What Happened To The "CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN?"

Does anyone besides me remember the night of the presidential election of 2008?  It seems like ages ago when Barack Obama walked out to address the huge crowd gathered in Grant Park in Chicago and once again promised to deliver "change we can believe in."  More remarkable to me than his inspiring speech was the look of joy, pride, and about-to-be-realized hope on the faces of those who came to hear him speak.  While watching the events of that populist pageant unfold, it came to me that I had not felt like that about a political figure in forty years.

 In 1968, a year away from being old enough to vote, I was an active participant in the presidential election campaign of Robert Kennedy.  But unlike so much during that horrible year, my dreams for our country were devastated by an assassin's bullets.  My dreams were not dead, but they were in a state of suspended animation for quite some time, until Barack Obama found a way to revive them.  Finally, after so many disappointments, after so many false progressive prophets, I was sure that it was finally our time.  After all, the Democratic Party scored huge gains in the Senate and House in the 2008 election, as well as winning back the presidency, and I was sure that we would now see the final touches applied to the unfinished work of the patriarchs of modern progressivism, Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson.  What began in the depths of the Great Depression as the New Deal, followed by the social reforms of Kennedy's New Frontier and Johnson's Great Society, would surely be completed by the progressive agenda laid out by Barack Obama in his campaign for the presidency.

But something kept gnawing at the back of my conscious mind.  Something that would not abate, even while so much of me was caught up in the joy of that incredible November night. I kept seeing this image of the all but forgotten "fringe" candidate of the progressive left, Ralph Nader. I remembered the evening prior to the beginning of the Democratic National Convention, when he was being interviewed by Jim Lehrer on PBS's The News Hour. By then, Nader was no longer taken seriously by most of the media, so his TV time had been reduced to an occasional footnote on PBS, or a late night conversation on CSPAN.  Both of which, for American pop culture, are the national media equivalence to a near-death experience.  

Lehrer, dropping his usual tranquil style, bored-in and challenged Nader to explain why anyone should still take his candidacy seriously. Without missing a beat, Nader fired back, "because there is no substantive difference between Obama and McCain, nor between the Democrats or the Republicans." Pressed by Jim Lehrer to justify that comment, Nader offered this simple fact: most of the money raised by both major parties during the campaign of 2008 came from the economic elites running America's manufacturing, insurance, banking, and, communications industries.  And those people like things just the way they are.  Raising his voice, as if that would make any more of us listen, Nader told Lehrer that the last thing the United States needed was another president and another Congress more beholden to the boardrooms of our country than to the living rooms.  He concluded with a prophetic warning that we would see no fundamental change in any of our policies or programs as long as corporations financed American political campaigns.

Now it looks as though he may have been right.  Last week Rahm Emanuel, President Obama's chief of staff, read the riot act to sixty progressive Democratic members of the House, who have been criticizing the president for seemingly backing off on support for the public option in the healthcare bill.  Rather than assuring the progressives that Obama is with them, Emanuel warned them that if they did not back off, all Democrats might lose some campaign funding for the 2010 election cycle.  So there it is, seven months into the Obama presidency and "Change we can believe in," is looking more like "change the fat cats can live with."

In an earlier rant I called for an amendment to the Constitution to eliminate private funding for all political campaigns.  I still believe that is ultimately the way to go, if we ever really want a government that represents the people instead of the stockholders.  But that is a long and arduous process and there may be an easier way.  Maybe it is time that we progressives do what many centrists have been doing for the last twenty years.  But instead of becoming political independents, like they did, perhaps we should organize our own political party.  Let the Blue Dogs have the Democratic Party, and let's see how well they do without us.  It takes a majority in both houses of Congress to pass a bill and instead of trying to appease those on the right to get a health reform bill, how about we stand our ground and fight this time.

Perhaps losing is not the worst thing that could happen. If at the end of the day there is no public option for health insurance, there is no plan to cover the forty million Americans without health insurance, there is no robust federal regulatory process to rein in the insurance companies, then who cares if a bill passes?  Better we lose fighting for what is right than let the corporate jackals and their political toadies win with a meaningless piece of legislation, gutted of any real reforms.  After all, this fight should be about morality and justice, not politics and money.  Here is an idea, let's make Ted Kennedy's forty-seven year struggle for a compassionate and caring society a reality, rather than just another political slogan. Wouldn't that be a more fitting tribute to his memory than a marble headstone in Arlington? Instead of making placards with swastikas on them, like the fools on the far right, let's write our representatives in Congress and the President and press for the kind of change we all voted for in November.