Delegation Attacks Obama

Comments made over the weekend by members of Oklahoma’s Congressional delegation that argue President Barack Obama is a leftist who needs to get to the center are simply untrue.

As I written before, Obama is a “centrist” by any rational definition of the word. He supports big businesses while continuing many right-wing policies created during a Republican-dominated government. He has escalated the military occupation in Afghanistan. He has bailed out Wall Street banks and huge automobile manufacturers, earning him the ire of his progressive supporters. His push for health care reform has been effectively stripped of any public option that might hold insurers accountable, and this, too, has disappointed progressive voters.

Let’s be clear. The president supports the corporate/military /industrial complex and will not try to change the power structure embedded in it. He has not proposed one program that can be construed as radical in the leftist sense. He inherited a huge deficit from a Republican president and extended it only to help revive the economy, which has actually improved in a technical sense.

But, according to a NewsOK story, Oklahoma’s Congressional delegation, including U.S. Rep. Dan Boren, a fellow Democrat, see Obama as a lefty who needs to "get to where the American people are, which is somewhere in the center” (Boren’s words), claiming the president “is well to the left of the American people “ (U.S. Rep. Tom Cole’s words.)

The comments, which were made during an Oklahoma Press Association convention, reek of political pandering and calculation. Oklahoma is a conservative bastion, for sure, and Obama is unpopular here for debatable reasons, but that still doesn’t make him a lefty. The story, of course, is short on specific information and long on political rhetoric. The rhetoric makes it difficult to even have a discussion about what constitutes left, right and center.

The real reason the federal legislative process can be construed as ineffective and partisan right now is because of obstructionist Republican senators, who offer no realistic plans or programs and simply oppose Obama no matter what he does. The arcane rules of the U.S. Senate give a lot of power to the minority political party and individual senators through the filibuster and holds.

Here’s what Paul Krugman, a columnist for The New York Times, says about the state of the current U.S. Senate:

The truth is that given the state of American politics, the way the Senate works is no longer consistent with a functioning government. Senators themselves should recognize this fact and push through changes in those rules, including eliminating or at least limiting the filibuster. This is something they could and should do, by majority vote, on the first day of the next Senate session.

Republican senators need to move to the center, not the president. That’s what the country voted for in 2008. The GOP, with help from conservative Democrats, is ramping up the political rhetoric about Obama, but failing this country.