“A second term for Obama would bring on a socialist nightmare hellscape as he moves further to the left.” Dick Morris on Fox News.
“To me, the gap between President Obama and these people [the GOP candidates] is so enormous that it’s a threat to our country to elect people who take such a silly view of the rest of the world.“ Russ Feingold, former Senator and one of President Obama’s re-election co-chairs.
These statements are typical of campaign season. Even Van Jones–who can be one of the best, most uplifting public speakers (and who has personally inspired me)–must stoop to organizing support for Obama by painting a scary picture of the opposition. Forget the past four years of lies, lost battles, and disappointments, Jones says, and fight for Obama this year… or be decimated (and worse) by the Tea Party!
Jones also talks about the risks that people took when fighting for labor and civil rights. “They knew what it meant to fight for change, for real,” he says, pointing out that people marched, were beaten, and even killed. He uses this history to bridge from the disappointment of Wisconsin to calling on the rest of the “progressives” in the United States to do more.
That would be fine, if he were not using that history to ask for more on behalf of the Democratic Party and the re-election of President Obama. Activists (that is, real regular everyday oppressed people and allies) who bravely fought against oppression to obtain labor and civil rights fought for their own interests and/or on behalf of what was right. To me, this seems like a crucial difference. Read Dr. King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail with this question in mind: Do King’s tactics correspond to what Jones advocates (that people use their energy and resources to elect someone who will work with them to bring change)? I think not; Dr. King also appears to expressly rejects that approach in Why We Can’t Wait – at least as I read the text.
In his Netroots speech, Jones is both patronizing and deceitful. Since the latter is more important, I will only address it. He claims that the Tea Party is “already corrupting the Supreme Court, you see that in Scalia’s antics; they already have half of the Congress; if they get the rest of it and the White House…”
Ignoring his claim regarding the Supreme Court and Scalia’s “antics” (which is too vague to address, or to take seriously), you can see that he equates the Tea Party with Republicans, in general. This is a lie. The Tea Party does not control Congress, or the Republican Party. This is abundantly clear, the best evidence of which is that Tea Party candidates sometimes run against “moderate” Republicans. Jones threatens that they might get the White House if too many disappointed people try to “teach [Obama] a lesson.” So Jones is worried that teaching Obama a lesson will lead to Romney winning… But wait, isn’t Ron Paul the Tea Party candidate? Romney is not, that is for sure. Jones is not concerned with facts in this speech, just pushing his agenda. Such is the nature or partisan politics.
Where is Jones going with this? Is hope dead? After electing Obama and saving ourselves from the Tea Party horde, is it four more years of disappointment? Here is how blogger Scarecrow recapped Jones’s message:
“So after uniting to slay the Tea Party barbarians in November, the progressives’ second mission is ‘to hold this President accountable.’ That’s it. After they fight the trench warfare necessary to get Democrats and Mr. Obama elected to the last electoral campaign he’ll ever enter, somehow they’re supposed to ‘hold him accountable.’ At this point, Jones was a bit vague about how that could happen after the election; he changed the subject.“ (Emphasis added).
I do not blame Jones for being vague on this point – it is impossible to hold someone accountable after his last election. His “second goal for progressives”–a patently impossible one–is just another deceptive, partisan trick.
I do blame him for using lies to scare voters into supporting a President who has not served them, even though it is politics as usual in the United States. Jones went on to call it a “fear election” because the “Tea Party will decimate us” (Really? They will “decimate us”?). I agree that it will be a “fear election” because advocates on both sides rely on fear to motivate, which itself makes sense. For most Americans, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are terrible candidates. That is obvious, now. This is most certainly not an election in which you can play on people’s naive hopes (like in 2008); this year, partisan advocates play on fear to motivate.
Ultimately, I think statements like Jones’s, Feingold’s, and Morris’s tend to confirm two things: (1) Presidential candidates that win Democratic and Republican primaries tend to suck, overall, so it is difficult to make an affirmative case for them (this year, you already knew that); and (2) you should think for yourself! If it weren’t for pundits and scaremongers pushing the two-party system, most people would recognize that when facing a choice between a candidate who lied and betrayed, on the one hand, and another who is certain to lie and also faithfully serve elite interests, on the other, you should vote for someone else.
What Jones apparently does not consider is this: Why has the country moved to the right, leading to the emergence of the Tea Party and an extraordinarily disappointing Democratic President? He should. Don’t we need to stop this movement to achieve “change, for real”? One important factor is that voters tell both parties to do that as a direct consequence of not holding people like President Obama accountable. If a Democrat gains votes by moving right, and loses none on the left because the left fears a Republican victory, why on earth would the Democrats stop moving to the right? They are a political party, and they need votes above all. If you disagree, please explain how liberals will hold Obama accountable next term–something Van Jones could not do–and what they could have done differently during this term.
Finally, I would like to ask what Jones means by “change for real.” I think he means a progressive reordering of political values, and in turn, a progressive reordering of society. If that or something similar is what he wants, how in our political system will four more years of Obama–and under his rationale an indefinite regime of Democrats and Republicans–produce that change? More importantly, can real progressive change be based on fear and lies? I don’t think so; but you should think about and answer that for yourself.
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