Nader: Primary Obama

Not because he thinks anybody can knock off Obama in a primary, but just to remind Obama not to take liberals and progressives for granted:

Ralph Nader is convinced that Barack Obama will win reelection in 2012, but that won’t stop him from trying to organize a slate of Democrats in the coming months to challenge the president in party primaries next year.

Nader told POLITICO on Wednesday that he is working on bringing together about half a dozen presidential candidates who could “dramatically expand a robust discussion within the Democratic Party and among progressive voters across the country.” Each would focus on a specific issue where the far left says Obama hasn’t done enough, including the environment, labor and health care.

Nader, who has run for president five times as an independent or third party candidate — including his 2000 run on the Green ticket, which some Democrats say cost Al Gore the election — said that for next year, he believes an ideologically based, multi-candidate primary challenge would be the best way to pull Obama to the left ahead of the second term he believes Republicans will not be able to stop.

Obama is smug and abusive toward the base.

I think anything that makes him less smug and less abusive would be a good thing.

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.

Is There Anything Obama Won't Cave On To Republicans?

The Bush tax cut extension is the latest Obama cave-in.

Obama seems to have this obsessive need to be loved by Republicans.

He keeps caving to them on all kinds of things.

Maybe he should make believe they're teachers or union members.

I bet then he'd suddenly get some stomach to fight them.

I've send it before, I'll say it again:

This guy needs a 2012 primary challenge from the left.

45% Of Dems Want To See Obama Face A Primary Challenge

President Accountability likes to hold teachers accountable in schools, he's not so big on being held accountable himself.

But many Democrats want to see him face some accountability in 2012:

President Barack Obama emerges from a bruising midterm election with uncertain prospects for the next one in 2012, according to a new McClatchy-Marist poll.

Nearly half of his own base — 45 percent of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents — want someone to challenge him for the Democratic nomination, according to the poll.

And, assuming he wins re-nomination, barely more than 1 in 3 voters, or 36 percent, said they'll definitely vote for him, while nearly half, 48 percent, said they'll definitely vote against him.

...

His political problems start with his own base.

Among Democrats, 41 percent want someone to challenge Obama for the 2012 nomination, while 51 percent don't.

Moreover, a majority of Democratic-leaning independents, 56 percent, want him challenged, while 33 percent don't.

...

Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, 39 percent said they'd want any primary challenge to Obama to come from the left, and 40 percent said they'd want it to come from the right.

"He's in the murky middle," Miringoff said. "He's not energizing his base, nor is he convincing enough independents. Those numbers all reflect a real restlessness about him. This is not a pretty picture for him."

Therein lies the problem with Accountability and his administration.

He's a wishy-washy corporate centrist who has been tarred as socialist by the right and is increasingly seen as a sell-out by the left. And the middle doesn't like him either.

So who does like him?

Well, HE likes HIMSELF. He thinks he's doing a fabulous job if just other people would notice. When he does blame himself for something, it's that he hasn't done a good job communicating to people how successful he has been.

But that's all jive.

Unemployment is 9.6%. Corporate profits are at an all-time high but people are STILL being laid off and now the Village Elite is coming for Social Security cuts. Foreclosures, many fraudulent, are rising in many parts of the country and the Obama mortgage plan (HAMP) has added to the fiasco, not made things better. Wall Streeters are partying like it's 1989 again. The top 15% own 80% of the wealth in this country.

And Obama sees nothing wrong with any of this.

That is the problem with him.

I have been talking about a primary challenge for Obama for a long time now.

It could happen.

If not because of the economy, then perhaps because of Afghanistan.

Hell, I think it ought to happen just because of his corporate-friendly, pro-privatization policies on education.

Regardless of the reason, let's get this movement started.

PRIMARY OBAMA 2012.

Too True

From Political Wire:

"If Hillary gave up one of her balls and gave it to Obama, he'd have two."

-- James Carville, quoted by Politico.

The only people Obama relishes doing combat with is teachers and union members.

That's why it's time for this.

Soros Suggests 2012 Primary For Obama

The PRIMARY OBAMA 2012 movement might have just gotten some funding:

WASHINGTON -- At a private meeting on Tuesday afternoon, George Soros, a longtime supporter of progressive causes, voiced blunt criticism of the Obama administration, going so far as to suggest that Democratic donors direct their support somewhere other than the president.

The Hungarian-American financier was speaking to a small side gathering of donors who had convened in Washington D.C. for the annual gathering of the Democracy Alliance -- a formal community of well-funded, progressive-minded individuals and activists.

According to multiple sources with knowledge of his remarks, Soros told those in attendance that he is "used to fighting losing battles but doesn't like to lose without fighting."

"We have just lost this election, we need to draw a line," he said, according to several Democratic sources. "And if this president can't do what we need, it is time to start looking somewhere else."

Soros is exactly right.

With Obama all set to cave on the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and raise Social Security to 69, it is time to start looking somewhere else.

PRIMARY OBAMA 2012!

Pelosi May Be An Ally In The Fight Against Obama's Privatization Agenda For Schools

The news came yesterday that David Axelrod will be leaving the White House in the spring to begin overseeing the Obama 2012 re-election campaign.

They're already working on the messaging.

The Obama White House is laying blame for the previous two years of failures by blaming Rahm Emanuel.

And they're getting ready to appeal to independents and moderates by compromising on all sorts of liberal sacred cows like extending the Bush tax cuts for really rich people and raising the Social Security retirement age to 69.

No Child Left Behind is up for re-authorization and there has been all kinds of talk from the administration - including Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and President Obama himself - about all the groovy kinds of compromise we're going to have on education issues.

In fact, the president is expected to spend a portion of the SOTU address on education, calling for a longer school day/year, more charter schools, more rigorous teacher accountability measures based upon test scores and merit pay for teachers.

Now some of that agenda may very definitely appeal to members of the GOP and provide areas of compromise for Obama and Republicans.

But they will still need some Democrats to go along with that agenda.

And let us remember that House Dems just got slaughtered in the midterms and a lot of the Blue Dog Dems who would have been open to that kind of agenda are gone.

Many of the Dems who are left are of the more traditionally Democratic variety and may very well be open to AFT and NEA pressure to stop Obama from rolling the public education system any further in the direction of privatization than he already has.

In other words, Obama can be fought on this.

The unions, of course, have to stop letting Obama and Duncan frame these issues and push back HARD against the pro-charter, pro-testing nonsense the administration is pushing.

If they can do this, Dems in the House and Nancy Pelosi in particular, may become very big allies in the war against Obama's NCLB Jr. policies.

Dems know the White House hung them out to dry on many issues, making them take difficult votes on cap-and-trade and other issues that put many House members at risk in the midterms.

Many House members are going to look to stick it to Obama now that the midterms are over and the White House is already starting to look toward 2012. As Politico put it today:

Pelosi in particular may now be more of an obstacle than the “outstanding partner” Obama dubbed her on Friday. Her supporters in Congress want her to stand up to the president to protect the liberal causes they worry he’ll forsake in the interest of getting re-elected.

It is time to start working on our congresspeople to push back against the pro-privatization, pro-charter, pro-testing agenda that both Obama and Duncan are pushing and the demonization of teachers that Obama engages in periodically.

House members will be open to this and they will listen.

After all, the White House is already signaling through Axelrod's jumping in the spring to work on the 2012 campaign and through it's promises of compromises with the GOP that it is every man and woman for himself/herself now.

Let us remind our House members just who it is who can get out the vote in 2012 and just who it was who didn't work all that hard in 2010 - union members and teachers.

How Much More Will Progressives Take?

Glenn Greenwald and Cenk Uygur on why progressives MUST abandon Obama and the Democratic Party:



And I agree with Cenk - when Obama tries to cut Social Security benefits and raise the age of retirement to placate his banker overlords, it will be time to make open war on the Obama administration and the corporate Dems who back them as well as the Republicans.

Again I say, if you want change - real change - then PRIMARY OBAMA 2012.

If Not Feingold in 2012, Perhaps Dean?

Earlier today I speculated about a possible 2012 challenge to Obama by Russ Feingold.

Howard Dean is also a possibility says Roger Simon in Politico:

President Barack Obama sounded humble, almost meek, Wednesday at his news conference. “No one party will be able to dictate where we go from here,” he said. “We must find common ground.”

Howard Dean took a somewhat different tone on the phone with me the same day. “If Republicans think we’re going to slow the growth of Medicare and Medicaid and give tax cuts to those making a million dollars a year, we will wrap that around their necks and beat the hell out of them in 2012.”

Finding common ground with Republicans versus strangling and beating the hell out of Republicans — which one do you think an angry and dispirited Democratic Party might go for?

Both men were thinking about 2012, and Obama’s people have long been thinking — grimly — about Dean.

Some of the most influential members of Team Obama do not like or trust Dean and have long feared he would challenge Obama for the presidency if only given an opportunity.

Voters gave him that opportunity Tuesday, when Democrats got “shellacked” — Obama’s term — in the House and lost seats in the Senate.

...

While today it looks impossible that anyone would challenge Obama, in politics you have to prepare for the impossible. Russ Feingold, the Wisconsin senator who lost his reelection bid Tuesday, has been mentioned but denies interest. Michael Bloomberg’s name is sure to come up, but the New York mayor has no real base outside the New York press corps.

Dean is different. He has run for president before — albeit briefly — which is not essential but can be very helpful. He is still a hero to many young people for his pioneering use of the Internet as a political tool. Most important, he appeals to liberals for his dramatic challenge to Democrats to stop being wimps and rolling over for George W. Bush. In 2003, Dean said he represented “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party,” a call that might sound appealing now to liberals who fear Obama will compromise even further with Republicans. And Dean, a doctor, was a champion of the health care public option, which Obama abandoned.

But the big issue is compromise. Obama actually wants to get things done. Which means he has to compromise with Republicans and has to risk angering and losing his liberal base. That makes him vulnerable to attack from the left, which is where Dean now stands.

Could Dean really beat Obama? Probably not. But incumbent presidents forced to fend off real primary challenges get beaten up and weakened. (Jimmy Carter, who had to battle Ted Kennedy in 1980, then lost to Ronald Reagan.)

And Dean has no reason to like the Obama White House. He was denied a Cabinet position he felt he deserved. Republicans got seats in the Obama Cabinet, but the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee did not.

When I spoke to Dean Wednesday morning, he said he had foreseen the loss of the House but had kept his mouth shut because he “didn’t want to make headlines.” But the loss of the House is, he said, “to some extent a referendum on Obama.”

I prefer the Dean approach to the Obama approach.

Run, Howard, run.

Primary Obama 2012.

Run, Russ, Run!!!

Senator Russ Feingold, progressive from Wisconsin, lost his Senate race last night after 18 years in the Senate.

Feingold, one of the true progressives in the Democratic Party, has been an outspoken critic of the overseas wars, the Patriot Act, gov't by, for and of the corporations, and NCLB.

Now some political prognosticators wonder if he will run for president in 2012:

William Kristol: "Russ Feingold, now freed of his Senate responsibilities, is liberated to consider a Gene McCarthy-like run against the president in the 2012 primaries on an end-the-war platform -- pre-empting Howard Dean, who is undoubtedly also considering such an effort."

Interestingly, Ben Smith notes that at the conclusion of Feingold's concession speech, he says, "It's on to our next adventure. It's on to 2012! Forward!"

Granted, Kristol is a wingnut who wants to see an intraparty chellenge to weaken Obama for 2012, so we ought to take what he says about Dems with a grain of salt.

But I would LOVE to see Feingold run a primary against Obama.

Maybe then Obama wouldn't be so quick to take liberals, union members and teachers for granted.

Maybe then Obama would govern more progressively rather than govern as a corporatist.

So I say, run, Russ, run!!!

Feingold in 2012.

Primary Obama 2012.

Jerome Anderson, Progressive Blogfather, Declares Independence From Dems

This is EXACTLY what I have been feeling:

I've ended my hyper-partisan allegiance to the Democratic Party. In moving beyond the past decade's partisan affair with Democrats, I am ready for a real revolution to happen in this country.

It has got to happen over the next two years, and its going to take progressives, libertarians, tea partiers, coffee partiers, conservatives... everyone that is not part of the problem (the financial/political/military elite). Get radical, first by moving beyond attachment to a single party or a political identity. Radicalize them both, go independent; whatever, and if that's not you too, then get out of the way.

I have said this before, I will say it again.

I am DONE with the Democratic Party.

I WILL vote MY interest on economic and social issues.

Right now, with public schools under assault from Dems and Repubs and with teachers being bashed in every newspaper and on every TV station in the country, THE issue for me education.

I WILL ONLY support politicians who share my views on education policy.

This means no teacher bashing and no promotion of standardized tests for every grade in every subject in order to use those scores to "hold teachers accountable."

This means no privileging of charter schools over public schools. I can support politicians who approve of charters, but only if they also push for accountability measures for those charters

This means no support for politicians who promote Race to the Top competition programs designed to reward the HAVE'S, punish the HAVE NOT'S and further push public education toward privatization.

Let's get this movement started, folks!

It starts this Tuesday when bad Dems like Michael Bennet - bought and sold corporate whores supported by hedge fund criminals like Whitney Tilson - go down to defeat.

It continues in the two years we have before 2012 when we can let the Obama administration and both the Republican and Democratic Party establishment know that government by the bankers and hedge fund managers, for the bankers and hedge fund managers and of the bankers and hedge fund managers is NO LONGER ACCEPTABLE.

We are at a watershed moment.

You can feel it.

The two parties and the Washington Village Elite don't get it.

That's because they are corporate owned and corporate concerned.

But we KNOW what's going on.

We can see where the country is heading - a kind of Logan's Run circa 2012 where only the top 1% make any money and have any kind of life while the rest of us are left to fight for the leftovers - the leftover jobs, the leftover opportunities, the leftover wealth.

A 2012 where EVERY public entity will have been privatized and run for the benefit of our corporate masters, where workers will be laid off or fired at the drop of the hat, where homeowners will have their homes taken from them by the banks even when they DON'T have mortgages or HAVEN'T fallen behind on their bills, where pensions will be stolen, Social Security privatized and shitty health care mandated for ALL Americans regardless of whether they can afford to buy it or afford to use it.

That's where we're heading, regardless of whether the GOP wins on Tuesday or not.

So let's get off this train, get a train of our own and run these fuckers down with it - the politicians, the bankers, the hedge fund criminals/ed deformers like Whitney Tilson, and their apologists in the Washington Village Elite like Jonathan Alter and Tom Friedman.

Time To Primary Obama

From Political Wire:

Half of Democrats Think Obama Should Face Primary

An AP-Knowledge Networks poll finds that 47% of Democrats think Presidential Obama should be challenged for the 2012 Democratic presidential nomination while 51% say he should not be opposed.

"A real Democratic challenge to Obama seems unlikely at this stage and his re-election bid is a long way off. But the findings underscore how disenchanted his party has grown heading into the congressional elections Tuesday."

Tuesday should be a bloodbath for Democrats.

They deserve it.

They have done little in this Congress to help middle and working class people.

They bailed out more banks - no strings attached.

They allowed the Obama administration to run a mortgage relief program that has caused more foreclosures than it has alleviated.

They have passed a corporate-friendly health care reform bill that mandates 31 million new customers buy garbage private insurance while charging workers with employer-provided health insurance a 40% tax on their plans.

They have allowed this administration to turn education funding into an exercise in some Ayn Randian "Compete or Die" competition model so that only the most "reformy" of states get money.

They passed an inadequate stimulus that was used for garbage like Race to the Top instead of spending the money on a jobs and infrastructure program that actually put Americans to work and actually rebuilt the country's crumbling Third World infrastructure.

Unemployment stands at 9.5% right now - higher than before Obama took office and higher than Obama and the Dems said it would be if the stimulus was passed.

Working and middle class people all across this country are worried about their jobs, their homes, and their debts while the wealthy and the affluent party like it's 1925.

Of course a Republican Congress won't rectify any of this. They will make things worse, especially for working and middle class people and union members.

Cutting the deficit, as they are vowing to do, when GDP is barely rising and unemployment is holding steady near double digits is CRAZY.

But Obama and the Dems brought this on themselves.

Congressional Dems will pay for this on Tuesday.

Unfortunately Obama will not.

He deserves the most blame for this mess and given the findings of the AP-Ipsos poll, it seems a sizeable part of the Democratic Party feel the same way.

Somebody from the left SHOULD challenge him in 2012.

Let's get this movement started.

PRIMARY OBAMA 2012

Send the corporate whore back to Chicago where he can be chief of staff for Rahmbo.

Or maybe there's an opening at the Gates Foundation he can interview for.

Either way, time to send him packing in 2012.