Counterpunch | In 2008, the American people overwhelmingly voted for “change” in
Washington. They never got it. Hence, Trump. To pretend that there’s not
a straight line connecting the failed policies of Barack Obama and the
subsequent rise of Donald John Trump, is to ignore the obvious and to
shrug off responsibility for the situation the country is in today.
Obama created Trump, the man didn’t simply appear from the ether. Had
Obama acted in good faith and kept his promises to shake up the status
quo, end the foreign wars, restore civil liberties, hold Wall Street
accountable or relieve the economic insecurity that working families
across the country now feel, Hillary Clinton would have been a shoe-in
on November 8th. As it happens, Obama made no effort to achieve any of
these goals, which is why Hillary was defeated in the biggest political
upset of the last century.
The point we need to underscore here, is that the Democratic
leadership is responsible for Trump, not the working class people in the
red states who merely did what they had to do to effect change. These
people can’t be blamed for voting their own best interests. That’s what
people do. Had Obama done anything to genuinely improve the economy,
things might have turned out differently. But he didn’t, in fact– as
popular as Obama was– a full two thirds of the American people thought
the country was headed in the wrong direction. In other words, the
election was a referendum on Obama’s performance as the primary steward
of the US economy. Obama lost that referendum.
Even so, the DNC could have reloaded and taken a different approach
to the economy under Hillary. They didn’t. They thought the “recovery”
meme was effective enough to put them over the finish line. But it
wasn’t effective enough, because too many people saw that the recovery
was a fraud, that there was no recovery, it was all a slick Madison
Avenue public relations campaign aimed at concealing the fact that Obama
had restructured the US economy in a way that deliberately kept growth
at-or-below 2 percent so the Fed could continue pumping cheap money to
its constituents on Wall Street while everyone else saw their
personal debtload grow, their retirement savings vanish, and their
standards of living slip. Isn’t that what really happened? Obama’s
grand restructuring project has resulted in perennial economic
stagnation and widespread pessimism about the future. The former
president oversaw the greatest transfer of wealth from working class
people to parasitic plutocrats in the history of the nation. It wasn’t
an accident. Obama was following a blueprint that was given to him by
his handlers at the DNC.
So now the country is to be led by a brash billionaire reality TV
celebrity who has no previous political experience and who seems
unusually sensitive to any kind of personal criticism. Not surprisingly,
there’s no sign that the Democratic leadership feels any responsibility
for this extraordinary development.
Why is that? Why hasn’t anyone in the DNC admitted their failure,
admitted that they didn’t accurately gage the mood of the country or the
hunger for change? Why haven’t they acknowledged that putting the most
untrustworthy candidate of all time –a thoroughly dislikable,
warmongering harridan– on the ticket was a mistake? Why?
It’s because this vile collection of corporate Dems who run the party
are incapable of self reflection, right? It’s because the Podesta
throng — who still hold the party in their deathgrip –truly believe that
bamboozling their base with Potemkin executives like Barack Obama, is
a terrific model for running the government. They think Obama’s tenure
as president was a success story, mainly because his
grandiloquent bloviating and larking around on stage with sleeves rolled
up like an overpaid athlete– diverted attention from the trillions of
dollars that were being sluiced to the banking whores on Wall Street.
Isn’t that why the Dems haven’t changed?
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