Last January, the Bush-appointed ideologues John Roberts and Samuel Alito along with right-wingers chosen by Reagan and George H.W. Bush opened the floodgates to secret corporate donations that inundated Election 2010.
Obama's Mistakes
Obama's core political mistake may have been trying to stabilize a very sick patient the U.S. economy rather than applying more radical remedies. His stabilization approach largely worked, at least for those heavily invested in the stock markets which have rebounded to two-year highs.
Obama's stimulus plan and auto bailout also saved many jobs that would have been lost if he had adopted a laissez-faire approach.
His other option would have been to shake up an already badly shaken system by, say, nationalizing ailing Wall Street banks. He also could have challenged the Washington power structure by ordering investigations of Bush-43's war crimes and bringing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to prompt conclusions.
But that course of action would have risked a wider economic collapse, even worse joblessness and bitter conflicts between Obama and potent political/media interests in the power centers of Washington and New York. He would have faced even more accusations of overreaching.
Plus, the weak American Left would have provided little meaningful political support. More than likely, it would have continued to find something to criticize.
The media reality that Obama faced was what I encountered last month when I was driving late at night from upstate New York back to Washington. To stay awake, I sampled what was available on the AM dial and was stunned to discover how many different right-wing voices there were sneering at Obama and the liberals. I could find no channel that offered an alternative.
Even decades into this dangerous media imbalance, the Left mostly continues to ignore its messaging gap. Wealthy progressives spend some money on tracking what the Right is up to (i.e. Media Matters) and subsidizing non-controversial investigative journalism (i.e. ProPublica and the Center for Public Integrity), but they still do little to support real independent journalism that examines systemic problems or high-level crimes.
After Obama's election in 2008, the Left's most promising though flawed media effort, Air America Radio, was deemed expendable by wealthy progressives. Rather than spend the money and provide the management skills to improve Air America, they pulled the plug in January 2010, the same week of the Supreme Court's ruling on corporate donations. [See Consortiumnews.com's "US Democracy's End of the Road."]
Today's other progressive media operations remain fragile or limited.
MSNBC, which is owned by General Electric pending a sale to Comcast, has experimented with a liberal evening line-up (only after failing at everything else, including trying to out-fox Fox). But MSNBC could easily shut down its experiment if it senses a risk to the interests of its corporate parent, whether GE, a charter member of the military-industrial complex, or Comcast.
Faced with this paucity of independent or left-leaning media, many rank-and-file progressives have turned to the liberal-oriented irony of Comedy Central's Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who sponsored a massive rally for sanity on the National Mall last Saturday.
However, as many progressive writers have noted, Stewart and Colbert are primarily entertainers, not activists committed to changing the political/economic system.
So, Tuesday's congressional elections represented the latest wake-up call to American progressives that they must make a much bigger commitment to building media. However, they have shown a remarkable tenacity to hit the snooze button no matter how loud the alarm.
Instead of action, one can expect a number of articles from the Left about how Obama and the Democrats failed because they weren't leftist enough. Despite all the evidence, the Left remains obstinate against the need to reconsider what it's been doing for the past several decades.
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