Done with Change, Over Hope

I’m done with politics for a while.

I’m disgusted, dejected, and discouraged.

I’m done with change and over hope.

No more will I respond to e-mail alerts from well-meaning but underfunded progressive organizations, no more will I e-mail or phone the people who are supposed to represent my interests in Washington D.C., no more will I pull my hair and gnash my teeth over the latest Obama capitulation.

I can’t do it, at least not without driving myself crazy or into a prolonged depression. I thought the Bush years were aggravating – and they were – but to watch the candidate I voted for bend over and spread his ass cheeks to appease the GOP, well, that’s beyond what I can tolerate. The latest tax giveaway to the rich was the straw that snapped the camel’s spine. I called, I wrote, I signed petition after petition, yet the package went forward just the same, pushed by Obama, to the delight of the wealthy; they received the goodies their campaign contributions paid for.

If I keep writing about politics I’m going to become a crank, like the one Philip Roth describes in Exit Ghost: “Otherwise, I told myself, you’ll become the exemplary letter-to-the-editor madman, the village grouch, manifesting the syndrome in all its seething ridiculousness: ranting and raving while you read the paper.”

I’m not naïve. I expected a limited resemblance between candidate Obama and President Obama, but I didn’t expect that Obama would become the second coming of Bill Clinton, surround himself with Clinton-era apparatchiks, and take economic advice from the likes of Robert Rubin and Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner; I didn’t expect that he would bow and scrape and become Wall Street’s lackey.

I never thought that President Obama would endorse the Bush era economic plan: endless tax cuts that largely benefit the rich and endless foreign wars that benefit no one. But endorse them he has, putting his presidency and the Democratic Party in a box come 2012.

For a man blessed with such eloquence, why does Barack Obama find it so difficult to articulate a coherent vision of who he is and what he stands for?

Obama has taken to spinning the truth like a run-of-the-mill D.C. PR flack, calling the tax giveaway the product of compromise with the GOP and an economic stimulus package that will grow the economy. The truth is that the tax deal will exacerbate the federal deficit, add fuel to Republicans who want to dismantle Social Security and Medicare, and do little to promote job growth.

In Afghanistan, Obama claims things are on-track and that some American forces may depart next summer, though naturally this depends on conditions on the ground and how prepared the Afghan military is to take over. If the Afghan Army isn’t ready now, after nine years and billions of dollars, why should we believe things will be any different by mid-2011? Or by 2014 for that matter? Obama is selling us a fantasy at a time we cannot afford a costly and unwinnable foreign war. Strip away all the military-speak and the fact is that a few hundred al-Qaeda forces have effectively tied up 100,000 American troops – the sophisticated forces of an empire -- at a cost of $120 billion a year.

The war continues and the tax cuts continue and the calls for spending cuts continue and the tone deafness of the ruling class continues, and the people are impotent, far more interested in American Idol and the Kardashians than they are in how their children’s prospects are being diminished by a political and economic system owned and operated by plutocrats for the benefit of plutocrats.

Time to back off and think about something other than the death spiral of the American Dream.