From: Adam Green, BoldProgressives.org
Sent: Wednesday, December 01, 2010 5:04 AM
Subject: awesome new TV ad
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Our new TV ad tells Pres. Obama to keep his promise on taxes.
Watch here and chip in $4 to air it!
Ed,
President Obama clearly promised during his campaign: "We will also allow the
temporary Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans to expire."
So we found footage from the campaign, and today we're using it in a new TV ad
holding Obama to his promise.
Click here to see our new TV ad -- and chip in $4 to air it this week in DC.
Our ad also includes devastating video of House Republican leader John Boehner
admitting he would cave if President Obama fought hard on this issue.
When Democrats stand with 98% of Americans and Republicans stand with only the
wealthiest 2%, it's absolutely insane for Democrats to be obsessed with
"compromise."
This is a winnable fight for Democrats -- if Obama keeps his promise and fights!
Help make sure the White House sees this message by chipping in $4 air this new
ad in DC.
We'll run this ad as long as regular people keep funding it. So please donate
what you can and pass this email to others. Thanks for being a bold progressive.
-- Adam Green and Stephanie Taylor, PCCC co-founders
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Want to support our work? We're entirely funded by our members—no corporate
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***
Ed - Write Intro
http://www.thenation.com/article/156384/obama-without-tears
Obama Without Tears
William Greider
his article appeared in the November 29, 2010 edition of The Nation.
Given the election results, the question Barack Obama has to decide for
himself is whether he really wants to be president in the fullest sense. Not
a moderator for earnest policy discussions. Not the national cheerleader for
hope. Not the worthy visionary describing a distant future. Those qualities
are elements in any successful presidency, and Obama applies them with
admirable skill and seriousness.
What's missing with this president is power-a strong grasp of the powers he
possesses and the willingness to govern the country with them. During the
past two years, this missing quality has been consistently obvious in his
rhetoric and substantive policy positions. There is a cloying Boy Scout
quality in his style of leadership-the troop leader urging boys to work
together on their merit badges-and none of the pigheaded stubbornness of his
"I am the decider" predecessor, nor the hard steel of Lyndon Johnson or the
guile of Richard Nixon.
Obama has patience and the self-confidence not to insist that his solution
is the best and only one. On many vital questions, he went so far as to not
even say what his solution was. Such a governing style is too nice for
real-life politics, where Boy Scouts get their heads handed to them.
Some politicians may enjoy Obama's generous spirit, but many despise him for
it. Washington always takes the measure of a new president and tests him
early on. Congress and the surrounding power centers, swiftly reading
weakness in this president, decided they would fill the vacuum Obama left
for them.
A friend and longtime warrior for liberal reforms described what unfolded in
harsh but accurate terms: "First he was rolled by the bankers, then he was
rolled by the generals, then he was rolled by the Blue Dogs and other
Democrats who had no interest in going along with what he proposed." Obama
seemed exceedingly tolerant of resisting forces and even cooperated with
them. Or maybe he privately agreed with them. He never made it clear.
Perhaps because he was young and relatively inexperienced, Obama surrounded
himself with savvy veterans of Washington's inside baseball. He inherited
his economic advisers from Robert Rubin, his political team from former
Senate leader Tom Daschle and center-right Clintonistas like Rahm Emanuel.
Together with old friends from the academy, the administration was
overstaffed with intellectual abstraction and short on street-smart
politicians, especially any harboring liberal instincts. That pretty much
ruled out the "change" many voters had expected. It produced a tone-deaf
seminar of policy thinkers in which Obama assumed he was hearing all sides.
Republicans, who are masters of deceptive marketing, seized on Obama's most
appealing qualities and turned them upside down. Their propaganda cast him
not as soft but as a power-mad (black) leftist, destroying democracy with
socialist schemes. The portrait was so ludicrous and mendacious, the
president's party hardly bothered to respond. Egged on by the Republican
Party and Fox News, right-wing frothers conjured sicko fantasies and extreme
accusations: the president is not only a black man (bad enough for the party
of the white South); he is not even American. The vindictive GOP strategy is
racial McCarthyism, demonizing this honorable man as an alien threat, just
as cold war Republicans depicted left-liberal Democrats as commie
sympathizers.
Even Obama supporters began to ask, Where is the fight in the man? Some
critics blame a lack of courage, but that neglects the extraordinary nerve
Obama displayed in his rise to the White House-a young black man with an
unusual name and limited experience who triumphed through his audacity.
Obama's governing style is a function of his biography-a man who grew up
always in the middle, both black and white. He succeeded by learning rare
skills, the ability to bridge different worlds comfortably and draw people
together across racial, political and intellectual divides. He learned to
charm and disarm, not to smash and conquer.
For the first time in his life, those qualities seem to have failed him.
Indeed, he may have been misled by his high regard for his own talents. This
is really his first encounter with devastating political defeat. The
question now is, What will he learn from his "shellacking"? Possibly not
much, since it is always very hard to rethink and adjust in midstream. But
remember, this man is an unusually observant politician with a great thirst
for self-reflection. One can reasonably hope that as he absorbs the hard
knocks, he will make calculated changes in how he governs.
Bluntly put, Obama needs to learn hardball. People saw this in him when he
fired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, and many of us yearn to see more. If he
absorbs the lesson of power, he will accept that sometimes in politics you
can't split the difference or round off sharp edges. He has to push back
aggressively and stand his ground, more like those ruthless opponents trying
to bury him. If Congress won't act, the president will. But first he has to
switch from cheerleading to honest talk. Tell people what the nation really
needs, what Republicans intend to sabotage. In a political street fight,
you've got to hit back.
Only Obama can decide this about himself, but others can influence the
outcome by surrounding him with tough love and new circumstances created by
their own direct actions. It does not help Obama to keep telling him he did
great but the people misunderstood him. He did lousy, not great, and in many
governing dimensions people understood his failures clearly enough. They
knew he gave tons of money to bankers and demanded nothing in return. They
knew he thought the economy was in recovery. They couldn't believe this
intelligent man was that clueless.
Popular forces can blow away the fuzziness. They can mobilize to demonstrate
visible support for the president's loftier goals and to warn him off the
temptation to pursue a Clintonesque appeasement of the right. Given the
fragile status of his presidency, Obama needs to know that caving in is sure
to encourage enemies and drive off disheartened supporters. People should,
likewise, call out the president's enemies and attack them with the
harshness that's out of character for him. The racial McCarthyism of the GOP
establishment is a good place to start.
People who still have great hope for Obama can help revive his presidency,
but only if they toughen up themselves. Stop holding his hand (he's an
adult) and start building a people's agenda that compels the president to
change his. Obama won't like this at first-his own supporters talking
back-but he can learn to draw strength from their courage. If people fail to
step up with their own message, the president will likely fail with his.
William Greider
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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