Blue Mass Group

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“Holding Obama Accountable”

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Tough talk here from Randy Shaw on HuffPost:

After spending 2009 mobilizing grassroots support for progressive change, activists in 2010 face a new challenge: pressuring President Obama to fulfill a progressive agenda. A new approach is clearly needed, and three steps should be taken.

First, email campaigns, protests and media events must directly target Obama, rather than insulating him by attacking appointees like Rahm Emanuel, Tim Geithner or Lawrence Summers.

Second, activists must pressure progressive Senators to put their constituencies’ interests ahead of Obama’s political agenda.

Third, and most critically, activist groups that the Democratic Party is counting upon for money and volunteers in the 2010 midterm elections — such as organized labor, MoveOn, and the Netroots — must be willing to play hardball with Obama.

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  1. EVERY elected official.  Hold every single one of them accountable.  The reason we get taken for granted is because the politicians think – “where else are these Democrats going to go,” and they blithly go on their merry way, forgetting who helped put them in office.   Enough already…no one is irreplaceable.  

    • Along with closed primaries and IRV.  Put all three together, and watch as the GOP gets pulled apart by Wall St, Neocons, Theocons, libertarians, and the Rockefeller types — and watch as the Dems get pulled apart by enviros, labor, women’s rights, etc.

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      p>I want the GOP and Dems to get pulled in multiple directions.  It will force them to take more coherent positions and it will allow pragmatists like ShillelaghLaw (below) and myself to support the specific political babies we find most important without throwing them out the window along with the bathwater.

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      p>I believe if we move to IRV (or, to a lesser extent, electoral fusion like in NY) that we’ll provide for situations where minor parties can really influence change, and not simply in the Ralph Nader way.

      • helps keep Democrats honest.  Left to their own devices, the Dems, much like any powerful group, forget what they look like in the mirror when they turn away.  

  2. Because no loaf is better than half a loaf when it comes to ideological purity! Just ask the folks up in NY-23!

    • isn’t ideological purity.  The issue is making sure Democrats behave like Democrats.  Where’s the jobs?  Where’s the mortgage relief?  Where’s the real reform for the financial industry?  

      • From Obama and some in Congress we get basically, “My preference is X, but I won’t fight too hard.”  Take health care, for example.  It would be one thing if Obama had said that he disagreed with the idea of single payer on the grounds that it wouldn’t work, costs too much, etc.  We would know what we’re getting.  However, he HAS said that if he could create a system from scratch he would go single payer, but he started with let’s try the public option instead and then backtracked on that at the first sign of trouble.  Nobody will win every fight, but fights that aren’t at least engaged rhetorically for a time will definitely be lost.  I supported Jamie Eldridge for Congress in 2007 in large part because he said he was running to “create political reality” on this issue rather than bow to it.

  3. Speaking of Hardball… according to Chris Matthews, these netroot efforts you speak of above would be useless. Don’t you remember?

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    p>Have we started a “Boycott Hardball” yet? We should!

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