Nixon, and even with all of that, the election was still close), with almost all the victories coming in gigantic landslides.

The south giving the Republican Party an era of dominance of the White House makes 1972 a poor comparison to 2016 as there is little evidence right now for an ongoing realignment. Bernie’s also a far better candidate today than McGovern was in ‘72. New technology and a well-run organization have gotten Bernie’s message and platform out to people who were either ignored or marginalized in 1972. Bernie’s also not running against an (oddly in retrospect) a popular incumbent, and if he wins the nomination, he would be running against either Trump or Cruz, neither of whom is as strong a candidate as Nixon in ‘72. These comparisons constitute a false choice designed to justify opposition to Bernie, and while I am a Bernie supporter I will readily admit there are legitimate reasons for someone to have doubts about him or to support someone else, but making an inaccurate connection between Bernie and McGovern, and 2016 and 1972 shouldn’t really qualify.

The condescension of the Clinton Campaign and its attempts to casually paint Bernie as a risky choice for either the Party or the nation should be beneath it. Providing weak and inaccurate analogies in order to marginalize Bernie and his supporters is hurting the Party, since it is unlikely to gain any votes for the Secretary or weaken Bernie’s Campaign, while it simultaneously engenders bitterness between supporters of the candidates who are going to have to coalesce in order to defeat the Republicans in November. Patronizing Bernie’s voters reeks of the kind of cynicism that turns people away from politics, and makes it harder to accomplish the kind of things that Liberals and Democrats both want to get done. Pushing people to throw up their hands in disgust and tune out the entire political process is a bad strategy for those who want to show that government can be useful and can do good; it is a victory for those who want to discredit government and democracy in general. Condescension feeds cynicism and leads to feelings of hopelessness, and good things are not accomplished by withdrawing into anger and despair: it is optimism and a sense of the possible that produces positive results. So stop talking down to us and telling us why we’re wrong or foolish to support Bernie, stop using ‘idealism,’ as a synonym for naïve, and tell us why you believe we should support Hillary, and we’ll tell you why we feel that you should support Bernie. If you want to have a productive conversation with us as equals and not wayward children, you’ll find us ready partners.

Abraham Lincoln, Afghanistan War, Health care, Historical Rankings of Presidents, Immigration Reform, Iran Deal, Iraq War, LGBT Rights, Nuclear Iran, Obamacare, President Barack Obama, President George W. Bush, Presidential History, U.S. History, US Domestic Policy, US Economic Policy, US Foreign Policy, War on Terror

Ranking the Greatness of Barack Obama

2 Comments

I disagree with President Obama on many issues, from the Trans Pacific Partnership and the overreach of the NSA and CIA to his vigorous prosecution of whistle blowers. I have no idea why our military is still in Afghanistan and keeps trying to get involved in a centuries-old civil war in the Muslim world between Sunni and Shia Muslims, and at the beginning of his Administration I thought the President was too quick to attempt to find bipartisan agreement between the Democratic and Republican Parties when the Republicans in congress had declared that their top priority was to guarantee that Barack Obama would be a one-term president, and set about trying to deny him at every turn out of fear that any sort of victory for the Obama would make him more popular and more likely to be re-elected in 2012. He made a big mistake and set a dangerous precedent by allowing the Grand Old Party to effectively hold the full faith and credit of the USA hostage by threatening to default on our national debt; while President Obama has learned from his mistake – when the GOP tried the same tactics in 2013, he called their bluff, and, by daring the Republican Party to shoot their hostage, he forced the Party’s eventual capitulation of the Republicans in congress – his initial mistake has left us with the Sequester that has resulted in lots of pain for the Americans who already have the least. But in spite of all my disagreements with the President, I think it is becoming more apparent by the day that we’re looking at one of the ten greatest presidents in the history of the United States, and the best in at least half a century.

I love to rank things, and as someone who is sort of an amateur historian, one of the many things I try to quantify is the greatness of the 43 men who have served as POTUS. The way I try to gauge our Commanders-in-Chief is to look at the condition of the USA when the president enters office and compare it to the situation on the day the president leaves office, and I primarily use the foreign, economic, and domestic states of affairs to judge the president’s success or failure. It is much harder to do this sort of thing today than it was even in the recent past, because politics has become so divisive that statistics that prove one’s argument are willingly ignored by one who feels differently. That makes it much easier to rank a historical president like Abraham Lincoln (my pick for best ever, by the way) because almost no one is arguing the basic facts that stand in his favor in the categories I mentioned before: only one month into his Administration, there were 11 states in open rebellion against the federal government, yet when he was assassinated one month into his second-term, the rebellion was over, Reconstruction had begun, slavery (its primary cause) had been extinguished first with his Emancipation Proclamation and then for good by Constitutional Amendment. Meanwhile the US economy had increased exponentially to deal with the war, most northern cities/population centers saw their economies and populations skyrocket and the US had decisively shown itself to be one of the world’s Great Powers. The contrast of the state of the United States when Lincoln took office and when he died is proof of how incredible he was.

If we use those same standards and compare the state of American foreign, economic, and domestic affairs on January 20th, 2009, the day that Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States, and compare it to today, with a year and a half still to go, the result is stunning. When President Obama succeeded President George W. Bush, the USA and the world were mired in the Great Recession (the worst global economic downturn since the Great Depression); the US was stuck in the two longest wars in American history with one of them, the Iraq War, being a completely unnecessary war based on a lie; Osama bin Laden – the mastermind of the terror attacks of 9/11/2001 that had in many ways to come to define Bush’s Presidency –  was still commanding Al Qaeda, having evaded Bush for 7 ½ years;  we had engaged in a torture program under Bush that, exemplified by the Abu Ghraib scandal and the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, badly tarnished America’s global reputation; Bush had driven up a huge deficits by slashing taxes for the rich in spite of the fact that when he succeeded President Bill Clinton in 2001 the government was actually running a surplus; the integrity and legitimacy of our democracy was greatly threatened by the controversial presidential election of 2000; and many things, from the ineptitude of the Bush Administration’s response to Hurricane Katrina to its inability to stop or slow down the recession had discredited government as a whole in the eyes of many Americans.

A lot of those issues are simply due to the fact that George W. Bush was one of the worst presidents of all-time (I have him 3rd worst, and at the bottom for all two-term presidents), but the wreckage W. left behind makes it easier to view the successful Administration of his successor. In January 2009 the unemployment rate was at 7.8 and it quickly grew to 10 % before the 2009 Stimulus fully kicked in, and today it sits at 5.3 %. When President Obama took office we still had 150,000 American troops fighting the unnecessary Iraq War, and when the last US troops left the nation in 2011, over 4,000 Americans had died fighting in that war with tens of thousands more wounded either physically or emotionally, and that does not even touch on the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed or wounded or the millions who lost their homes. And it was President Obama who gave the order to kill Osama bin Laden in 2011, doing in under 2 ½ years what Bush could not do in the 7 ½ years he was in office after 9/11. President Obama’s bailout of the American automotive industry was also a huge success, with GM and Chrysler paying back their loans way ahead of expectations. There has been a great leap forward in LGBT rights, which is all the more impressive when one remembers that part of the reason Bush won the 2004 election over John Kerry was by campaigning against gay marriage, with many states across the nation putting gay marriage bans on the ballot that same day, and seeing those bans pass with huge margins. And yet today, only 11-years after that contentious 2004 election, gay marriage is now legal in all 50-states and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell was repealed, allowing homosexuals to serve openly in the military for the first time.

One of the most amazing features of his Presidency has been that Barack Obama accomplished all the things I mentioned before with a dedicated Republican opposition to him that is one of the most sustained and vehement in US history. The Republicans have even abandoned their own bills when those bills were supported by President Obama, and they have ground Congress to a halt, leaving it incapable of doing almost anything. None of this has been an accident, as it has been the part of an almost nihilistic effort to deprive Obama of anything that might have been perceived as a victory for him, and while this was just as despicable early in Obama’s Administration as it is today, at least then the GOP was doing it as part of a plan to keep Obama from being re-elected in 2012. However, even though President Obama won big in his 2012 re-election bid, the Republican resistance has not weakened at all. Even when the President has gotten strong bi-partisan support for a bill, as he received with is proposal for comprehensive immigration reform (it received 67 votes in Congress), it failed in the House because Speaker John Boehner refused to bring the bill up for a vote in spite of the fact that the vocal support of many Republicans in the House seemed to show that the bill would pass and become law. Congress also killed multiple proposals from the Obama Administration to raise the national minimum wage to at least $10.10 an hour, and left without the help of Congress, President Obama took Executive Action on both issues to try to save as many immigrants from deportation as possible, while raising the minimum wage for all government employees and contractors to $10.10.

Perhaps the most lasting achievement of President Obama will be the Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act, more commonly known as ‘Obamacare,’ a name Republicans had coined in an effort to kill health care reform, just as they had successfully been able to do in 1993-94 when they labeled the Clinton Administration’s proposal ‘Hillarycare,’ and made it so unpopular, it fell apart before it even got a vote. However this time the GOP was unable to kill Obamacare (though it is not for lack of trying), and it is now the law of the land, expanding health care coverage to millions of Americans and ending pre-existing conditions. While many liberals (including myself) were upset that Obama tried to compromise with Republicans by not aiming for single-payer health care or at least propose a public insurance option, especially because his alterations to the plan – which actually made the plan almost identical to the health care reforms the Republican Party had championed in the fight against ‘Hillarycare’ as being the free market solution to universal health care – refused to get a single Republican vote in either House of Congress anyway. The Republicans in Congress desperately tried to kill Obamacare, but were unable to do so and so brought the law to the Supreme Court, which in a surprise 5-4 ruling (a surprise because the Court is currently divided 5-4 in favor of conservative, Republican-appointed justices) declared that the law was constitutional, and they made it a huge focus of the 2012 presidential election, but President Obama won re-election by 5 million votes over Republican nominee and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. And while Healthcare.gov got off to a rocky start and many states with Republican legislatures and governors have actively worked to sabotage the law at the expense of their own people, so far the law has been a huge success, has expanded health care to people who have never before been able to afford it, and has led to the smallest rise in health care costs in decades. However, the obvious success of the law has not led to any more Republican-controlled states expanding Medicaid to make sure that some of their poorest citizens can still get health care, purposefully hurting many of their own citizens, and Republicans tried again to kill the law at the Supreme Court based on a ludicrous technicality, but were again rebuffed, this time 6-3. All of it means that Obamacare is here to stay, and it is likely to be the crowning achievement of the Obama Presidency.

However, it is President Obama’s recent impact on the world stage that led me to write this article, and while his recent climate change agreement with China, and his starting to normalize relations with Cuba – something that a majority of Americans have been in favor since at least the end of the Cold War in 1991 – have been very impressive, the major story has been the initial agreement that his Administration has reached with Iran concerning its nuclear program. There is a lot to the tentative Iran deal, and it still has to make it through congress and past the hardliners in Iran, if the agreement works out, it will cement Obama’s legacy as the greatest president of at least the last half century and one of the best ever. The plain logic of the deal with Iran is hard to ignore, as it acknowledges that American, Israeli, and other leading nation state’s regimes are in nearly entire agreement that Iran possessing nuclear weapons is a threat that we can’t really live with. Once it is accepted as a truth that we will not allow Iran to attain nuclear weapons, the question then is how we stop that from happening, and the only realistic options are diplomacy (such as the deal the Obama Administration just worked out) or war. It is that simple, and the fact of the matter is that it has been true at least since the Bush Administration that we cannot just wipe out Iran’s nuclear capability in one blow, which means they would still retain the knowledge of how to build a bomb and have enough centrifuges and enough enriched uranium to build a bomb. We would then have the choice of either using our own nuclear weapons against Iran OR of waging a conventional war against the country, which would entail fighting a nation with around 80 million people who live in a nation the size of Alaska – which is contrasted to an Iraq we invaded in 2003 that had around 25 million people in a nation the size of California, and that war did NOT go well. There is almost no American support for a war with such a huge nation, as it would entail years and would result in the deaths of tens to hundreds of thousands and maybe even more in a war we would largely be fighting for the benefit of our ally Israel, a nation which has under 7 million people, meaning that if we do not choose to try to wipe the nation of the face of the earth with an instant nuclear strike, we would be doing most of the fighting and the dying in that war. I find it hard to imagine that the American people, upon learning the true size, scope, and difficulty of a war with Iran, would not swiftly turn on both the war and on Israel itself, for how many lives are we willing to sacrifice to support such a small nation? Anyone who peddles a potential third option outside of diplomacy or war is being dishonest, and it is easy to see how serious the opposition to this agreement is by seeing what the opponents are selling; most of them understand that there is no support for a huge war against Iran, so they are instead selling some nebulous ‘better deal,’ without any specifics except that if not for the ‘weak’ Obama Administration, we could get Iran to give up ALL of its nuclear program instead of dismantling almost all of it, agreeing to constant inspections, and making it so that the soonest they can produce a bomb is 10-15 years from now. The options are peace or war and there is no support for war, which means that the Obama Administration just got the best deal we could get, and if it makes it through Congress, it really will be a crowning historical achievement for Barack Obama.

There is still a year and a half to go in President Obama’s term, and anything can happen in that time, but he is on the cusp of locking up the position as the greatest US president of the last half-century, and with all that time left, he has a real chance to even pass Eisenhower and become the best President since Truman. With how divisive our politics are today, I know that there are many conservatives who earnestly believe that Barack Obama has been a horrible president (and some think he is actively working to hurt America, which is ridiculous, but no less of a real belief for being so) and who believe that Ronald Reagan is the single greatest president in American history, but I am not really writing this for them, as they mostly had their minds made up on the Obama Presidency before he even took office. I am not writing it for the person who asked me (with absolute sincerity) if I was ‘ready to admit’ that Obama was the ‘worst president since Jimmy Carter,’ and potentially the worst ever, less than six months into his first term in 2009. Instead, I am writing this for those who did not have their mind made up already, and who can appreciate the historical significance of a national health care plan, a saved economy, the expansion of LGBT rights, and the potential for a real and lasting peace. I am writing this for those who still have faith that government can have a positive role in making peoples’ lives better, and can see that President Obama has done a lot to restore that faith, which is a hell of an achievement when one remembers how little trust in our public institutions was left after a Bush Administration that lied us into a seemingly endless war, could do nothing to help the people devastated by Hurricane Katrina, and left amidst the greatest world-wide recession since the Great Depression. Neither government, nor a president, can do everything, and both governments and presidents can do bad things, but once in a while, when the right person comes along, he or she can restore your faith and make you remember why you had that faith to begin with. Barack Obama has done that, and his legacy will only grow because of it. He truly is one of the greatest of all-time.