It began just as I had just flipped my old beaten up shower radio to WWL where Tommy Tucker was celebrating the President's impromptu birther shower. Tucker, in addition to pushing an online poll which told us 70% of WWL listeners still don't believe the President was born in the U.S.A., conducted much of the morning's call-in show using Bruce Springteen's "Born in the U.S.A." as bumper music. And that's where the trouble started.
Sure, you think at first. Cheap joke, not very original, but good enough for talk radio. But that's before you think about the actual content of Springsteen's song. Often misunderstood (once famously so by the 1984 Reagan campaign) as a nationalistic anthem by people who don't actually listen to the words, Born in the U.S.A. is, in fact, a song about the lost American working class being used to fight its country's imperial wars and then abandoned to "end up like a dog that's been beat too much".
As I thought about this yesterday, I found myself struggling to decipher what Tucker was trying to tell us. Since it's undoubtedly Obama's U.S.A. birth we're talking about here, was Tucker saying that Obama has been similarly abused by a nation's broken promises? That didn't seem very likely so I decided I'd try to think like a talk radio listener and puzzle out some hidden code in the lyrics the way Glenn Beck might.
What was it that Tucker wanted me to know the President had "spent half his life just covering up"? Wasn't this whole thing, after all, about Obama's "little hometown jam", in the first place? Where is his hometown anyway? The birth certificate says Honolulu but perhaps his arrival there was really the result of his being sent off to a foreign (to him) land. It's all very suspicious particularly when we consider this "brother at Khe Sahn" and the woman in Saigon. Where are those birth certificates?
Obviously there's more going on here than we've been told. But then when I returned to the problem of why all of this information about a President presiding over three simultaneous foreign wars was coded into a song about the mistreatment of veterans, I had to let it go. I'm trying to keep my head from exploding more than once a week these days and the NFL draft is tonight and... well, you can see my problem there.
From a political strategy standpoint, I think I understand what Obama was doing yesterday. On the one hand, it's easy to question the wisdom of engaging with crazy and long-debunked conspiracy theorists at all. It certainly doesn't appear to discourage them. And it's even easier to point out the silliness of calling an early morning press conference and drawing a whole day's worth of attention to something you yourself are declaring to be a "waste of time."But Obama isn't really wasting his own time here. And he's certainly not engaging birthers in constructive dialog. He's campaigning. Specifically he's aiming his campaign message at what he considers his base.
No, Obama's base isn't crazy libruls like me who want to end the wars, build infrastructure, put people to work, and give everybody free health care. His base is made up of voters who are less concerned about doing anything useful than they are about feeling superior to crazy right wingers. As Glenn Greenwald put it a few weeks ago, this is why Obama is an ideal guardian of the status quo.
Conventional D.C. wisdom -- that which Obama vowed to subvert but has done as much as any President to bolster -- has held for decades that Democratic Presidents succeed politically by being as "centrist" or even as conservative as possible. That attracts independents, diffuses GOP enthusiasm, casts the President as a triangulating conciliator, and generates raves from the DC press corps -- all while keeping more than enough Democrats and progressives in line through a combination of anti-GOP fear-mongering and partisan loyalty.
Isn't that exactly the winning combination that will maximize the President's re-election chances? Just consider the polling data on last week's budget cuts, which most liberal commentators scorned. Americans support the "compromise" by a margin of 58-38%; that support includes a majority of independents, substantial GOP factions, and 2/3 of Democrats. Why would Democrats overwhelmingly support domestic budget cuts that burden the poor? Because, as Yglesias correctly observed, "just about anything Barack Obama does will be met with approval by most Democrats." In other words, once Obama lends his support to a policy -- no matter how much of a departure it is from ostensible Democratic beliefs -- then most self-identified Democrats will support it because Obama supports it, because it then becomes the "Democratic policy," by definition. Adopting "centrist" or even right-wing policies will always produce the same combination -- approval of independents, dilution of GOP anger, media raves, and continued Democratic voter loyalty -- that is ideal for the President's re-election prospects.
The most dangerous thing about modern Democratic presidents is that they employ "fear mongering" tactics, such as Obama's "look how crazy the birthers are" press conference in order to convince voters to accept an ever-rightward policy drift as the perpetual "lesser evil" often with horrifying results.
Take, for example, this exchange in a recent interview between Bill Moyers and David Simon.
Bill Moyers: Many people could see what you saw simply if we opened our eyes. And yet the drug war keeps getting crazier and crazier, from selling guns to Mexico’s drug cartel to cramming more people into prison even though they haven’t committed violent crimes. Why don’t the policies change?
David Simon: Because there’s no political capital in it. There really isn’t. The fear of being called soft on crime, soft on drugs. The paranoia that’s been induced. Listen, if you could be draconian and reduce drug use by locking people up, you might have an argument. But we are the jailing-est country on the planet right now. Two million people in prison. We’re locking up less-violent people. More of them. The drugs are purer. They haven’t closed down a single drug corner that I know of in Baltimore for any length of time. It’s not working. And by the way, this is not a Republican-Democrat thing, because a lot of the most draconian stuff came out of the Clinton administration, this guy trying to maneuver to the center in order not to be perceived as leftist by a Republican Congress.
Bill Moyers: Mandatory sentences, three strikes—
David Simon: Loss of parole. And again, not merely for violent offenders, because again, the rate of violent offenders is going down. Federal prisons are full of people who got caught muling drugs and got tarred with the whole amount of the drugs. It’s not what you were involved in or what you profited from. It’s what they can tar you with. You know, a federal prosecutor, basically, when he decides what to charge you with and how much, he’s basically the sentencing judge at that point. And that’s, of course, corrupting. Again, it’s a stat.
While Clinton benefited from looking not-too-leftist, he didn't suffer politically at the hands of his base as a result of the destructive "draconian" policies he implemented to achieve this position. Why? Because the Republicans at that time were doing crazy things like shutting down the government and making up shit to investigate the Clintons for, accusing them of murder, drug smuggling, etc. No one on the left could raise any objections, though, because... well then the crazies win or something.
Similarly Obama's three wars, his indefinite detention of terror suspects, his unwillingness to take on the banks, his Nixon-Romney version of health care reform, his extension of the Bush tax cuts, all of this stuff gets recast as mainstream Democratic policy solely because the only alternative is Paul Ryan's Medicare privatization, or Donald Trump's birther crusade.
And that's why Obama called that press conference yesterday. To reinvigorate the perception that he's all that stands between us and the abyss. Democratic voters who lived through the Clinton years and are now seeing the pattern repeat may find Springsteen's voice ringing in their heads once again.
I'm ten years burning down the road
Nowhere to run ain't got nowhere to go
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