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Little
India was among the first publications in the mainstream or the ethnic
media to endorse Barack Obama’s quest for presidency, in February 2008, when he
was still a long shot for the Democratic Party’s nomination. We now share the
disappointment that so many who lent their support to his campaign have with
his stewardship of the country.
We were inspired by the idea of Barack for
President — by the historic character of his quest and the statement his
election would make about the American promise of equality. That quest is now
over and it alone is a greater national achievement than anything that any of
his opponents from either party offered. So, we — as we suspect most others who
embraced his candidacy — do not regret our choice. America is a better place,
not as a result of any actions or policies of Pres. Obama, but simply by the
fact of his election.
Our disappointment stems from the opportunities,
unforeseen in early 2008, he has frittered away for major social and economic transformations
of the country. The financial crisis and the national anxiety it engendered
offered a once-in-a-lifetime chance to reframe the contours of public policy,
reorient the terms of the post-Reagan debate on the role of government, and
advance the progressive agenda that Democrats have long advocated.
Instead, the Obama administration tempered its
political ambitions at the altar of bipartisanship in a laudable effort to
alter Washington’s divisive political culture. But once those efforts were spurned
by Republicans, his administration turned to narrow political and policy
pursuits through backroom deals with senators and congressmen, hoping to
leverage the large Democratic majorities in Congress. The public saw the
unseemly spectacle of frenzied horse-trading with lobbyists and politicians for
what it was — spineless, unprincipled and crass.
The political defeats the Democrats suffered in
the gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey as well as the senate race
in Massachusetts are not a repudiation of Pres. Obama’s radical policies, as
the right wing machine would have us believe. If anything, his policies were
overly timid and centrist, perhaps because that is who he truly is or wishes to
be positioned politically. Rather, the political defeats reflect the anger that
voters feel at the failure of Washington to deliver on jobs and the economy as
well as their disgust at the continued stranglehold that lobbyists and
self-serving politicians have over the broken system.
At this point, Obama has lost an historic
opportunity to fundamentally reconfigure the social contract and exacerbated
the public cynicism of government. He might yet redeem some political capital
for his agenda, however, by returning to his netroots by mobilizing his
millions of net volunteers so that political change is driven — as he was once
won’t to say, but has seemingly forgotten — from the bottom up. He needs to
spend less time fretting over his Washington hand and turn to reenergizing his
base to take on the calculated, destructive “politics of no” that the
Republicans and the Tea Party loonies have engendered. Their opposition cannot,
and should not, be ignored; it must be countered. If Obama fails to do so, he
is likely to discover himself working with a decidedly smaller deck in
Washington after the mid term elections in November.
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