Young Ezra is actually critical of the administration today:
Here’s a depressing sentence: “the White House has not filled a position overseeing ethics and lobbying issues for more than two years — a job Obama created with great fanfare when he took office in 2009.”
That’s from Juliet Eilperin’s look at President Obama’s fading commitment to campaign-finance reform. This morning also brings a blistering letter signed by Americans for Campaign Reform, the Campaign Legal Center, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, Common Cause, Democracy 21, the League of Women Voters, and Public Citizen. ”We are writing to express our deep concern about the nation’s corrupt campaign finance system and about your failure, to date, as President to provide meaningful leadership or take effective action to solve this fundamental problem facing our democracy,” they say.
This is a White House that has little interest in quixotic causes. And campaign-finance reform is, at the moment, nothing if not a quixotic cause. With Republicans in control of the House and in possession of the filibuster in the Senate, big money is in no danger of being banished from American politics.
The White House thus sees this issue as heads, Republicans win, tails, Democrats lose. They’ll never get the votes to truly change campaign-finance laws. But along the way, they’ll attack the system in ways that will make them look like hypocrites for participating in it.
This all makes perfect sense. But it is another example of Team Obama being changed by Washington rather than changing Washington.
Bill Burton, head of Priorities USA, the pro-Obama superPAC, wrote that “our system is broken and…the Democratic Party should be spearheading reform. However, until campaign-finance reform is a reality, the party of reform should not be one of perpetual loss.” It is a pragmatic argument that has fully triumphed over 2008′s idealistic campaign.
Under Obama, today’s Democratic Party is not the party of campaign-finance reform in any serious way. They favor it abstractly, but with the exception of relatively modest laws meant to roll back the effects of Citizens United and its related rulings, they expend no political capital or intellectual energy on the topic. Washington is safe. Democracy less so.
Expending political capital on “quixotic” causes is how change begins. Who would have thought ten years ago that marriage would be so available for gay people? But without any actual leaders exercising a little thing I like to call “leadership,” progress becomes even harder. Bug or feature?
This is a WH that has no interest in changing the status quo. Except in areas where it will gain voters for the Democratic Party. Which is why there is no single-payer, universal, health care system in place. Or why we won’t be leaving Afghanistan until 2014. If you believe that leaving 10,000 troops behind is being gone. Or why Gitmo is still open. Or why Bush , Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and others haven’t been sent to the World Court for prosecution. Or why Hillary Clinton was chosen to be the Secretary of State. Or a thousand other things. Obama’s will be remembered as the “do nothing” administration.
@ 1 — What makes you so sure this is a WH, and more particularly this president and his closest staff, that wants to actually increase the number, or enthusiasm, of Democratic voters?
We can’t know what is in Obama’s mind or heart; we can only judge his actions as we know them. I judge that he is far from the liberal, progressive, or even supporter of rule of law that he proclaimed himself to be in his campaign speeches. I judge him to be a Corporatist running dog lackey.
His support for gays and Hispanics telescopes the fact that he’s invested in bringing ‘specific’ voting blocs into the Democratic Party. The fact is that the Democratic Party’s leadership hates the Left with a passion. Anytime they get the chance to co-opt, ignore or discredit the Left they will take that opportunity. If the Left makes up 10% or 15% of the Party then substituting them with gay and Hispanic voters is a win win for the leadership. The Left is not only fighting the Fascism of the Right, it is also fighting the corporatism of the Democratic Party (Obama) as you correctly point out.
Also, many among the Big Money crowd (not all, obviously; see Koch Bros.) and Big Corporations are socially liberal. Just not on economic issues. Hence Obama’s great care for the Big Bankster crooks and his neglect of the vast numbers of the middle class falling down and down the economic ladder.