In fact, if Obama pulls any more of that neoliberal shit, especially if it comes to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, mark my words, he's not just a lame duck, he's a dead duck president.
That will be the end of the Democratic Party or the end of the neoliberal takeover of the Democratic Party.
If Obama wins, to put it bluntly, he will become the Democrats’ Reagan. The narrative writes itself. He will emerge as an iconic figure who struggled through a recession and a terrorized world, reshaping the economy within it, passing universal health care, strafing the ranks of al -Qaeda, presiding over a civil-rights revolution, and then enjoying the fruits of the recovery. To be sure, the Obama recovery isn’t likely to have the same oomph as the one associated with Reagan—who benefited from a once-in-a-century cut of top income tax rates (from 70 percent to, at first, 50 percent, and then to 28 percent) as well as a huge jump in defense spending at a time when the national debt was much, much less of a burden. But Obama’s potential for Reagan status (maybe minus the airport-naming) is real. Yes, Bill Clinton won two terms and is a brilliant pol bar none, as he showed in Charlotte in the best speech of both conventions. But the crisis Obama faced on his first day—like the one Reagan faced—was far deeper than anything Clinton confronted, and the future upside therefore is much greater. And unlike Clinton’s constant triangulating improvisation, Obama has been playing a long, strategic game from the very start—a long game that will only truly pay off if he gets eight full years to see it through. That game is not only changing America. It may also bring his opposition, the GOP, back to the center, just as Reagan indelibly moved the Democrats away from the far left.
He's giving Obama too much credit. The rightward lurch is downright destructive to the country. Look at the shit he is pulling with education policy, for example, which undermines basic democratic insitututions. The party has NEVER been on the "far left" anyway, you stupid shit Sullivan. FDR, Truman, JFK, LBJ, and Carter were NEVER "far left." The ONLY "far left" presidential candidate in Democratic Party history was George McGovern, and that is because NIXON and his henchmen PICKED him. THAT is what Watergate was about.
Of course Sullivan is way too young to remember any of this. He was born in 1963 and in another country to have any real knowledge of any of this.
The fact is Obama is the culmination of a longstanding attempt by the right to infiltrate the Democratic Party. He is not a Democrat by any real stretch of the imagination and never has been. The GOP has long been run into the ground by John Birch and libertarian/neoliberal crazies; it's now the Democratic Party's turn to be similarly infiltrated.
I don't want this neoliberal crap anymore. Nor do millions of other people. Furthermore, I couldn't care less if a far-right Obama forces the GOP to go back to the "center." It won't happen because the northeastern liberal wing of the GOP, who were political moderates in many ways, has died out since Reagan.
What we really have are two political parties doing the bidding of the financial elites, with one party more sneaky than the other. What we really need is a SECOND POLITICAL PARTY.
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