Heidi Li's Potpourri

International Women's Day: Women - the Forgotten 51 Percent Minority

This picture from the 1970s, reprinted in a March 8, 2009 story in the New York Times, is heartbreaking. It is heartbreaking  because even though such a picture today would, I fervently hope, show women more diverse in age and rage, it would be easy enough to find women - millions of them - who came out of the 2008 Presidential election cycle realizing that women are the forgotten majority in this country.

Women are the people who can be called anything for supporting another women's bid for higher office; indeed a woman governor who runs for vice-president can publicly be called a c*nt and absolutely no member of the punditry nor any politician in high office of either party denounces this. Imagine if photos of young people wearing shirts that called our current President a n*gger had circulated widely during the last election. The media and politicians would have been absolutely up in arms. They would have been right to have been, too. But what many women are only realizing now, after surviving the dashed hopes of seeing Hillary Rodham Clinton given a fair shot at the nomination in Denver (instead the Democratic Party held a rigged process where pledged delegates were pressured to change their votes for the first ballot and superdelegates were pressured, starting in June, to act as if they had already voted for a candidate to lead the Democratic ticket) is that the entire political and cultural situation in this country not is stacked against them, but that almost no progress in the fight for political and economic equality has been made since the "Women's Liberation" movement of the early 1970s. The wretched and persistent wage gap persists; no Equal Rights Amendment has been added to our constitution; and despite the de jure legality of abortion, women's reproductive rights generally cannot be vindicated by actual individual women, at least not without hardship.

Our current President had his inauguration blessed by a pastor who believes in "wifely submission" and has retained as his chief speechwriter a man who blithely posed for a picture depicting himself metaphorically groping the most powerful person in the president's own Senate - a person who happens to be a woman, Secretary of State Clinton. This same President has ignored calls for a Presidential Commission on Women modeled on John F. Kennedy's 1961 - 1961! - Commission on Women; and has displayed zero interest in creating an even stronger institution, one that would be on par with the President's Advisory Boards on Intelligence (spying) and Economic Recovery.

The other day I was reading and listening to Mario Cuomo's address to the 1984 Democratic Convention. Well into a classic speech, Cuomo delivers this message:

We speak for women who are indignant that this nation refuses to etch into its governmental commandments the simple rule "thou shalt not sin against equality," a rule so simple -- I was going to say, and I perhaps dare not but I will. It's a commandment so simple it can be spelled in three letters: E.R.A.

In 1984, the Democratic hall went wild when Cuomo added this apparent ad lib. The crowd chanted over and over E - R - A.

Thou shalt not sin aginst equality, thou shall pass and ratify the Equal Rights Amendment. Can you imagine a keynote speaker from either major political party today uttering these words at its presidential nominating convention?

The closest we came in 2008 was Hillary Rodham Clinton's convention speech, which included this declaration:

And I know what that can mean for every man, woman, and child in America. I’m a United States Senator because in 1848 a group of courageous women and a few brave men gathered in Seneca Falls, New York, many traveling for days and nights, to participate in the first convention on women’s rights in our history.

And so dawned a struggle for the right to vote that would last 72 years, handed down by mother to daughter to granddaughter – and a few sons and grandsons along the way.

These women and men looked in-to their daughters’ eyes, imagined a fairer and freer world, and found the strength to fight. To rally and picket. To endure ridicule and harassment. To brave violence and jail.

And after so many decades – 88 years ago on this very day – the 19th amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote would be forever enshrined in our Constitution.

My mother was born before women could vote. But in this election my daughter got to vote for her mother for President.

This is the story of America. Of women and men who defy the odds and never give up.

How do we give this country back to them?

By following the example of a brave New Yorker , a woman who risked her life to shepherd slaves along the Underground Railroad.

And on that path to freedom, Harriett Tubman had one piece of advice.

If you hear the dogs, keep going.

If you see the torches in the woods, keep going.

If they're shouting after you, keep going.

Don't ever stop. Keep going. (emphasis added)

Although the convention applauded wildly it should be noted that in 20 years the Democratic Party went from demanding the Equal Rights Amendment to reminding women that when they hear the dogs, they must keep going.

Many women and women understand that women's rights are human rights and human rights are women's rights. They demonstrate this knowledge in this country and around the world as they keep going. Some make small contributions, financial and otherwise, to new organizations like 51 percent (disclosure: the author of this post is the president of 51 percent), WomenCount, and The New Agenda - organizations formed in direct response to the unresponsiveness of the Democratic Party to American women's dreams and hopes for their emancipation and autonomy. In other countries, too, women take action on the local level. A friend from Europe decided that she would mark International Women's Day (a holiday not recognized in the U.S.) by protesting a local piece of artwork that, however unwittingly, depicts a woman in a subordinate and demeaned posture compared to her male coworkers (the art is meant to celebrate rice harvesting). Here is the artwork as it looks on an ordinary day:

 But on International Women's Day, the woman sweeping wore a placard that, translated, read:

"I feel enslaved in this humiliating posture next to the two strapping men standing up. I demand equality."

Dones endavant! (Translation: "Put women forward!")

I believe that 2008 will be remembered not as a year of defeat for women, but as year of galvanization. Despite the wretched economic uncertainty that plagues men and women today, those who want to see the majority-minority - women of the world - put forward, are banding together and one placard or one donation or one blog post at a time these men and women realize that we must renew the fight against oppression and for emancipation of women everywhere.

To read Secretary of State Clinton's 2009 International Women's Day statement on the importance of advancing the interests of women throughout the world, go here.

President Obama: no Lyndon Johnson, no Franklin Delano Roosevelt

I am still trying to figure out how a Democrat who won the presidency by a large margin, got into office, with the entire country knowing that we needed action from the Federal government has managed to squander the opportunity to lay the groundwork for a systematic domestic agenda at which social justice and welfare are front and center. I knew President Obama was not the most liberal or progressive of the Democratic contenders for the presidency - and I wondered often as the campaign proceeded just how liberal or progressive he was at all. I did not prefer the content of John McCain's views to whatever I could glean the content of "hope"/"change" was.

I assumed that President Obama had a domestic agenda that he would promote and actually, although I felt that the way the nomination had been rigged in Denver, the Democratic Party did not deserve to have its candidate with the general election, I did assume that the Party establishment's favored son would actually fight for its causes.

But if we examine how President Obama has handled TARP-part 2, it seems like he has no plan and certainly not one that puts domestic justice and welfare front and center. Read this for a good take on the situation. Best quote: "On the domestic issues Mr. Obama ran and won on — health care, education, climate change, rebalancing the distribution of wealth — the legislation does little more than promise there will be more to come."

Feminists do not horse-trade women's rights to care for their bodies for Republican votes

A week or so into our new Presidential administration, and the strange sensation of living in a universe that only partially intersects that of many people I would formerly have have considered obvious political allies continues. Starting yesterday and on through today I began receiving messages from blogger friends and then from NOW-NY and then Planned Parenthood, that something very strange seemed to be happening with the economic stimulus bill. Apparently President Obama (who neither NOW nor Planned Parenthood can bring themselves to name as part of the problem, although Planned Parenthood does suggest calling the White House) and Congressional Democrats are willing to curry votes from Republicans on the Hill by cutting the Medicaid Family Planning State Option from the stimulus package the Congress is hoping to have ready for presidential signing by mid-Februrary. The Medicaid Family Planning State option is a provision that would provide health care coverage for 2.3 million low-income women, according to Planned Parenthood, by "allow[ing] states to expand their Medicaid family planning services, including cancer screenings and other preventive care, to more women in need, without having to go through the burdensome Medicaid waiver process." Or as the National Women's Law Center puts it, "In a disappointing move, the economic recovery package will not include a provision to make it easier for states to make family planning services more accessible and affordable to the millions of women and families who depend on them. The Medicaid Family Planning State Option would have allowed states to expand Medicaid eligibility for family planning services without having to obtain a federal waiver."  Meanwhile, when I went to look at the January 28 New York Times print edition to for details, I found no mention of this ditching of the Family Planning option until deep into one of the three stories on the stimulus package, mentioned in passing in a vague paragraph on page A16 of the Washington print edition of the Times:

As the House version of the legislation came to the floor on Tuesday, Democrats stripped from it a provision that Republicans had ridiculed as having nothing to do with economic stimulus, one expanding federal Medicaid coverage of family planning services. (The Congressional Budget Officehad estimated that the provision would actually save the government $200 million over five years by reducing pregnancy and postnatal-care expenses.)

Then, as I sat down to compose my thoughts about this latest bit of chicanery over women's bodies, things turned a bit more surreal. Apparently, despite its reported spike in subscriptions, Ms. Magazine has enough leftover editions of its inaugural issue - you know, the one with this patently ridiculous cover, to just today be offering me more "one more chance" to own the cover in poster size.

Please note: no way in hell does a feminist look like a person who is willing to horse-trade funds for family planning benefits under Medicaid to placate Republicans, who will do anything to beat back money for family planning which they are trying as quickly as possible to turn into an epithet. Family planning is a good idea. So is birth control in most people's lives. So, in some cases, is access to safe and legal abortion. Family planning, birth control, access to safe and legal abortions: these are not dirty words. They are real world, practical options - options needed, at least as options, by all women if they are to be truly autonomous actors in our society; and therefore options that must be as available to those whose health insurance is provided by the government as to those whose insurance is provided by private insurers.

Here's a little trick used by many who teach property law across the country. Most first year law students arrive in their Property Law courses with two visions of what property is: either the stuff they just put away in their dorm rooms or a field in the country somewhere. So we law professors often start by telling them that no,that isn't property at all. What property really is, is the set of entitlements and rights any particular person or the state has to control or use the stuff they just put their dorm rooms or the field in the country. In other words, property is a bundle of say-so's over what happens to the bits and pieces in the world. Who gets to say what about what happens to what what bits and pieces makes up the law of property. Today's casebooks tend to leave out the statutes and cases that blatantly assumed that women and black men were bits and pieces that were just as much the objects of debates about particular say-so's - cases about the details of chattel marriage (e.g. since a husband controlled all of his wife's legal rights, could she ever charge him with rape?) and chattel slavery (e.g., since a slave owner controlled absolutely the working conditions of slaves, could a slave owner be charged with murder for  willfully and knowingly depriving slaves of adequate rest or water thereby leading to their deaths?). Property casebooks tend to leave out these cases because it is rightly considered unacceptable to conceive of women and black men as the equivalent of the stuff in the dorm room or the field in the countryside. So, especially when it comes to chattel slavery, current law school curricula focus on the law that removed blacks from the status of chattel and recognized them as persons, not property.

Because there has never been a legal seismic shift in the status of women in this country - nothing comparable to a Civil War leading to an Emancipation Proclamation or the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the U.S. Constitution or the myriad of statutes and regulations passed to make the guarantees of these Amendments a reality - there is no natural place in law school curricula to address the halting transition our society is making toward giving women full say-so over their own bodies and the opportunity and means to give that say-so tangible effect.  Some family law courses consider the question; some specialized courses in feminist legal studies do. But even the most aspirational of law school curricula still must work from the law as it is, not as we would have it be. And the fact remains that women have not been liberated from the shackles legally imposed on them.

If President Obama and the Democratic Congress were to horse-trade away men's rights to control their health care, I am confident that there would be hue and cry. But this is because the baseline assumption in our society is that men are entitled to control their own bodies.  No man of any color is the property of the state, nor may the state dole out its aid starting from the presumption that the state has more say so over men's bodies then men themselves do.

But since President Obama has decreed "there's not a minute to spare" before he gets the stimulus package he is willing to settle for, apparently he has not a minute to spare to fight for the women's rights and resources to control and care for their bodies.

What are women, Jews, and gays - and those who care about them - going to do now in preparation for 2012?

If you are a Jew, a woman, a gay person or somebody who is not any of these but cares about somebody who is, and you voted for President-elect Obama in the primaries or the general election, read Katha Pollitt (article reprinted,with light annotation, below). Than ask yourself some tough questions:

• Why did you vote for then-Senator Obama?
• Has he met your expectations so far?
• Do you think he will in the future?

If you are unhappy with President-elect Obama's conduct now, what are you doing to work toward a better alternative candidate to support in 2012? If you think you will want an alternative, you better start working on that problem now, because the soon to be incumbent is already working to make sure he is the automatic choice for the Democrats in 2012, and that he maintains the money machine he created - depending on the precedent of foregoing public funding - to ensure that he will again be the Democratic nominee. We have had one term presidents in this country - usually succeeded by a successful candidate from the opposing party (e.g. G.H.W. Bush followed by William Jefferson Clinton; Jimmy Carter followed by Ronald Reagan). Now, there may be a Republican out there who you would be happy to see become president in 2012. But if you want an alternative to a Republican follow-up to the current term of President-elect Obama; and if you are have misgivings about President-elect Obama, for whatever reason, you had better start organizing around a different option for 2012, be that person currently an Independent or currently a Democrat.

My own view is that President-elect Obama, under the banner of empty p.c. talk, has taken real steps - ranging from the retention of Jon Favreau to the Rick Warren invitation to the cabinet appointments of Bob Gates and Ray Lahood - to erode whatever vestiges of a two-party system we have had in this country.  President-elect Obama has not ever and does not now speak for liberalism; he speaks for himself. But he will enjoy a tremendous advantage in getting the 2012 Democratic Party nomination: the Democratic Party ensured that for itself by rigging his receiving it this year in Denver. That is going to discourage any Democrat from taking him on. Of course, depending on how much damage he does to himself Mr. Obama may make it easy for the Democrats to nominate somebody else as an alternative by deciding to step aside, as Lyndon Johnon chose to do in declining to see renomination in 1968, a move that did not work out too terribly well for liberals or conservatives as it brought us Richard Nixon, one of the most disgraced and disgraceful Presidents our country has ever had to endure.

---

From the Los Angeles Times

Opinion

Rick Warren is an insulting choice

Preacher Rick Warren's views are simply too extreme for Obama's supporters.

By Katha Pollitt

December 22, 2008

To understand how angry and disappointed many Democrats are that Barack Obama has invited evangelical preacher Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inaugural, imagine if a President-elect John McCain had offered this unique honor to the Rev. Al Sharpton -- or the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. I know, it's hard to picture: John McCain would never do that in a million years. Republicans respect their base even when, as in McCain's case, it doesn't really return the favor.

Only Democrats, it seems, reward their most loyal supporters -- feminists, gays, liberals, opponents of the war, members of the reality-based community -- by elbowing them aside to embrace their opponents instead.

Most Americans who've heard of Warren know him as the teddy-bearish, Hawaiian-shirted head of the Saddleback megachurch in Orange County and the author of "The Purpose Driven Life." Perhaps they also know he's the rare right-wing Christian pastor who sometimes talks about poverty and global warming and HIV. His concern for those issues has given him a reputation as a moderate and has made him the darling of Democratic Party think tanks, ever hoping to break the Republican lock on the white evangelical vote.

But on the signal issues of the religious right he is, as he himself has said, as orthodox as James Dobson.

And as inflammatory. Warren doesn't just oppose gay marriage, he's compared it to incest and pedophilia. He doesn't just want to ban abortion, he's compared women who terminate pregnancies to Nazis and the pro-choice position to Holocaust denial. (Hmmm ... If a fertilized egg is as precious as a born Jewish human being, does that mean a born Jewish human being is only as valuable as a fertilized egg?)

Speaking of Jews, Warren has publicly stated his belief that they will burn in hell, presumably along with everyone else who hasn't accepted his particular brand of Christianity (i.e., the vast majority of people in the world). And forget about evolution -- the existence of homosexuals, he's argued, disproves Darwin. And while we may not know how old the Earth is, the Saddleback website assures us that dinosaurs and humans coexisted.

Warren claims that his views are mainstream, pointing out that in 30 states, the majority of voters have banned gay marriage. Popular doesn't mean right, of course, but regardless of what Americans think about gay marriage, on other so-called social issues, he's way out in far-right field.

Take abortion. Most Americans, whatever their personal feelings, are pro-choice. On election day, anti-choice initiatives went down to defeat in all three states where they were on the ballot. Most Americans do not think the one-third of American women who terminate a pregnancy are running a concentration camp in their wombs, and would have no trouble choosing between saving a Jew from a gas chamber and a fertilized egg from a fire at the clinic.

Or take marriage. At his Saddleback Church, wifely submission is official doctrine: The church website tells women to defer to their husband's "leadership" even when he's wrong on important issues, such as finances. Never mind if she's an accountant and he flunked long division, or if she wants to beef up the kids' college fund and he wants to buy shares in the Brooklyn Bridge. The godly answer is supposed to be "yes, dear." Is elevating this male chauvinist how President-elect Obama thanks women, who gave him more than half his votes?

Or take foreign policy. In electing Obama, Americans overwhelmingly rejected President Bush's Wild West approach to foreign policy. Apparently Warren didn't get that memo either. Unlike many evangelical preachers, he issued a statement against torture, but despite his access to Bush, he told Beliefnet.com that he never raised the subject of torture with him. ("I just didn't have the opportunity," he said -- although he apparently found plenty of time to lecture Obama about abortion.)

On "Hannity & Colmes," he agreed that the president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, should be killed because "the Bible says God puts government on Earth to punish evildoers." Really? The Bible says the United States should murder the leaders of other sovereign states? How many other heads of state does Warren want to do away with? If Ahmadinejad, who is, after all, a more-or-less democratically elected leader, had shared his inauguration with an imam who had called on national television for the assassination of President Bush, Americans would be calling for the nuking of Tehran.

In a news conference Thursday, Obama defended the choice of Warren: "It is important for the country to come together even though we may have disagreements on certain social issues." That's all very well, but excuse me if I don't feel all warm and fuzzy. Obama won thanks to the strenuous efforts of people who've spent the last eight years appalled by the Bush administration's wars and violations of human rights, its attacks on gays and women, its denigration of science, its general pandering to bigotry and ignorance in the name of God.

I'm all for building bridges, but honoring Warren, who insults Obama's base as perverts and murderers, is definitely a bridge too far.

Katha Pollitt, a poet, essayist and critic, writes the "Subject to Debate" column in the Nation. She is the author, most recently, of "Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories."

Just when I think the DNC cannot sink any lower, they find a way to do so

My friend who continues to get email from the DNC just forwarded this message to me:

	S---- -- It's been just over a month since Election Day, and we're getting ready to change America. We can't do it alone, and we can't do it in a single day. But thanks to supporters like you, change is coming. Show your support for our ongoing movement with an Obama four-year calendar -- or share one as a holiday gift. Make a donation of $35 and get a limited edition, full-color calendar featuring photos of President-elect Obama and his family from the campaign trail: You can also donate just $25 and get an Obama winter hat: https://donate.barackobama.com/hat Your donation will support the Democratic National Committee, which did so much to strengthen the campaign over the past two years. The DNC will continue to support change -- but it also needs to retire the debt it accumulated by putting everything on the line for victory in 2008. Get a four-year Obama calendar with your donation of $35 or more: https://donate.barackobama.com/calendar If you order by December 15th, delivery is guaranteed before December 25th. Thank you for your continued support, The Democratic Party
	Paid for and authorized by the Democratic National Committee, www.democrats.org. This communication is not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee. Democratic National Committee, 430 S. Capitol St. SE, Washington, DC 20003 Contributions or gifts to the Democratic National Committee are not deductible as charitable contributions for federal income tax purposes. Click here to unsubscribe from this mailing list.

Although this is for real, the DNC has now managed to sound like a cross between QVC and a blatant political machine straight out of Chicago.

The tackiness is not the problem; it is just a minor annoyance. The sound of Chicago-like machinery gears grinding is a problem and a big one. While I want President-elect Barack Hussein Obama  (I am now using all three names because CNN has just reported that this is how the President-elect wants to be sworn in and known for official purposes) to have a Presidency that serves our country well, I do not want a major political party beginning its next Presidential campaign before this one has yet to begin. And just as I did not want the Party to select the nominee in contradiction of its own rules and procedure -  thereby effectively disenfranchising every single person who voted in a primary or a caucus regardless of how they voted - neither do I want the Party now acting as if they know who the rank and file will elect to run in four years.

Or is the new DNC PAC/0bama-for-America Party simply planning to officially disenfranchise rank and file Democrats and abandon primaries in 2012 altogether?

At one time that might have been a question I would have posed rhetorically, to show the absurdity of the idea just by inquiring about it. But having seen the latest in the shilling emails from the DNC PAC, I ask the question seriously.

Because if the Democratic Party understood democracy they would understand that they cannot be asking people now to support Barack Hussein Obama for reelection in 2012. Democracy requires an election procedure that involves rank and file citizens choosing who will run for the chief executive office. The choice is not up to a webmaster - or a would-be DNC-chair- sitting in Chicago or Washington D.C.

It is seeming easier by the day to imagine a serious third party movement for 2012. It may be the only way to guarantee a fundamental presupposition of republican populist democracy: the right of the individual citizen to have a real choice of candidates to serve as the President of the United States.

Hey, Mr. Plouffe - Do you realize how fascistic you sound?

From my friend who gets email from the David Plouffe, Campaign Manager Obama For America/DNC PAC (that's the Democratic National Committee, which is, indeed a mega-PAC): (emphases mine)

S-----

I just recorded a special video message -- from a place you might recognize -- about this weekend's Change is Coming house meetings, and why you should join tens of thousands of your fellow supporters.
Watch the video and find a Change is Coming house meeting near you. Or host one yourself and invite your friends, family, and neighbors.

At the house meetings, you'll reflect on our campaign, discuss the future of this movement, and identify some ways to get involved in your community.

Meeting hosts will report back, and your feedback will be instrumental in guiding this movement through some important and unprecedented territory.

This grassroots organization has always been about more than an election. It's about transforming our country -- and we've only just begun.

With the enormous challenges we're facing at home and abroad, we have no choice but to continue working together. There's so much more we can do to help Barack bring change to America.

How we do that is up to you.

Watch the video and sign up to host or attend a house meeting this weekend:

http://my.barackobama.com/changeiscoming

I hope you'll continue to make history with us.

Thanks and happy holidays,

David

David Plouffe
Campaign Manager
Obama for America

Please donate.
Paid for and authorized by the Democratic National Committee, www.democrats.org. This communication is not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee. Democratic National Committee, 430 S. Capitol St. SE, Washington, DC 20003 Contributions or gifts to the Democratic National Committee are not deductible as charitable contributions for federal income tax purposes.

*********************

My reactions:

1.  Since when does the DNC PAC = Obama for America? Suppose you supported another Democrat for President and objected to President-Elect Obama's selection as the candidate, but you donated to the DNC before you knew they would take extreme measures to make sure that your primary vote meant nothing? Will the DNC-PAC-Obama-for-America refund your money? (After they get out of debt, naturally.)

2.  The technique outlined - hold meetings with some predefined agenda with hosts reporting back to HQ is repugnant to the ideals of liberal democracy, which call for a division between the private and the public. But this is the favored technique of the DNC-PAC-Obama-for-America organization. They used it to rig the Democratic Party's convention. (Discussion of that episode appears here and here.)

3. Why is the DNC giving its website to raise money for President-Elect Obama? The DNC is in the red. Nobody from the Obama campaign has pledged that the merged entity, DNC-PAC-Obama-for-America, will be paying off that debt. The presumption is that the money is for Mr. Obama's next campaign, presumably for reelection in 2012. So once again the DNC is predetermining who it intends to run in an election. Don't bother with house-parties. The DNC-PAC-Obama-for-America Party is already in full swing.

Pay attention when you vote

After the article from Politico, reprinted in its entirety, below, I have added links to posts about the concerns this liberal aired both before and aftershe decided not to vote for Mr. Obama in the Democratic Primary Mr. Obama has not changed. Many of his liberal supporters were either kidding themselves (and others) or simply were not paying attention to material available not only in the MSM and on blogs, but contained in Mr. Obama's books about himself. He is a conservative person, Nixonian in his tendencies toward deception. If you are surprised by that now, it is only because you were not paying attention before. How does it feel to have been bamboozled and okie-doked?

Of course if you voted for Mr. Obama for reasons other than thinking he would be liberal and progressive, you may have been right on the money.

If like me, you are a Democrat's Democrat, you should be rather worried about who Mr. Obama intends to select at the new DNC chair. The MyBarackObama Democratic Party is not recognizable as the Democratic Party.

Liberals voice concerns about Obama
By: Carol E. Lee and Nia-Malika Henderson
December 8, 2008 09:00 AM EST
[emphases added]

Liberals are growing increasingly nervous – and some just flat-out angry – that President-elect Barack Obama seems to be stiffing them on Cabinet jobs and policy choices.

Obama has reversed pledges to immediately repeal tax cuts for the wealthy and take on Big Oil. He’s hedged his call for a quick drawdown in Iraq. And he’s stocking his White House with anything but stalwarts of the left.

Now some are shedding a reluctance to puncture the liberal euphoria at being rid of President George W. Bush to say, in effect, that the new boss looks like the old boss.

“He has confirmed what our suspicions were by surrounding himself with a centrist to right cabinet. But we do hope that before it's all over we can get at least one authentic progressive appointment,” said Tim Carpenter, national director of the Progressive Democrats of America.

OpenLeft blogger Chris Bowers went so far as to issue this plaintive plea: “Isn't there ever a point when we can get an actual Democratic administration?”

Even supporters make clear they’re on the lookout for backsliding. “There’s a concern that he keep his basic promises and people are going to watch him,” said Roger Hickey, a co-founder of Campaign for America’s Future.

Obama insists he hasn’t abandoned the goals that made him feel to some like a liberal savior. But the left’s bill of particulars against Obama is long, and growing.

Obama drew rousing applause at campaign events when he vowed to tax the windfall profits of oil companies. As president-elect, Obama says he won’t enact the tax.

Obama’s pledge to repeal the Bush tax cuts and redistribute that money to the middle class made him a hero among Democrats who said the cuts favored the wealthy. But now he’s struck a more cautious stance on rolling back tax cuts for people making over $250,000 a year, signaling he’ll merely let them expire as scheduled at the end of 2010.

Obama’s post-election rhetoric on Iraq and choices for national security team have some liberal Democrats even more perplexed. As a candidate, Obama defined and separated himself from his challengers by highlighting his opposition to the war in Iraq from the start. He promised to begin to end the war on his first day in office.

Now Obama’s says that on his first day in office he will begin to “design a plan for a responsible drawdown,” as he told NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday. Obama has also filled his national security positions with supporters of the Iraq war: Sen. Hillary Clinton, who voted to authorize force in Iraq, as his secretary of state; and President George W. Bush’s defense secretary, Robert Gates, continuing in the same role.

The central premise of the left’s criticism is direct – don’t bite the hand that feeds, Mr. President-elect. The Internet that helped him so much during the election is lighting up with irritation and critiques.

“There don't seem to be any liberals in Obama's cabinet,” writes John Aravosis, the editor of Americablog.com. “What does all of this mean for Obama's policies, and just as important, Obama Supreme Court announcements?”

“Actually, it reminds me a bit of the campaign, at least the beginning and the middle, when the Obama campaign didn't seem particularly interested in reaching out to progressives,” Aravosis continues. “Once they realized that in order to win they needed to marshal everyone on their side, the reaching out began. I hope we're not seeing a similar ‘we can do it alone’ approach in the transition team.”

This isn’t the first liberal letdown over Obama, who promptly angered the left after winning the Democratic primary by announcing he backed a compromise that would allow warrantless wiretapping on U.S. soil to continue.

Now it’s Obama’s Cabinet moves that are drawing the most fire. It’s not just that he’s picked Clinton and Gates. It’s that liberal Democrats say they’re hard-pressed to find one of their own on Obama’s team so far – particularly on the economic side, where people like Tim Geithner and Lawrence Summers are hardly viewed as pro-labor.

“At his announcement of an economic team there was no secretary of labor. If you don’t think the labor secretary is on the same level as treasury secretary, that gives me pause,” said Jonathan Tasini, who runs the website workinglife.org. “The president-elect wouldn't be president-elect without labor."

During the campaign Obama gained labor support by saying he favored legislation that would make it easier for unions to form inside companies. The “card check” bill would get rid of a secret-ballot method of voting to form a union and replace it with a system that would require companies to recognize unions simply if a majority of workers signed cards saying they want one. Obama still supports that legislation, aides say – but union leaders are worried that he no longer talks it up much as president-elect.

“It's complicated,” said Tasini, who challenged Clinton for Senate in 2006. “On the one hand, the guy hasn't even taken office yet so it's a little hasty to be criticizing him. On the other hand, there is legitimate cause for concern. I think people are still waiting but there is some edginess about this.”

That’s a view that seems to have kept some progressive leaders holding their fire. There are signs of a struggle within the left wing of the Democratic Party about whether it’s just too soon to criticize Obama -- and if there’s really anything to complain about just yet.

Case in point: One of the Campaign for America’s Future blogs commented on Obama’s decision not to tax oil companies’ windfall profits saying, “Between this move and the move to wait to repeal the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, it seems like the Obama team is buying into the right-wing frame that raising any taxes - even those on the richest citizens and wealthiest corporations - is bad for the economy.”

Yet Campaign for America’s Future will be join about 150 progressive organizations, economists and labor groups to release a statement Tuesday in support of a large economic stimulus package like the one Obama has proposed, said Hickey, a co-founder of the group.

“I’ve heard the most grousing about the windfall profits tax, but on the other hand, Obama has committed himself to a stimulus package that makes a down payment on energy efficiency and green jobs,” Hickey said. “The old argument was, here’s how we afford to make these investments – we tax the oil companies’ windfall profits. … The new argument is, in a bad economy that could get worse, we don’t.”

Obama is asking for patience – saying he’s only shifting his stance on some issues because circumstances are shifting.

Aides say he backed off the windfall profits tax because oil prices have
dropped below $80 a barrel. Obama also defended hedging on the Bush tax cuts.

“My economic team right now is examining, do we repeal that through legislation? Do we let it lapse so that, when the Bush tax cuts expire, they're not renewed when it comes to wealthiest Americans?” Obama said on “Meet the Press.” “We don't yet know what the best approach is going to be.”

On Iraq, he says he’s just trying to make sure any U.S. pullout doesn’t ignite “any resurgence of terrorism in Iraq that could threaten our interests.”

Obama has told his supporters to look beyond his appointments, that the change he promised will come from him and that when his administration comes together they will be happy.

“I think that when you ultimately look at what this advisory board looks like, you'll say this is a cross-section of opinion that in some ways reinforces conventional wisdom, in some ways breaks with orthodoxy in all sorts of way,” Obama recently said in response to questions about his appointments during a news conference on the economy.

The leaders of some liberal groups are willing to wait and see.

“He hasn’t had a first day in office,” said John Isaacs, the executive director for Council for Livable World. “To me it’s not as important as who’s there, than what kind of policies they carry out.”

“These aren’t out-and-out liberals on the national security team, but they may be successful implementers of what the Obama national security policy is,” Isaacs added. “We want to see what policies are carried forward, as opposed to appointments.”

Juan Cole, who runs a prominent anti-war blog called Informed Comment, said he worries Obama will get bad advice from Clinton on the Middle East, calling her too pro-Israel and “belligerent” toward Iran. “But overall, my estimation is that he has chosen competence over ideology, and I'm willing to cut him some slack,” Cole said.

Other voices of the left don’t like what they’re seeing so far and aren’t waiting for more before they speak up.

New York Times columnist Frank Rich warned that Obama’s economic team of Summers and Geithner reminded him of John F. Kennedy’s “best and the brightest” team, who blundered in Vietnam despite their blue-chip pedigrees.

David Corn, Washington bureau chief of the liberal magazine Mother Jones, wrote in Sunday’s Washington Post that he is “not yet reaching for a pitchfork.”

But the headline of his op-ed sums up his point about Obama’s Cabinet appointments so far: “This Wasn’t Quite the Change We Envisioned.”

For those think they were and are being hoodwinked, please see the following sampling of writing detailing the concerns that are, for some, only blossoming now.

These days Barack Obama seems increasingly like Lyndon Johnson 

Now, will you please stop telling me that Sen. Obama's election is critical to women's reproductive rights

Camp Obama?! Senator Obama seems to be turning into Rev. Sun Myung Moon

Of "Truth Squads" and fear of free speech: "Heed Their Rising Voices"

Do progressives REALLY want to support a campaign starting an "official faith tour"?

The quality of intent: What is really at stake in the 2008 Presidential Election

No comparison!

Senator Obama: you are getting CREEPy

I kid you not: Senator Obama's campaign adviser is now saying he is not "like a high school-girl waiting for date."

Will the next DNC chair do a better job than Howard Dean?

In June 2008, U.S News and World Report ran a story headlined:

"Dean: Party Needs to Unify Around Obama; The DNC chair said the Democratic Party will have no money problems this year with Obama on the ticket."*

Wrong.

Among the difficulties that will beset the next DNC chair is that, regardless of whether "the Party" united around then-candidate Obama, is carrying multi-million dollar debt.**

Furthermore while "the Party" may have gone along with Dr. Dean in effectively nullifying the primary season and the Party's own rules for selecting a nominee  the next DNC chair will have to replace or regain the confidence of  voters who left the Democratic Party because of its decision to forego a free and fair roll call vote in Denver.

Amid the press coverage of cabinet appointments and transition team members, I have not yet seen any coverage of who President-elect Obama is considering for chair of the DNC. Nor have I seen mention of who wants the job, although I am sure there are people President-elect Obama has in mind.

I wonder, though, how many people want the position. Yes, the Democrats won the general election and in Washington, D.C. there's much excitement about upcoming inauguration. But the new President is walking into a first term with the country already sure to be mired in economic woe that may be beyond any remediation before the 2012 election. Whether the then sitting administration gets the blame (assuming the economy does not pick up) remains to be seen. But if it does, the new chair of the DNC will face a difficulty not completely unlike the one face by the RNC this year: how to run a successful campaign with an incumbent presiding over a moribund economy?

To me, the job looks like a thankless one. But there's some speculation that Claire McCaskill, the junior senator from Missouri, would like it.***

__________________

*Halloran, Liz. "Dean: Party Needs to Unify Around Obama; The DNC chair said the Democratic Party will have no money problems this year with Obama on the ticket.(Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean)." U.S. News & World Report. U.S. News and World Report, L.P. 2008. Retrieved December 05, 2008 from HighBeam Research: http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-180021816.html

** LIZ SIDOTI. "DNC chair faces $15M debt; fight for RNC boss." AP Online. 2008. Retrieved December 05, 2008 from HighBeam Research: http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1A1-D94DLFOO0.html 

***ARI SHAPIRO. "RNC, DNC: Who's In, Who Out?." NPR Morning Edition. 2008. Retrieved December 05, 2008 from HighBeam Research: http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P1-158079095.html

Another Sun Myung Moon moment from My Barack Obama aka the DNC

Just in from a friend who is on the President-elect's mailing list:

What IS this? It reads like some sort of tent-revival/teeny-bopper/new-age infotainment ad. Why is mybarackobama now the the new name for the Democratic Party? Is Obama for America officially operating  with 2012 in mind, as I have suggested previously, hence we are receiving messages from David Plouffe in his capacity as "Campaign Manager, Obama for America"?

In the United States of America, political parties do not have Constitutional status. They are not to be conflated with the government, which, in contast to parliamentary systems, is not in the possession of the prevailing party. And neither the head of any political party nor the President of the United States is to be conflated with government either - that would be a totalitarian regime.

President-elect Obama must come to realize that these messages coming from his campaign manager, using the resources of the debt-ridden DNC, are unbecoming to say the least. As a Democrat, they make me cringe. I have no problem with patriotism, I have no problem with politicians building their base. But as a Democrat and a democrat, I shy away from messages that sound cultish or invoke the style of Sunday morning TV preachers to "encourage" everybody to "plan the next steps for this movement". What movement? Mr. Obama: you are the President now. Your job is not to lead a movement, if it ever was. Your job is to lead the country, the entire country, not just those who supported you or voted you. You are the chief executive officer of the United States of America. Form your cabinet, staff the executive branch, and lead the country. In the meantime, please note, it is, again to say the least, unseemly to have your Campaign Manager sending messages with a graphic that makes no mention of the United States but just continues to refer to "CHANGE" and displays your personal symbol. We need a president, not a guru.

Compare the above with Reverend Moon's organizational materials to catch the similarities in style, if not content. Examples here.

Who will be the next DNC Chair?

The DNC is in the red and is now shilling commemorative coffee mugs to try to pay down its debt. The new DNC chair, who will be selected by President-elect Obama. Since President-elect seems disinclined to bail out the DNC with his own campaign funds (he is permitted to give as much as he wants to the Party from those funds), it will be interesting to see who he selects.

Meanwhile here's a blast from the past, in a year when the Party had to elect a chair. Guess who wrote it?

This Saturday in Orlando, at a meeting of state party chairs, a parade of potential candidates are going to be making the case for why they should be the next chair of the Democratic National Committee.

I don’t have a candidate. But I do have a litmus test: Anyone raising the idea that the party needs to “move to the middle” should immediately be escorted out of the building. Better yet, a trap door should open beneath them, sending them plummeting down an endless chute into electoral purgatory — which is exactly where the party will be permanently headquartered if it continues to adopt such a strategy.

Among those eyeing the position are Howard Dean, former White House aide Harold Ickes, Texas Rep. Marty Frost, former Denver Mayor Wellington Webb, former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk, New Democrat Network founder Simon Rosenberg, political strategist Donnie Fowler, and telecom exec Leo Hindery.

Although less than 450 people will ultimately decide who becomes the next party chair, when the DNC votes on Feb. 12, the outcome will have a profound effect on shaping the party’s future. Will Democrats continue to toe the strategy line of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council that has brought them to the brink of permanent minority-party status? Or will they finally return to the party’s roots and recapture its lost political soul — and the White House and Congress with it?

Welcome to the Great Democratic Party Identity Crisis of 2005.

Ever since the election, Democratic leaders have been crawling over each other in a mad scramble to the middle. Indeed, this is the worst case of midriff bulge since Kirstie Alley stopped by Sizzler’s all-you-can-eat buffet.

“Things are accomplished in the middle. We have to work toward the middle. And I think that that’s clear.” That was new Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid on “Meet the Press” this weekend. He didn’t elaborate on what good was “clearly accomplished” in the middle over the past four years, but perhaps he was referring to the invasion of Iraq. Almost makes you long for the spineless bleating of Tom Daschle, doesn’t it?

Last week’s meeting of the 21-strong Democratic Governors Association was similarly an orgy of centrist groping, best summed up by Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, who said, “This, for us, is our moment to push an agenda . . . that is centrist and that speaks to where most people are.”

If Gov. Granholm, a rising star in the party, really thinks the center is where the majority of people were located this past election, the Democrats are in even worse trouble than we think. Have these people learned nothing from 2000, 2002 and 2004? How many more concession speeches do they have to give — from “the center” — before they realize it’s not a very fruitful place?

Putting aside for a moment the question of the party’s soul and focusing entirely on hardball politics, running to the middle has been proven to be the single stupidest strategy the Democrats can pursue.

As cognitive psychologist George Lakoff told me: “Democrats moving to the middle is a double disaster that alienates the party’s progressive base while simultaneously sending a message to swing voters that the other side is where the good ideas are.” It unconsciously locks in the notion that the other side’s positions are worth moving toward, while your side’s positions are the ones to move away from. Plus every time you move to the center, the right just moves further to the right.

And if middle-of-the-roadism is such a great vote-getter, why don’t we see Republicans moving there? In fact, framing the political debate in right-left terms is so old, so tired, and so wrong that we need to resist all temptation to do so. There is nothing left-wing about wanting corporations to pay their fair share rather than hide their profits in PO boxes in Bermuda, or in ensuring access to health care now rather than paying the bill at the emergency room later.

That’s why the DNC race is so important. The party needs a chairman able to drive a stake through the heart of its bankrupt GOP-lite strategy and champion the populist economic agenda that has already proven potent at the ballot box in many conservative parts of the country. Just how potent is revealed in “The Democrats’ Da Vinci Code,” a brilliant upcoming American Prospect cover story by David Sirota that shows how a growing number of Democrats in some of the reddest regions in America have racked up impressive, against-the-grain wins by framing a progressive economic platform in terms of values and right vs. wrong. These are not “left” ideas; they are good ideas.

“This,” writes Sirota, “is not the traditional (and often condescending) Democratic pandering about the need for a nanny government to provide for the masses. It is us-versus-them red meat, straight talk about how the system is working against ordinary Americans.” These red-state progressives have brought the Democratic Party back to its true calling and delivered, according to Sirota, “as powerful a statement about morality and authenticity as any of the GOP’s demagoguery on ‘guns, God, and gays.’”

This strategy of economic populism coincides perfectly with what is the most significant shift in Democratic politics in a generation: the astounding growth of a grassroots donor base. Thanks in no small part to the Internet, the Kerry campaign and the DNC raised between them over $300 million from grassroots donors. Kerry alone raised over $71 million from donors who contributed $200 or less. What’s more, the DNC experienced a sevenfold increase in donors — skyrocketing from 400,000 in 2000 to the 2.7 million who contributed in 2004.

This reallocation of power away from lobbyists and big corporate donors will finally allow Democrats to stop taking policy dictation from their corporate financiers and start offering up an alternative vision to compete with George Bush’s. But only if the will is there — which means only if the next DNC chair understands and embraces this tectonic shift.

And only if he promises, at all costs, to stop playing in the middle of the road.

The emphases are mine. Do check out the author of the piece.