PRIMARY OBAMA 2012 Makes It To The NY Times

I have been calling for a primary challenge for President Accountability almost since the corporate sell-out got elected.

Between the Wall Street bailouts, the Bernanke renomination, the 40% excise tax on people with employer-provided health care plans in order to fund his health care reforms, the corporate-driven education reforms, the demonization of teachers, the horrific mortgage relief program known as HAMP (as in "I got HAMPed and lost my house to foreclosure even though I did everything they said I should!) - the Obama failures and sell-outs go on and on...

For a while, I was just a leftie crank, but now more progressives are joining the cause:

WASHINGTON — President Obama’s compromise with Republicans on extending tax cuts for the wealthy, which his self-described progressive critics see as a profound betrayal, is bound to intensify a debate that has been bubbling up on liberal blogs and e-mail lists in recent weeks — whether or not the president who embodied “hope and change” in 2008 should face a primary challenge in 2012.

The idea seems to have little momentum for now, not least because there isn’t an obvious candidate, and because such a challenge would seem to have about as much chance of success as, say, a reality show about David Hasselhoff. That a primary is being openly discussed, though, reflects how fully Mr. Obama’s relationship with his party’s liberal activists has ruptured and the considerable confusion on the left over what to do about it.

Just last weekend, three liberal writers made the case for taking on Mr. Obama in 2012. Michael Lerner, longtime editor of Tikkun magazine, argued in The Washington Post that a primary represented a “real way to save the Obama presidency,” by forcing Mr. Obama to move leftward. Robert Kuttner, co-founder of The American Prospect and one of the party’s most scathing populist voices, issued a similar call on The Huffington Post, suggesting Iowa as the ideal incubator.

On the same site, Clarence B. Jones, a one-time confidant of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., suggested that liberals should break with Mr. Obama now, just as Dr. King and others did with Lyndon B. Johnson in 1968. “It is not easy to consider challenging the first African-American to be elected president of the United States,” Mr. Jones wrote. “But, regrettably, I believe the time has come to do this.”

Meanwhile, in Iowa, a group known as the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, originally founded to aid Democratic Congressional candidates in 2010, has started broadcasting an advertisement that shows Mr. Obama, in 2008, promising to reverse the tax cuts for the most affluent Americans. The group isn’t advocating a primary challenge just yet — but then, the choice of Iowa as a market seems intended to send a pretty clear warning to the White House.

“On issue after issue, when the public is on his side, this president just refuses to fight,” says Adam Green, the group’s co-founder. “At this point, the strategy is to shame him into fighting.”

I think some of these progressive groups are misreading Obama's essential character.

He is, at core, an establishment wanna-be who craves pats on the head from Republicans and Village Eliters and thinks throwing his progressive base and union supporters under the bus is the best way to achieve that acceptance from the Washington Elite.

So there's no shaming the guy into fighting - he doesn't want to fight for progressive values.

In fact, about the only thing I have seen him fight for with any intensity is corporate-driven education reform.

He threatened to veto any bill that cut his precious Race to the Top boondoggle and signed into law food stamp cuts rather than sacrifice even a dime of his signature corporate-friendly education reform program.

That's who he is, guys.

Wake up and smell the sell-out.

Let's PRIMARY OBAMA 2012.