There are some folks in town who are intensely dissatisfied with the "make haste slowly" product of the Obama Administration's first year in office and have begun circulating a petition that seeks a pledge from the signers not to support the president's reelection in 2012. These are such early days, especially given the intransigent behavior of the Republican minority in the Senate and the cold feet of the conservative Democratic Senators from the " Red" states. One does not know whether the president will even seek a second term.
This well-intentioned but impetuous initiative led me to part company with the petitioners. I spend a fair amount of time every day following the national scene, as has been my practice for many years. I am glad to agree with Guy Gambill who writes elsewhere about the shallowness of the anti-Obama petition on many counts in the international arena and suggest that that's just the start of an even longer list that has salience in national, state, and local venues.
The Conservatives are now firmly anchored in a negative posture that becomes more ludicrous by the day. Being anti-Obama as a global position, fixed in cement in 2010, lends credence to the hard right and implies a belief in the powers of the presidency that didn't work for Woodrow Wilson and nearly lost FDR the tools to get as far as he did in the face of the Depression.
Recall if you will the need for an adroit workaround to get destroyers to a Britain that would otherwise have fallen to Hitler. Or the Murmansk run that bought time for the Soviets to establish a trans-Ural industrial capacity that eventually crushed the Germans' eastern front. An ugly business compounded by horrific anti-Semitism all around.
Closer to home, Truman brought an end to overt racism in the US military but it took Eisenhower's use of the 81st Airborne to force Faubus to stand aside in Little Rock. These were years when Jewish folks weren't able to buy homes in the alphabet streets south of Uptown. IMHO it took the assassination of JFK to give LBJ the leverage to achieve passage of the civil rights bill and it took the assassination of Dr. King and subsequent widespread violence in urban centers across the nation - including Minneapolis, BTW - to set safety net programs in motion on a sufficient scale however shaky in execution.
The nation was wounded severely by criminal behavior during the Nixon presidency, by illegal adventures in Central America during the Reagan years, by the abuse of the impeachment process during the Clinton years, and by the gross abuse of power from start to finish during GWB's presidency. Cleaning up this mess will take generations, not just the term-limited presidencies we have in place and concurrently we have seen an ominous resurgence of fascist elements in the United States that are deeply embedded in the military and that work their will on a Congress tied in knots by Republican obstructionism.
Pressuring the present administration, ridiculing the likes of Pawlenty and Sarah Palin, beating back the right-wing insanities exemplified by Republican candidates for the Minnesota congressional seats, advocating for pragmatic treatment of the social crises that descend upon us as the economy continues to contract and state and local resources fall deeper into negative balances, crafting policy initiatives that address the failing public school system and the irrelevance of much post-secondary education, becoming informed about safety net strategies that actually work, and giving some hard thought to the imbalance of power that surrounds us - all good to go.
Vowing to dump Barack Obama leads immediately to the question "and then what?" If there is another three-way race for the presidency in 2012 as happened in 1992, do you really think that another left-center candidate will achieve success at the ballot box? The Nader candidacy in 2000 was deadly to Gore's chances and a de facto boost to Republican apparatchiks who were ruthless and ultimately successful.
At the state level in the 2010 election cycle, such dispositions may not cost us statewide offices or have a significant effect on the congressional races, but the Minnesota House of Representatives is not a done deal and if the Republicans are sufficiently successful because the left is sitting on its hands for national and international reasons, without doubt the calculus that goes into redistricting and the economic strategies that have to be crafted no matter who holds the policy offices will be adversely affected and the question will be "by how much".
Taking intransigent positions is perfectly normal and necessary in our public lives, but it is foolhardy to sacrifice capacity to the purity of intent if one's purpose is to have a role in the political mud wrestling that actually goes on.
