In commenting about John Boehner’s resignation from Speaker
of the House and Congress, President Obama told the Big Lie in American
politics. It’s a lie that virtually all mainstream politicians tell and that’s
presented positively by most Democrats and negatively by all Republicans.
The lie is that Boehner and Obama are on opposite ends of
the political spectrum. Now the President didn’t spell it out in detail, but
what he communicated to everyone when he said he and Boehner are on opposite
ends of the political spectrum is that Obama is on the left and Boehner is on
the right. To be sure, Boehner is to the right of Obama, although there are
many such as Ted Cruz and Kevin McCarthy who are much farther right than the
retiring Boehner.
But Barack Obama, like so many in the Democratic Party, are
centrists looking left. Certainly Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie
Sanders are left of Obama, but that doesn’t even begin to cover the possible ground
to the left of our president. Think of Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, George
McGovern, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or FDR’s best VP, Henry Wallace. If we expand to all the legitimate stable
democracies of the world, the right-centrists in countries such as Germany and
the Scandinavian countries are to the left of Barack Obama. And then we come to
Willie Brandt and Helmut Schmidt and the golden age of democratic socialism.
If we were to analyze the positions advocated in the work of
legitimate sociologists, political scientists and historians in the English
speaking world—those who don’t depend on think tanks for funding, we would find
that Obama would at best be a centrist.
And let’s not forget that Obama typically follows the
hawkish right-looking American foreign policy of the last 70 years. He is not
as hawkish as the Republicans who want to bomb everything that moves in the
Middle East outside of Israel, but Obama is in favor of using drones,
developing automated weapons, wholesale NSA spying on citizens, using foreign
policy to help large U.S. multinational corporations grow their businesses and projecting
a strong U.S. military presence throughout the world. Of course, no person can
be elected president who does not accept the basic premises of the military-industrial
complex.
It is only in the bizarre world of 21st American mainstream
politics, truncated by big money and a rightwing news media, that Barack Obama can
imply that he is a the left end of the spectrum with a straight face and not
have a dozen journalists call him on it.
The news media has always kept the American public firmly
focused on maintaining the myth that a narrow part of the political spectrum
represents all possibilities. And since 1980, that narrow part of the spectrum
has moved considerably rightward, to the point that on all but the very basic
social issues such as gay marriage, Barack Obama and the Clintons are about
where Dwight Eisenhower was in the 1950s.
The news media defines the terms of the debate in many ways,
including:
·
Defining the issues in terms of rightwing language
and predilections, e.g., assuming we have to cut the deficit and discussing spending
cuts but not tax increases to eliminate the deficit.
·
Allowing the ultra-right to have their views
aired in the public forum, while ignoring anyone left of mainstream Democrats.
·
Selection of Op/Ed experts and academic studies
they publish. My favorite example in recent years was the extensive coverage
that the media gave to a study that showed that an enormous number of TV weather
personalities—half of whom are talking heads and none of whom are experts in
climatology—have doubts about global warming, while completely ignoring a study
that demonstrated how the world could produce twice the electricity it needs
using clean wind energy.
·
Using the so-called fairness doctrine to let
rightwing lies gain or maintain credence, for example quoting both sides in
debates that have already been settled such as human-created global warming and
the safety of vaccines. In both instances, a story will quote the one expert
who doubts global warming or thinks that vaccines cause autism and one of the
99+% of all the experts who rightfully think that humans are causing global
warming or that vaccines are safe.
·
Letting rightwing lies stand. The media is
willing to go after politicians who lie about their own accomplishments like
Carly Fiorina or behave hypocritically (e.g., gay politicians who condemn other
gays, such as ex-Senator Larry Craig). But they are much more reluctant to highlight
policy lies, such as the lie that raising the minimum wage destroys jobs or
that we are undergoing a crime wave.
·
Selective coverage, for example, covering
right-wing politicians but not progressives; focusing on Republican primaries
in which to right-wingers are battling it out, but not Democratic primaries. To
see what I mean, try looking up the instances when the “liberal” New York Times calls a Democratic
politician “brave” in a feature story over the past five years. In virtually
all instance, that politician is fighting unions.
When compared to the corporate factotums who are most of the
current crop of American politicians, Obama looks very good to progressives.
But compared to the possibilities that exist out there, he is a centrist. A
true progressive would favor a wealth tax—a tax that people pay annually on all
assets over a certain amount, say $5 million. A true progressive would never
favor any movement such as charter schools that hurts unions. A true
progressive would clamor for single-payer nationalized health insurance. A true
progressive would advocate the unilateral dismantling of all nuclear weapons.
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