Russ Feingold for President
Alexander Cockburn
The Nation: Noember 29th, 2010 issue
As the dust clears from the electoral battlefield, the corporate press is
unanimous: the people have spoken, and their verdict is that President Obama
must "move to the center." Onto the butcher block must go
entitlements-Medicare, Social Security. The sky darkens with vultures eager
to pick the people's bones.
In fact, election day delivered no such verdict. The American people spoke,
and their message was confused. When exit pollsters questioned 17,000 voters
across the nation as to who should take the blame for the country's economic
problems, 35 percent said Wall Street, 29 percent said Bush and 24 percent
said Obama. Just over half of the respondents (57 percent) said that their
votes in House races had nothing to do with the Tea Party. The other half
was split on the Tea Party, pro (22 percent) or con (17 percent). More than
60 percent said the all-important issue is the economy; 86 percent said they
are worried about economic conditions. On whether government should lay out
money to create jobs or slash expenditures to reduce the deficit, there's
also a near-even split.
The American people want a government that doesn't govern, a budget that
will simultaneously balance and create jobs, and spending cuts across the
board that leave the defense budget intact. Collectively, the election made
plain, they haven't a clear notion of which way to march.
Obama must carry a substantial part of the blame for this. He delivered no
clear message, no clarion call. For two years he gave labor nothing; he gave
his most loyal constituency-black America-nothing. When the "One Nation"
rally mustered in Washington on October 2, there was no stentorian message
of support from Obama for the event, sponsored by the NAACP and the AFL-CIO.
Among the vast throngs who gathered for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's
politically inconsequential "sanity rally" on October 30, how many were
young people who had voted for Obama in 2008, their passionate expectations
now mutilated on the battlefields of Obamian realpolitik?
As Obama reviews his options, which way will he head? He's already supplied
the answer. He'll try to broker deals to reach "common ground" with the
Republicans, the strategy that destroyed those first two years of
opportunity.
What do the next two years hold? Already there are desperate urgings from
progressives for Obama to hold the line. Already there are the omens of a
steady stream of concessions by Obama to the right. There's hardly any
countervailing pressure for him to do otherwise. The president has no fixed
principles of political economy, and who is at his elbow in the White House?
Not the labor secretary, Hilda Solis. Not that splendid radical Elizabeth
Warren, whose Consumer Financial Protection Bureau the Republicans are
already scheduling for destruction. Next to Obama is Treasury Secretary Tim
Geithner, the bankers' lapdog, whom the president holds in high esteem.
In the months ahead, as Obama parleys amiably with the right on budgetary
discipline and deficit reduction, the anger of the progressive left will
mount. At some point a champion of the left will step forward to challenge
him in the primaries. This futile charade will expire at the 2012 Democratic
National Convention amid the rallying cry of "unity."
The White House deserves the menace of a convincing threat now, not some
desperate intra-Democratic Party challenge late next year by Michael Moore
or, yet again, Dennis Kucinich.
There is a champion of the left with sound appeal to the sane populist
right. He was felled on November 2, and he should rise again before his
reputation fades. His name is Russ Feingold, currently a Democrat and the
junior senator from Wisconsin. I urge him to decline any job proffered by
the Obama administration and not to consider running as a challenger inside
the Democratic Party. I urge him, not too long after he leaves the Senate,
to bruit the possibility of a presidential run as an independent; then, not
too far into 2011, to embark on such a course.
Why would he be running? Unlike Teddy Kennedy challenging Jimmy Carter in
1979, Feingold would have a swift answer. To fight against the Republicans
and the White House in defense of the causes he has publicly supported
across a lifetime. He has opposed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. His was
the single Senate vote against the Patriot Act; his was a consistent vote
against the constitutional abuses of both the Bush and Obama
administrations. He opposed NAFTA and the bank bailouts. He is for economic
justice and full employment. He is the implacable foe of corporate control
of the electoral process. The Supreme Court's Citizens United decision in
January was aimed in part at his landmark campaign finance reform bill.
A Wisconsin voter wrote me in the wake of the election, "Feingold likely
lost because his opponent's ads, including billboards with pictures of him
and Obama, as well as TV and radio ads, and last-minute phone bursts,
convinced many voters that he has been a party-line Democratic insider all
these years." What an irony! Feingold has always been of an independent cast
of mind, and it surely would not be a trauma for him to bolt the party.
Ralph Nader, having rendered his remarkable service to the country, having
endured torrents of undeserved abuse from progressives, should hand the
torch to Feingold as a worthy heir to that great hero of Wisconsin, Robert
La Follette.
The left must abandon the doomed ritual of squeaking timid reproaches to
Obama, only to have the counselors at Obama's elbow contemptuously dismiss
them, as did Rahm Emanuel, who correctly divined their near-zero capacity
for effective challenge. Two more years, then four more years, of the same
downward slide, courtesy of bipartisanship and "working together"? No way.
Run, Russ, Run!
Alexander Cockburn
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