Try (Just a Little Bit Harder) by Alexander Cockburn

[YankeeLeft7x]

The Twilight of Obama-time

"The sun will rise next Wednesday on a new American landscape, the same way it rose on a new American landscape almost exactly two years ago....That was the dawn of Obama-time. Millions of Americans had dined delightedly on Obama's rhetoric of dreams and preened at his homilies about the inherent moral greatness of the American people....Obama and the Democrats triumphed at the polls. The pundits hailed a "tectonic shift" in our national politics, perhaps even a registration of the possibility that we had entered a "post-racial" era....The realities of American politics don't change much from year to year. The "politics of division" which Obama denounced are the faithful reflection of national divisions of wealth and resources wider today than they have been at any time since the late 1920s...In fact the "dream" died even before Obama was elected in November 2008. Already in September that year Senator Obama, like his opponent, Senator McCain, had voted, at the behest of Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson (formerly of Goldman Sachs) and of Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, for the bailout of the banks. Whatever the election result, there was to be no change in the architecture of financial power in America....Two events are scheduled for next Tuesday. If we are to believe the polls, the voters will install Republicans as the new majority in the House of Representatives. A longer shot - they may even win the Senate....If that happens, Obama will be in exactly the situation that Bill Clinton found himself on November 9, 1994, the day after the Republicans won control of both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years....Also on Tuesday or maybe Wednesday, chairman Bernanke and the Open Market Committee of the Federal Reserve Board will convene in Washington and decide on how much money to create – "quantitative easing" - and hand to the banks, in order to lift the country out of a Depression which has 30 million Americans either without a job, or working part-time. Their deliberations will be more consequential, at least in the short term, than the verdicts of the voters in the democratic contest....In 1995 Bill Clinton clawed himself out of the political grave by the politics of triangulation – outflanking the Republicans from the right, while retaining the loyalty of his progressive base. Can Obama display similar flexibility. The President's aides are already confiding that the White House will move right. The question is: will his liberal base tolerate their hero colluding with Republicans in seeking to destroy Medicare (more likely than an onslaught on Social Security, which the Democrats may want to run on in 2012) in the interests of political survival. If that is the course Obama takes, look for a serious challenge to him from another Democrat, as we head towards 2012...."

Check this long article out at:
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn10292010.html

[YankeeLeft7x]

1. Corporate Media Wants the GOP to WIN

Yep, and thank goodness for sites like DU and Counterpunch.org