http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2010/08/27/krauthammer/index.html

That is the same crisis -- which exploded during the Bush presidency -- from which we still have not recovered, which has progressively worsened.

That crisis presented a huge opportunity for Obama and the Democrats to bring about real change in Washington -- the central promise of his campaign -- by capitalizing on (and becoming the voice of) populist anger and using it to wrestle away control from Wall Street and other financial and corporate elites who control Washington.  Had they done so, they would have been champions of populist rage rather than its prime targets. 

But, as John Judis argues in his excellent New Republic piece, they completely squandered that opportunity.  Rather than emphatically stand up to the bankers and other oligarchical thieves, they coddled and served them, and thus became the face of the elite interests oppressing ordinary Americans rather than their foes.  How can an administration represented by Tim Geithner and Larry Summers -- and which specializes in an endless stream of secret deals with corporate lobbyists and sustains itself with Wall Street funding  -- possibly maintain any pretense of populist support or changing how Washington works?  It can't. 

There are few more bitter ironies than watching the Republican Party -- controlled at its core by the very business interests responsible for the country's vast and growing inequality; responsible for massive transfers of wealth to the richest; and which presided over and enabled the economic collapse -- now become the beneficiaries of middle-class and lower-middle-class economic insecurity. 

But the Democratic Party's failure/refusal/inability to be anything other than the Party of Tim Geithner -- continuing America's endless, draining Wars while plotting to cut Social Security, one of the few remaining guarantors of a humane standard of living -- renders them unable to offer answers to angry, anxious, resentful Americans.  As has happened countless times in countless places, those answers are now being provided instead by a group of self-serving, hateful extremist leaders eager to exploit that anger for their own twisted financial and political ends.  And it seems to be working.

 

(soto voce) You used turmoil twice in the first sentence.

Had John Kerry listened to Greenberg instead of Shrum, he'd have won the Presidency in 2004.

Yes, because the "2 Americas" slogan worked out so well for John Edwards. As it is Kerry came close. Closer than I expected at least.

Doug Schoen is exactly the kind of person who is advising Obama right now. He and Pat Cadell (the man who advised numerous disastorus presidential candidates) recently wrote an op-ed piece called "Our Divisive President", filled with the usual crap. The fact is these people look at the tea-party and identify with them, same 60+ white demography. If anything Obama and his team has alienated the left and embraced an elusive center. These types of book/op-eds just paves the way for what is inevitable, a full-scale rejection of the base and sharp move to the right (as if he wasn't to the right already). It's quite obvious now that this administration diluted the bills that were signed to placate the right, if the Republicans win congress expect nothing to get done. We will have two parties staring at each other, like two pieces of turd in a bowl, like always, in perfect ennui.

This whole article is nonsense because it totally MISREPRESENTS the the Tea-baggers, mischaracterizes the arguments against them, and pretends to a symetry between right and left that doesn't exist.

1. Tea-baggers are simply the right-wing of the Republican party. They are the same people who have been voting Republican for years and are sure as hell NOT stirred up because they're:

<blockquote>"citizens demanding to be heard by an out-of-touch political establishment. Their concerns are real and their issues are legitimate."</blockquote>

The minute you hear crap like that you know this is a propaganda piece and not real research. Birthers and "Obama = Socialist Muslim!" is "legitimate" and "real?"Where's the "reality" in their racist paranoia? Are minorities really pushing whites aside and taking their jobs? Or is corporate America massively transferring jobs overseas?

2. Tea-baggers are stirred up because Fox News and Rush Limbaugh spend endless hours telling them that White America is getting screwed and it's the "magic Negro" who's doing it to them. They're suffering and minorities are rolling in welfare.

To pretend that's not deeply racist is simply more propaganda.

Because the fact remains that whatever bills got through Congress were decidedely NOT "socialist." And minorities are NOT rolling in federal dollars at the expense of white people.

So to pretend as these idiots do that we have 2 semetrical "grass roots" movements when one "movement" is orchestrated by a massive and ongoing propaganda effort is like calling Stalin's mass political theater a "grass-roots movement." The whole thing is an orchestrated fraud -- from the top down. Of course the anger and fear is real, but it's whipped up deliberately by self-conscious propaganda.

If the Tea-baggers aren't going away that's only because Fox News isn't going to stop stirring up racial discord. If it weren't for an endless campaign of lies and deception these idiots would go back to being simple Republicans -- unhappy ones because NO government is EVER going to be able to satisfy their fantasies, but Republicans nonetheless.

It's FOX NEWS that has convinced them that they're part of an "historic gathering of Patriots! instead of a manipulated band of idiots."

The underlying notion that Obama and the Dems represent the progressive movement is laughable, as Jerome noted, and I believe it's the primary reason for the decline in their popularity. Both parties are in bed with corporate interests, the only difference being that the Dems aren't publicly spooning them.

Big Money already has a representative party. Democratic strategists must end their love affair with Big Money and rekindle their relationship with FDR, otherwise the Democratic Party serves no purpose in American politics.

If a Republican wins the White House in '12 the teaparty vanishes.