“The only way to beat a bully is to stand up to a bully!” said Karen Lewis, the president of the Chicago Teachers Union. No kidding, Karen. And Obama’s former failed chief of staff, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, is nothing if not a bully.
But Rahm is not just trying to intimidate and harm students and teachers with his GOP-like posturing. He’s a wrong-headed Democratic bully who needs to be stopped because of the direction in which he and his kind (read Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, and Andrew Cuomo, the last of whom is watching very intently, I’m sure, before he tries to take on New York’s teachers) have moved the Democratic party: big-money, Wall Street, Rubinesque Democrats, the kind that believe poverty does not count since the poor (and the youth) don’t vote. The kind who do not care about civil rights, especially the new civil rights based on sexuality and gender, since after all they live in urban areas. This is why we got into the public-union mess in the first place. And there’s no point in blaming anti-union Republicans when powerful Democrats like this can get Democratic mayors to do their business with them.
Emanuel embodies the kind of Democrat that abandoned the urban poor in the 1970s. No matter how many complaints progressives may have against Obama, he fought for the urban poor in the mid-1980s, at the height of its unfashionableness, as a community organizer. Where was Emanuel? He may have helped coin the term “progressive” in the early 2000s when Bill Clinton left office, but he is certainly not liberal, nor a civil-rights defender. How can Emanuel call himself progressive?
To my mind, a real progressive must be, at least, on the right side of the counterproductive civil-rights/union/class-politics divide. Emanuel, Pelosi, Clinton, and the old third-way Democrats stand up neither for correcting economic inequality and injustice nor for civil rights and identity politics. But what is worse is that all those old-fashioned Nation-reading liberals (and a few radicals), along with some newfangled progressives, might put this together if they could just stop whining about Obama’s “failures” long enough to reunite and realize we are pursuing a political realignment that can be only partially realized as long as we lack structural political and electoral reform.
I suppose I’ve heard, at least one time too many, people say: “Support Obama, because look at the alternative.” But it’s more than “the alternative”: It’s a battle over the Democratic party’s heart and soul. Much more is at stake than losing the election. Bill Clinton’s slogan “It’s the economy, stupid” should be replaced with “It’s structural, stupid” — the federalist structure of American politics, which, in combination with a conservative Supreme Court and outdated and easily corruptible state election rules, frustrates attempts at serious progressive reform. Democrats should move on, get over Obama’s so-called leadership failures, and start heralding this president’s legislative successes in light of the same structural deficiencies that, after all, defeated President Clinton too (or at least defeated any hope that he would achieve a progressive or liberal legacy, and not complete Reagan’s legacy as Sean Wilentz taught us). Where are the real progressives, those turn-of-the-century stalwarts — who were not all good progressives by any means, since many of them supported eugenics, but who at least had the foresight to change state electoral rules to help knock out stalwarts in the Republican and Democratic parties?
After Hillary Clinton lost the primary to Obama in 2008, she loaned Emanuel out to the new president. Now, this is just a sneaking supposition, a suspicion; I could be wrong. But four years later, I am still getting over Obama’s incautious acceptance of this so-called “gifted” politician’s help (or perhaps I should say her Trojan horse), along with the kind, friendly, and fuzzy hand that Larry Summers extended to the president upon other Democrats’ urgings. From my perspective, Obama couldn’t have had a much worse chief of staff (who then publicly betrayed him before the 2010 elections), and to read how Emanuel teamed up with Summers in the tell-all political books of Richard Wolffe and Ronald Suskind is just too much.
Now, moving along, Obama, as president, at least has the good fortune of having the upper hand in this urban matter. Whereas no president can really push around a gung-ho governor without having it backfire (he could not do much with Wisconsin or in New Jersey), cities do not quite have the same luxury as states. The results of such a conflict depend on many factors, including the party and the state’s determination of mayoral power, but only states can muster enough autonomy to tell the executive branch to go shove it, as some red states are threatening to do with Medicare, Medicaid, and mass transit.
Besides, Chicago is nice in the fall (but not the winter, for all those who found it too chilly to demonstrate last year). So let’s start the Occupy Wall Street buses rolling west! Students need to start shaking hands in solidarity with other students, even if they are only knee high, or in knee-highs. Meanwhile, Obama needs to take a couple of trips home, as he originally planned (according to Jodi Kantor’s book), and help Karen push Rahm off the anti-union playground. This is a much-needed battle that Obama can win, and one that would help revive his campaign for reelection.
