I started posting on HowieinSeattle in 11/04, following progressive American politics in the spirit of Howard Dean's effort to "Take Our Country Back." I decided to follow my heart and posted on seattleforbarackobama from 2/07 to 11/08.--"Howie Martin is the Abe Linkin' of progressive Seattle."--Michael Hood.
In the last few months President Obama’s approval rating has steadily climbed, while he’s maintained a reliable if small lead over Republican Mitt Romney. Notwithstanding today’s Gallup daily tracking poll; daily tracking polls are meaningless. In the CNN poll also released Monday, he leads Romney 52-43 percent.
The question no one can answer definitively is why Obama’s fortunes improved after his miserable summer. Now that the race is a one-on-one contest, the debate over that question will intensify.
I’m of the oft-stated opinion that the president’s feistier populist rhetoric has driven his improved standing in the polls (more on why I think that shortly). But along comes the New York Times’ Bill Keller, with almost no data, to tell me I’m wrong. Keller insists Obama is turning off independents by being what he calls “a plutocrat-bashing firebrand” and pushing “Robin Hood” politics like the Buffett Rule. The source for Keller’s certainty? A recent poll by Third Way, a group that exists expressly to pull the Democratic Party to the right. MORE...
Tuesday evening, Joan Walsh talked to Ed Shultz about the voter-recruitment tactics President Obama and Mitt Romney will likely adopt in the upcoming race. While Obama appeals to the middle class, she argued, the GOP candidate has a different audience: “Mitt Romney is the poster boy for the top 1 percent.”
On Monday, Salon editor-at-large Joan Walsh joined Ed Shultz to discuss the GOP’s continued denigration of Planned Parenthood. She argued that the organization “enjoys esteem and respect from most Americans… [ its employees and volunteers] have a health mission, and they carry it out well.”
In the end, though, the book made me an angry white woman. Reading about the many ways the Obamas strive to be good parents and partners, as well as president and First Lady, I found it even more disturbing that they’re treated so poorly, and depicted as so terribly “other,” by so many on the right. They are everything the right purports to believe in: The products of families who struggled to do right by them; people who studied and worked hard and played by the rules; good citizens and seemingly great parents. Even Michelle Obama’s own First Lady project, childhood obesity, focuses less on government than on how children and families can take responsibility and improve their own health. It’s what Republicans preach.
I’m not sure this is what she intended either, but Kantor’s book makes many of the president’s opponents seem like racist hypocrites. MORE...
I got to debate Jonathan Chait about his much-discussed New York magazine piece, “When Did Liberals Become So Unreasonable?” on “Hardball” Tuesday night. He’s aiming at President Obama’s liberal critics, but in fact his article proves that criticism is nothing new. Apparently, we’ve always been unreasonable, because Chait’s survey of Democratic presidents going back to FDR finds that the left has always found a reason to squawk. But he seems to think we’re particularly unreasonable when it comes to Obama. With Thanksgiving ahead, I found myself wondering whether liberals should be more grateful to the president. MORE...
Mike Papantonio appears on MSNBC's The Ed Show to discuss Eric Cantor's sudden change of heart regarding the Occupy Wall Street protestors -- a group that just a few days ago he referred to as a "mob."
Wow, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor is running a little scared now. Ten days ago, he denounced Occupy Wall Street as a “growing mob.” On Fox News Sunday, he softened his stance, agreeing “there is too much income disparity” and promising to work on getting the top 1 percent to create jobs and opportunity for the rest of us.
In fact, Cantor said Monday that he’s going to deliver his very own speech on income disparity “and how Republicans believe the government could help fix it” on Friday. A spokesman elaborated: Cantor will talk about on how Washington can assist “a single working mom…a small business owner..and how we make sure the people at the top stay there.” (SNIP) But what about the Democrats? Is it a given they’ll benefit from the organizing of OWS? I don’t think it’s a given, and I don’t think it should be. On MSNBC’s “The Ed Show” I had the honor to follow Van Jones, founder of the Rebuild the American Dream movement, who expressed progressives’ chagrin at being ignored by the Obama team, if not dismissed as “retarded,” over the last three years. OWS is very wary of being co-opted by Democrats, Jones noted, and he suggested a better outcome was for the Democratic Party to be co-opted by OWS. MORE...
What happens when a movement without leaders meets leaders without a movement? We're about to find out---I’m embarrassed to admit my first reaction to Occupy Wall Street was cynicism. Along with some other folks on Twitter when it began Sept. 17, I wondered aloud why it started on a Saturday, when Wall Street was quiet. I couldn’t find a list of its goals. Visiting New York a few days later, I walked along Wall Street in the rain trying to find protesters, but though there were barricades all along that dark canyon, and cops everywhere, nobody was protesting; I later saw a few dozen people among tents at Liberty Plaza, but by that time I was running to catch my plane home. MORE...
I find myself wondering if progressives are over-focused on Obama's perceived shortcomings when it comes to dealing with Republicans, because we likewise don't want to deal with the amoral political savagery of the enemy he faces. MORE...
His comments on public sector workers were more sympathetic than critical, even as he called for "shared sacrifice."---On MSNBC's "The Ed Show" last night, Sirius XM radio host Joe Madison and I listened to a short clip of President Obama in Decorah, Iowa, answering a teacher's question about the importance of collective bargaining rights, especially for public sector workers. In the clip, Obama acknowledged the role of unions in improving wages and conditions for all workers, but quickly pivoted to his time-honored appeals for "reform" and "shared sacrifice." Madison and I both criticized the president for failing to back public sector unions more fully and for acting as though unions hadn't already sacrificed.
Tuesday a reader pointed me to Obama's full remarks, and having read the whole transcript, I think my reaction was unfair.MORE...
Every time I try to get out of this discussion about whether liberals made the wrong choice in the 2008 Democratic primary, someone pulls me back in. The Nation's Ari Melber, a writer I like a lot, asked me my thoughts via Twitter Monday night. Even more intriguing, a Salon reader who criticized me regularly but always respectfully for my Obama skepticism in 2008 posted on Facebook that I had been right back then. OK, I live for being told I was right -- but I have no way to know whether Hillary Clinton would have been a tougher Democratic president than Barack Obama. MORE...
I got the most criticism from people who think the left must band together behind Obama, but I also got some from folks who think I'm too easy on the president. Even my friend (and I mean that, he's a friend!) Glenn Greenwald cited me as an example of a progressive who, despite reservations about Obama, was "vowing to support his re-election." I'm in awe of Glenn's record of accuracy; still, that's not exactly what I said (though I admit it's close). Here's what I wrote, emphasis mine tonight:
Barring something horrific, I will support President Obama in 2012. (And I read Glenn Greenwald daily, so I know there's a digest of fairly horrific things taking place in the realm of civil liberties, on top of the regular cave-ins to corporate America.) I have explained before: I think a primary race would be distracting and destructive to progressive politics. It would tear the Democratic Party apart in ways that would make that unpleasant 2008 bickering look like a love-in. As the great Michael Harrington used to say, when it comes to electoral politics, I stand on "the left wing of the possible," and that's about where I believe Obama is. So I expect to stand with Obama next year.MORE...
I came to the end of "Age of Fracture" with the same feeling I had finishing "Stayin' Alive" and "Winner Take All Politics:" Now what? "Age of Fracture" is even more of a cliff-hanger, because its epilogue shows how our new national ideology of markets and freedom, and our lack of faith in any kind of larger collective endeavor, persisted, disastrously, through the presidencies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama (so far, anyway), despite their political differences. It only reinforced the sense of frustration and even fear I've described watching the economic half-measures pursued by the Obama administration in the last two years. Rahm Emanuel enraged Republicans by quipping "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste" to push Obama's agenda in early 2009. But in fact, the White House may have done just that; the Bush White House certainly did. The assault of 9/11 and the larger threat posed by violent Islamic radicalism, followed by the bank meltdown and economic crash of 2008, was exactly the kind of foreign and domestic crisis that in the past combined to heal American fractures and lead to ages of progress. Instead, it looks to have been wasted. MORE...
What you're seeing is the first glimpse of Obama's political strategy for dealing with divided government. Obama will strive for deals with Republicans that require concessions on core liberal priorities, and openly concede unhappiness with those concessions, but argue that the deals he's reaching are the best possible under the circumstances.
Obama will insist that such deals are necessary to keep government functioning on behalf of the American people, casting himself as the middle class's defender-in-chief against partisan brickbats flying from both sides. He'll be Washington's resident adult in a town full of bickering children -- on the right and the left. MORE...
The smart money may be on Obama caving to the GOP, as he did when Republicans demanded a smaller-than-needed stimulus, healthcare reform without a public option or curbs on industry profits, financial reform without a ban on banks' gambling with federally insured money -- and then delivered few or no votes for the watered-down result, anyway. I still believe Obama can stick to his guns, realizing that he's living through a depressing hazing ritual for Democratic presidents -- being stuck cleaning up after a Republican bacchanal -- and refuse to budge. MORE...
I don't think the Obama presidency hinges on whether chief of staff Rahm Emanuel stays or goes. I'm much more interested in the calculation behind the president's recent decision to get tough on Republicans. I loved his Labor Day speech, I was thrilled he committed yesterday to letting the Bush tax cuts expire for the richest 2 percent of Americans, and I'm surprised but pleased he's taking on not only the GOP, but wannabe GOP House Speaker John Boehner in his speech today. MORE...
Howie P.S.: Salon's Joan Walsh attempts some affirmative action consciousness-raising with Tweety and Pat Buchanan. You can guess how well they absorb her lesson.
Joan Walsh (Salon):
