Soon punk and disco brought on the Me generation and led us to Jimmy Carter's "malaise" and then to the rise of Ronny Raygun. When the left splintered, the right organized, putting in place a network of think tanks to take over. The conservatives drove the 80's until Clinton's centrism snuffed the spirit of the sixties in a 90's even as it appeared to be embracing it. It's the Economy Stupid led to deregulation and the crisis we are now coping with.
That led us to the neo-con emergence, and the stolen election of 2000, stolen by aggressive GOP tactics and Democratic incompetence.. With the help of various turncoats and oppositional media assets--like Fox and talk radio--they reenergized their movement by adopting 60's tactics while waging a culture war against 60's values.
Al Gore, now seen as an agent of climate change, blew that election and in the process blew up the power and personage of a political chameleon/wannabe messiah named Joseph Lieberman, a civil right activists turned sleazy opportunist and health care reform killer. He's still with us, like gum on a shoe, more obnoxious to the Democratic wing of the Democratic Pary than ever, as a new year begins.
Barack Obama's election seemed an anomaly, but clearly it was disgust with his predecessor that drove him from obscurity to the presidency. Obama's "outside-inside" strategy inspired millions of new voters. He organized, rallied new voters, used social networks and invoked change orieted slogans with more symbolism than substance.
But once in Office, the office took over, co-opting his populist inclinations and burying his grass roots movement in a miasma of paralyzing pragmatic centrism rationalized as the "politics of the possible.' Supporters became recipients of emails, not potential activists to lobby for his agenda. He allowed his "Army" to dissipate while he moved into using the Oval Office as a bully pulpit. His followers were demobilized as he gave speech after speech.
Obama realized that the Bush era had not ended in the bureaucracies or in the media and halls of Congress. To undercut its lingering impact, he moved right possibly to later move left. He embraced some of Bush's tough-guy national security boilerplate. He got along with Pentagon power by going along. Compromise began to become his mantra. Miniscule reforms were presented as great victories. Withdrawal from Iraq was delayed as was the closing of GITMO. He seemed to be on a short leash as the real power brokers checked and check mated initiatives.
Had he become a Bush 2? Many think so. Was he selling out or buying in? , Ross Douthat argues in the New YorkTimes that Obama is a knee-jerk liberal who believes in working within institutions for change. According to Douthat, reports Naked Capitalism, "that makes him"an odd bird who seems a Machiavellian willing to cut any deal juxtaposed with the soaring rhetoric of fairly ideological big government liberalism." The problem with institutions is that they rarely change without media scandals or outside pressure.
It was not that the he owed anything to "the left," once his radical preacher Rev Wright and one time buddy Bill Ayers had became albatrosses. He was now trying to appear non-partisan and non-ideological, but progressives read into his victory much more than was ever possible to achieve, much more than even he pledged. He took the liberals for granted with lip service, not major policy shifts.
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