Subject: [big campaign] New Huff Post from Creamer-Who’s to Blame for Stalling Key Parts of the Obama Ag
From: [email-masked]
To: [email-masked]
Date: Wed, 24 Feb 2010 09:41:54 EST
List-Id: <bigcampaign.googlegroups.com>

Who’s to Blame for Stalling Key Parts of the Obama  Agenda? 
Those who don’t live in the nation’s capital may so far have been spared  
the columnist-generated imbroglio over who is “to blame” for the fact that 
many  of President Obama’s flagship initiatives have yet to pass into  law. 
Many candidates have been nominated: Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel,  
Senior Adviser David Axelrod, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, Senior Adviser  
Valerie Jarrett, former White House Counsel Greg Craig, Attorney General 
Eric  Holder, and even White House Social Secretary Desiree Rogers. 
The correct answer: None of the  above.   
The people who are responsible  for the difficulty of making fundamental 
change within the first year of the  Obama Administration don’t have familiar 
names.  They are the people who run the huge  insurance companies, oil 
companies and Wall Street Banks.  They are the people who will lose if the  rest 
of America wins. They are the folks  whose recklessness and greed caused the 
collapse of our economy and cost seven  million Americans their jobs. 
Not  surprisingly, these people have not rolled over and played dead when 
their  interests have been threatened.  And  their ability to protect the 
status quo has been strengthened by the rules of  the U.S. Senate that have 
empowered some of their chief defenders, such as Joe  Lieberman and Mitch 
McConnell.  
They’ve used their massive financial muscle to mislead everyday  Americans. 
 They have been perfectly  willing to lie and distort and inflame fear.  
They are the authors of bogus “death  panels” and  “government  takeovers.”  
They are the source of  massive political contributions, and the fear that 
politicians who cross them  will pay a price.  
They have financed a “populist” uprising on the right.   
In short, they have done  everything that anyone familiar with American 
political history would assume  they would do.  Power surrenders  nothing 
without a struggle. 
Change turns out to be harder than a lot of people thought and  hoped.  But 
what the hell did we  expect. The other side plays hardball. 
To beat them, we  have to start where we are and get where we want to go.  
We can’t start where we wish we  were…or wish our opposition out of 
existence.   
The Obama  Administration has been forced to make some compromises.  But to 
their credit they have not trimmed  back their ambitious agenda – their 
goal of transforming the American economy --  to deal with the massive problems 
they faced from the day they took  office. 
They have not taken the advice of people like Mark Penn or Dick Morris to  
focus on amassing small victories.  They know that in confronting the 
challenges that America  faces today,  small victories are  simply not enough.  
They know that  we need bold, transformational change – and if that takes 
longer than we’d like,  that is simply the price we have to pay for our future. 
Leslie Gelb, whose article on Rahm Emanuel in the Daily Beast says that “no 
one I’ve  talked to believes he has the management skills and discipline to 
run the White  House” is just wrong.  And he must  have forgotten the 
disciplined, driven way Rahm oversaw the Democratic victory  in 2006 to retake 
the House. Emanuel gets things done, and that is exactly what  you need when 
you’re trying to pass a transformative agenda. 
David Axelrod is a brilliant crafter of message – and the engineer (along  
with David Plouffe) of the best-run Presidential campaign in the history of  
American politics.   
Bob Gibbs is exactly the kind of plain-spoken, straight-ahead press  
secretary that average Americans want to hear.  And Valerie Jarrett is an 
effective –  and absolutely loyal -- Senior Adviser.  By the way, it’s a damned 
good thing for a President to have some people  by his side whose loyalty he 
need never question. 
Has the Obama team  made mistakes? Of course.  I think  they would have 
done better to take a tougher line with Wall Street,  sooner.  I’m sure they 
would admit,  in retrospect, that they should have done everything in their 
power to end Max  Baucus’ months-long tango with the Republicans that delayed 
passage of the  health care bill until after the Massachusetts disaster. And 
they might even  agree that they should have used the 51-vote budget 
reconciliation process to do  health care reform from the beginning.  But then 
again, hindsight is 20-20.  
And let’s remember that the  record of this Administration for major new 
initiatives is pretty  impressive.   
* Saving the economy from complete meltdown – another Great Depression  
--following the failure of eight years of right wing economic policy and  
financial risk-taking “gone wild,”  including his bold rescue of the American 
auto industry.   
* Laying the first layer of a foundation for long-term, bottom-up  economic 
growth by passing the largest economic recovery package in history and  a 
Federal Budget that the Center on Budget Priorities called the most  
progressive budget in half a century. 
* Abandoning the failed Neo-Con foreign policy and changing our  
relationship with the rest of the world. 
* Signing into law measures that had repeatedly passed the Democratic  
Congress but been vetoed by George Bush – the “Matthew Shepard” bill that  
expands the definition of hate crimes to include sexual orientation, expanding  
the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), and passing the “
Lilly  Ledbetter Fair Pay Act” that seriously strengthened the ability of women 
to seek  redress for employment discrimination.  
* The Administration and Congress ended a program of wasteful subsidies  to 
private banks that provided student loans using Federal money, and used the 
 savings to greatly expand Pell Grants to college students. 
* Executive actions like ending the “Global Gag Rule” that prevented U.S.  
foreign aid from going to family planning programs that even mentioned  
abortion – and changes in labor law enforcement that make it easier to organize 
 in the workplace. 
* Ending torture. 
* Funding stem cell research and generally restoring a respect for  science 
to government.  
* Setting and keeping to a schedule to end the American presence in  Iraq. 
* Putting in motion a legislative agenda that will make major progressive  
change:  providing health care for  all, creating clean energy jobs and 
addressing global warming, overhauling the  regulation of the financial sector 
and beginning to shrink its dominance in the  American economy, and passing 
comprehensive immigration  reform. 
The Administration’s success rate seems low  only when measured against its 
lofty ambitions… and the magnitude of the  problems the President inherited 
last January. 
More importantly, second-guessing and backbiting does absolutely nothing  
to make the change America needs. 
Time to suck it up.  This is  going to be a long slog.  The  geniuses who 
write columns and make a living as Monday morning quarterbacks need  to get 
used to the idea that this is a real battle for the future of America,  not a 
reality show. 
The financial industry, the insurance  giants and the oil companies are 
going to bite and claw and fight to stop real  reform until the last dog dies.  
Progressives better be ready to do the  same. 
Robert Creamer is a  long-time political organizer and strategist, and 
author of the recent  book:  “Stand Up Straight: How  Progressives Can Win,” 
available on _Amazon.com._ 
(http://www.amazon.com/Listen-Your-Mother-Straight-Progressives/dp/0979585295/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213241439&sr=
8-1) 

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