President Obama a socialist finally paid off?
According to one new poll
from the Democracy Corps, a majority at 55 percent of likely voters
believe that the word "socialist" describes the president either "well"
or "very well."
Perhaps this is why The White House is starting a
coordinated campaign to push back against the perception that President
Barack Obama has an anti-business agenda.
White House chief of staff
Rahm Emanuel told Politico, "rather than recoiling against Obama,
business leaders should be grateful for his support on at least a
half-dozen counts."
get elected in America, both candidates and a political party have to
cozy up to the money sources. Since Reagan's successful war on organized
labor, taking the percentage of American workers represented by a union
from 25% when Reagan came into office in 1981 down to around 7% of the
private workforce today, there isn't the traditional labor money for
Democrats to rely on.
And because Obama has chosen to go the DLC
conserva-Dem route with many of his legislative initiatives, not pushing
for single-payer health care, not breaking up too-bit-to-fail banks,
and so on, his ability to raise money from an activated and excited base
has waned significantly. That leaves the big corporate monopolies, from
Wall Street to Wal-Mart to drug companies to defense contractors to the
big tech companies that manufacture in China and sell here.
It's too
late for the 2010 elections for Obama to move to the left, and thus
bring in his progressive base for fundraising, but there are many good
progressive candidates this year for the House and a few for the Senate,
so maybe it won't be so important what the President has done.
It will
be huge, though, in 2012, particularly now that the Supreme Court has
made transnational and foreign corporate monopolies "persons" with Bill
of Rights protections such as the ability to carpet bomb TV viewers with
political campaign ads.
We live, as the old Chinese curse goes, in
interesting times. A curse that's particularly appropriate as China is
poised to become the second largest and most powerful nation in the
world economically because, in part, of Clinton/Obama so-called "free
trade" policies.
Keep an eye on this election - it's going to tell us a
lot about both the future of the Democratic Party and the future of
democracy itself.
