August 20, 2008 2:41 PM

Seizing the "Obama Moment": Which Side Are We On?

The question of how progressives can seize the so-called "Obama Moment," as my colleague Bob Borosage calls it, is an important one - and it is critical that the question be asked right now - before the election, rather than after (This will be the central focus of my questions to Michael Moore in the Meet the Bloggers discussion this Friday). Though the media's horse race coverage and the Left and Right echo chambers "win at all cost" psychology would have us believe that elections are ends unto themselves, our Founders envisioned them as means to ends - instruments by which the people's will is debated, politicians are pressured, and a mandate is crafted.

Luckily for progressives, America has aligned with us on economic issues, ready to sculpt a populist election mandate. As a new poll by the Drum Major Institute shows, the center of American public opinion is far different from the center of opinion in Washington and Wall Street that says "centrism" and "moderation" is continuing the kleptocratic financial and trade policies championed by the Goldman Sachs twins, Bob Rubin and Henry Paulson. Unlike the Royalist Right, progressives don't have to manipulate the public with the kind of faux populism that packages, say, tax cuts for billionaires as a supposed panacea for the working class. We can offer the real thing: a real populist agenda for higher wages, fairer trade policies, universal health care, a better regulated financial system and a strengthened social safety net - and we can do that knowing the vast majority of America is with us.

But before we can assess an "Obama Moment" we have to know if this is an actual "moment," or whether this is a mirage, like the one when Bill Clinton promised to oppose NAFTA, and then rammed it through Congress "over the dead bodies" of the progressive movement?

Continue reading Seizing the "Obama Moment": Which Side Are We On?

August 19, 2008 5:26 PM

Proof That Good Things Can Happen to Good People

MSNBC just announced that Rachel Maddow is getting her own cable show. This is proof that even in today's cynical world, good things can happen to good people. Rachel Maddow is good people, and she deserves it.

August 19, 2008 11:11 AM

Tom Andrews On the DLC

Tom Andrews explains why the DLC is so irrelevant.

August 19, 2008 8:33 AM

Fortune Magazine's Cover Model As "Enduring Voice for Working-Class Americans"

Despite long advocacy for job-killing trade policies, voting for the bankruptcy bill, surrounding herself with Wall Street insiders, and appearing on the cover of Fortune magazine as Big Business's candidate, Hillary Clinton is now being refashioned by our elite media as the greatest working-class champion in American history:

As for Mrs. Clinton, she is increasingly looking at the advantages of staying off the ticket, whether to run again in four or eight years or to capitalize on her presidential run to become an enduring national voice for women and working-class Americans.

Our media discourse is such a total joke.

August 18, 2008 11:59 AM

An I-71 Candidate for VP

So John McCain is potentially doing a VP rollout in Ohio, according to ABC News. In light of this, I have a question: Can someone - anyone - please explain to me why no one in Obama's campaign, in the media, in the progressive infrastructure sphere, in the labor movement or even on lefty blogs, is pushing Sherrod Brown for VP in any real way? Seems to me, if you want to win the presidency as a Democrat, its a pretty sound strategy to simply put Brown on the ticket and tell him to spend the entire campaign simply doing events up and down Ohio's I-71 corridor.

I mean, is this really all that difficult? Please, someone - anyone - tell me how a gaffe-prone, Iraq War-supporting, bankruptcy-bill-voting senator from Delaware, or a warmongering DLC corpse from Indiana is a better pick than an economic populist with 3 decades of government experience (including 16 years in Congress, many on the House International Relations Committee) who has a proven ability to crush Republicans in Ohio, the most politically important state in the nation?

Can someone please answer this question? Anyone? Bueller?...

August 18, 2008 7:07 AM

Labor Challenges Obama's Rubinomics

From Bloomberg News:

Aug. 18 (Bloomberg) -- AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka delivers a slap at former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin in a slide show exhorting union members to back Democrat Barack Obama for president.

Blaming unfettered global trade and inadequate government regulation for lost manufacturing jobs and a staggering economy, Trumka's presentation cautions that "it will do us little good if, when the next Democrat moves into the White House, Wall Street takes command of our country's economic policy.''

It is definitely good news that unions are speaking up, though not for the reason Washington conventional-wisdom parrot Charlie Cook says:

In the end, the competition for influence between laborites and Rubinites may actually prove politically helpful, says Charlie Cook, editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. "What you need is two loud voices in the room to keep Obama down the middle, which is where he needs to be to get elected,'' Cook says.

This suggests that Rubinomics and its embrace of NAFTA-style trade policies has a mass political constituency, and that by echoing Rubinomic themes, a candidate appeals to that constituency. But polls - which Charlie Cook is paid to read - show exactly the opposite. No, there are not throngs of Americans clamoring for more of their jobs to be outsourced. Contrary to Cook's silliness, while up to Bob Rubin may make Obama friends among Washington and Wall Street elites, it doesn't help him win votes in places like Ohio, and doesn't move him into the political center - it helps him lose places like Ohio by moving him out of the center.

August 16, 2008 9:03 PM

A Bargain Bayh For Corporate Interests

In case you thought Evan Bayh (D-IN) had no controversial parts of his career that might complicate his Mr. Clean vice-presidential image, make sure to check out this story from the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette:

WASHINGTON - Since leaving Indiana as a first lady, Susan Bayh has become a professional board member, earning more than $1 million a year in director fees for advice she gives to companies that make pharmaceuticals, operate radio stations, sell health insurance policies, offer online banking and distribute ingredients to fast-food restaurants.

In the past four years, Bayh collected more than $1.7 million in pre-tax income when she exercised stock options from two of the corporations. Her actual income from exercising stock options is higher, but the details of one transaction were not publicly reported.

During the same time, her husband, Sen. Evan Bayh, D-Ind., cast more than 3,000 votes, including some on issues of keen interest to the pharmaceutical, broadcast, insurance, food-distribution and finance industries.

It goes down hill from there. Read the whole article here.

h/t poputonian

August 15, 2008 2:44 PM

Workers Unionize Wal-Mart

Good news from Quebec:

GATINEAU, Quebec -- A handful of workers in the automotive department of a Wal-Mart Canada store have become the only North American employees of the giant retailer to be covered by a union contract.

The fight ain't over yet, though. Read the whole story here.

August 15, 2008 8:50 AM

Buh Bayh

In the last week, the national media has ramped up its speculation that Indiana senator Evan Bayh is going to be named to the vice-presidential ticket by Barack Obama. Mind you, this is all speculation - this is what our national media now substitutes for actual reporting. What's worse, the same media hasn't really looked at who Bayh is, what he would represent, and why there is a growing backlash to the prospect of him being Obama's runningmate. So I did that in my newspaper column today.

Continue reading Buh Bayh

August 14, 2008 10:17 PM

Obama Pushes Off Payroll Tax Reform Promise

Here's the Associated Press in June:

Democrat Barack Obama said Friday he would apply the Social Security payroll tax to all annual incomes above $250,000, which would affect the wealthiest 3 percent of Americans.

It seemed like a pretty courageous stand at the time. But now we get this from Reuters today:

Barack Obama's presidential campaign said on Thursday a potential hike in payroll taxes for wealthy Americans under an Obama administration would not occur for 10 years.

So, not exactly a flip-flop, but not exactly a move that inspires a lot of confidence about Obama's willingness to go up against the millionaires he's now aggressively courting.

h/t to reader FLGibsonJr

August 14, 2008 1:31 PM

"Reporting"

This dispatch from the Chicago Sun-Times Lynn Sweet should be printed out and posted in every journalism school in America as proof positive that the craft once known as "reporting" is about as obsolete as the horse and buggy.

When I went to journalism school, they taught us that when you publish something for a newspaper, you try to inform readers as much as possible about your sources. Even when they are on background, you are supposed to give readers some context - any context - about where what you are reporting as fact is actually emanating from (Oh, and you try to - ya know - do some actual reporting, rather than reprinting your own personal speculation).

And yet, Sweet's entire premise for reporting "Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.) is moving up on the list of potential running mates" for Barack Obama is that that's she's "just passing on the latest I'm hearing."

We have no idea where she's "hearing" this from at all. Is she hearing it from Joe Biden? Is she hearing it from Chris Cillizza, who himself is saying he's hearing it? Or is she just hearing it in her own head? And wouldn't it be nice to know why Biden is theoretically moving up on the list considering he's a tiny-state senator who is so nationally important and respected that he recently ended up as a rounding error in a Democratic presidential primary?

This, folks, is how today's "reporters" simultaneously avoid doing real work, while manufacturing story lines out of nothing: They "just pass on the latest they are hearing" without even a shred of actual reporting or context whatsoever, package it as legitimate fact-based journalism, and then see if their laziness can quite literally create a storyline out of thin air.

Welcome to "reporting" in the 21st century.

August 14, 2008 8:17 AM

Breathe Easy, Everyone - Obama Is Now Courting the Most Critical Constituency

Everyone rest easy - we can all breathe a deep sigh of relief, as the Obama campaign aggressively moves to court the CEO vote, according to today's Wall Street Journal:

Jason Furman, Barack Obama's economic-policy director, is spending this weekend in the tony Hamptons outside New York, as will many top Wall Street executives. But he won't be relaxing. Instead he will be explaining the Democrat's tax policies in small business gatherings and celebrity-studded fund-raisers. Another top Obama adviser, University of Chicago Professor Austan Goolsbee, just returned from Jackson Hole, Wyo., to chat up other business executives and big donors. The campaign for the CEO vote is heating up. With increasing attention on the economy, the presidential candidates are trying to wrap themselves in business's embrace by wooing some of the best-known chief executives.

Whew! I know I'm really relieved, because millionaire CEOs are the most important constituency that will decide the election in places in working-class bastions like Ohio.