This time, Glenn Beck has managed to outdo even himself. Finally, can we say enough is enough?
Recently, the Fox News host made some unacceptable comments about George Soros, the Hungarian-American philanthropist and Holocaust survivor. On his radio show, Beck claimed that Soros -- who as a 13-year-old boy was separated from his parents in Nazi-occupied Hungary -- "used to go around with this anti-Semite and deliver papers to the Jews and confiscate their property and then ship them off. ... It was frightening. Here's a Jewish boy helping send the Jews to the death camps."
In order to escape the Nazi death camps, Soros posed as a Christian, and was taken in by the Baumbachs, a righteous Gentile family. His adopted father was ordered to take the inventory of Mor Kornfeld, a wealthy Jewish aristocrat who had since left for Lisbon with his family. Rather than leave the boy behind in Budapest for three days, Baumbach took Soros with him to the Kornfeld estate.
Those who monitor Beck on a regular basis know that his rants are consistently offensive and over the top. He crafts conspiracy theories involving left-leaning figures such as Soros, whom Beck has dubbed the "progressive puppet master." He vilifies people such as Nancy Pelosi and Van Jones, and progressive groups such as the Tides Foundation and ACLU. Beck has compared people such as Simon Greer, executive director of Jewish Funds For Justice, to the Nazis. Beck equates social justice with communism and, no surprise, Nazism. And apparently Beck's rhetoric has inspired some of his viewers, perhaps even more unstable and unhinged than he, to threaten public officials and conspire to commit acts of violence against Beck's targets, even murder.
Without question, Beck has a Nazi fetish. As Dana Milbank of the Washington Post noted, from the time of Obama's inauguration through June of this year, Beck mentioned Nazi or Nazism 202 times, fascism or fascist 193 times, Hitler 147 times, and Joseph Goebbels 24 times. Not unlike the virulently homophobic politician or pastor who is caught with a male escort, perhaps Beck's obsession with Nazis reflects a hypocritical admiration for them. After all, he has hosted white supremacists, secessionists and defenders of slavery on his program. On his Twitter page, he listed a white supremacist website as among his favorites.
Beck's latest hit job on George Soros is classic anti-Semitism, and is disturbing for a number of reasons. For one, he chose the 72nd anniversary of Kristallnacht -- the infamous pogrom against Jews throughout Nazi Germany -- to make his comments. During Kristallnacht, which means "Night of Broken Glass," mobs of storm trooper thugs destroyed 7,000 Jewish businesses, burned over 900 synagogues to the ground, and murdered 91 Jews. 30,000 Jewish men were shipped to concentration camps. Announced by Nazi Propaganda Minister Goebbels, this pogrom laid the groundwork for Germany's decision to remove Jews from public life.
Further, Beck's depiction of Soros as an enabler of Nazi murder represents a classic example of anti-Semitism and Holocaust revisionism. And the "puppet master" analogy is a variation on the "Jewish conspiracy" theme, the Jew as usurer and villain. In Beck's twisted mind, Soros is Shylock the ruthless moneylender in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, or Fagin the Jew in Charles Dickens' Oliver Twist, a man who deals in stolen goods and leads a gang of pickpocketing young boys.
Elan Steinberg, vice president of the The American Gathering of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and Their Descendants, said that Beck's charges are "monstrous," and "go to the heart of the instrumentalization and trivialization of the Holocaust." Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) said that Beck's statement was "completely inappropriate and offensive," adding that "For a political commentator or entertainer to have the audacity to say, there's a Jewish boy sending Jews to death camps, that's horrific. It's totally off limits and over the top."
But just weeks earlier on October 22, Foxman had written a letter to Beck, calling him a "friend of Israel," and apologizing for an ADL mailer that "inadvertently misidentified you on a list of celebrities who made anti-Semitic statements over the past year." And on October 13, the ADL presented an award to Rupert Murdoch, Beck's boss, "for his stalwart support of Israel and his commitment to promoting respect and speaking out against anti-Semitism." In his acceptance speech, Murdoch announced that the most virulent forms of anti-Semitism come from the left, often dressed up as legitimate criticism of Israel. That day, the ADL released its blacklist of the so-called top 10 anti-Israel groups in America, all of whom are leftwing civil rights and human rights groups critical of the occupation of the Palestinians. On the list is Jewish Voice For Peace -- a progressive Jewish group whose advisors include respected rabbis in the American Jewish community, and prominent Jewish Americans such as actor Ed Asner and journalist Naomi Klein.
Old-guard Jewish organizations such as the ADL and AIPAC have entered into a marriage of convenience with the American conservative movement, thereby enabling anti-Semites like Glenn Beck. That marriage has turned into a Faustian bargain. The ADL and others court the Christian Right for their so-called "pro-Israel" stand, although evangelical support for Israel is based on the belief that all Jews will die when Jesus Christ returns. Critics of Israel's hard-right, ultra-Orthodox coalition government -- including anti-occupation and pro-Palestinian rights groups -- are branded as "anti-Semites." Progressive pro-Israel, pro-peace Jewish groups such as J Street are branded as self-haters. Shutting down debate stalls the peace process and undermines everyone, including American Jews, the Israelis and the Palestinians.
Meanwhile, Fox News holds onto Beck as its useful idiot, albeit a dangerous one. Fox is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Republican Party, or vice versa. It is no secret that Murdoch has given truckloads of money to the GOP, and that Fox is the official Tea Party network. And it is no secret that as Beck pimped the legacy of Martin Luther King, he also partnered with the Tea Party corporate front group FreedomWorks to elect extremist-right candidates.
All of us should be concerned about Glenn Beck's verbal assault on George Soros and his mocking of the Holocaust. Yet, this is more than a Jewish issue. We live in a time of scapegoats, the "other," including Muslims, Arabs, Latino immigrants, and the LGBT community. Hard economic times do that to "civilized" societies. People need someone -- anyone -- to blame for their misfortunes. And they delude themselves into believing that once the "other" is eliminated, their problems will disappear.
Kristallnacht was the culmination of a campaign of racist rhetoric against a group of people. This led to full-scale violence against that group, and laws designed to bring about their civil and physical death. The Glenn Becks in a given society are the propagandists that get the process going. They soften up the public through media manipulation, and make their audience receptive to the persecution of others.
So, how long will Glenn Beck last? Certainly, he is important to Fox News as their money-maker, their rising star. But one should remember that when stars turn into black holes, they can destroy everything in their path, even light. With a successful boycott effort causing Beck's sponsors to drop like flies, we must ask if this latest chapter will prove to be his undoing.
November 19, 2010
November 13, 2010
We Need a Competency Test for Elected Officials
Where do they find these people? I'm talking about those crazy-talking Tea Party types, ultra-conservative Republicans posing as legitimate lawmakers and politicians, some of them even passing themselves off as senators, members of Congress and governors.
Now, before you say anything, I am not naïve about politics. I know that politics has always attracted some of the best, but all too frequently it has attracted some of the worst that society has to offer. But this past election season, it seems as if the bottom fell out on how bad it can get -- how truly pathetic and hopelessly unqualified candidates for political office are allowed to be. Tea party candidates demonstrated their extremist and racist views, their ignorance of basic constitutional principles, and their lack of preparation for primetime.
And most of all, they showed that they are wholly-owned pawns of wealthy interests.
Rand Paul, Rick Scott and Jan Brewer won. Christine O'Donnell, Ken Buck and Sharron Angle lost, but they were still legitimate nominees of a major political party, so victory was at least within the realm of the possible for them. Dumb as bricks, with no practical experience or knowledge of which to speak, is suddenly a virtue. Some of them said they would criminalize abortion in the case of rape and incest, or protect the rights of private businesses to discriminate against black people. Some have urged the use of Second Amendment remedies. At least one candidate led a program to openly intimidate black voters. And yet, a number of them found enough votes to take them to victory. They told the constituents they would protect the interests of the rich, and yet they were able to garner enough votes from the poor dumb citizenry to win the election. That's something, isn't it?
The bar of stupidity and intolerance is lowered every day, and yet someone will vote for these people. In Oklahoma, a state senator authored a measure to amend the state constitution, prohibiting state courts from considering international law or Islamic Sharia law when reviewing cases. The measure passed with 70 percent of the vote, and a federal judge overturned it, which shows that the federal government is necessary to protect us from the states.
The re-elected governor of Texas, Rick Perry, longs for the old days, a hundred years ago -- before the progressive movement and the New Deal, when there were no child labor laws, unemployment insurance, national income tax, consumer regulations or worker protections. He even wanted Texas To secede from the Union, and likely put an innocent man to death. And still, the citizenry of Texas rewarded Perry with a third term in office.
Meanwhile, in Arizona, the governor and a state legislator pass an anti-immigrant "papers please" law that was drafted by white supremacists and the private-prison industry.
Whenever you find deplorable laws, there were deplorable people behind those laws, driven by greed and fanaticism, and lacking in character, empathy, scruples, and a concern for the common good. America needs some sort of competency exam, some kind of quality control process for their elected officials. Where are the regulations? I know, elections are supposed to take care of that. Under normal circumstances, in a democracy with elected representatives, you should be able to count on an informed electorate to pick the best candidates based on the issues. But this is America, and there are several problems with that notion. Civic engagement is lacking, voter participation is low, and many who vote are low information voters. Public education and the news media have failed them. While democracy depends on an educated electorate, sadly, too many American voters are ignorant and ill-informed.
It does not help matters that the nation's politics are driven by a system of legalized bribery, blown wide open by the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. In this pay-to-play land, with the best system money can buy, democracy goes to the highest bidder. So what is considered corruption in your run-of-the-mill, Third World banana republic is the law in America, protected by the First Amendment -- because corporations are people, too.
Given the dysfunction, the gridlock and the mean-spiritedness in our politics, it is no wonder that the best and brightest too often flock to other disciplines, leaving the barrel scrapers to fill the vacuum of political leadership. And yet, someone somewhere out there will vote for them.
Now, before you say anything, I am not naïve about politics. I know that politics has always attracted some of the best, but all too frequently it has attracted some of the worst that society has to offer. But this past election season, it seems as if the bottom fell out on how bad it can get -- how truly pathetic and hopelessly unqualified candidates for political office are allowed to be. Tea party candidates demonstrated their extremist and racist views, their ignorance of basic constitutional principles, and their lack of preparation for primetime.
And most of all, they showed that they are wholly-owned pawns of wealthy interests.
Rand Paul, Rick Scott and Jan Brewer won. Christine O'Donnell, Ken Buck and Sharron Angle lost, but they were still legitimate nominees of a major political party, so victory was at least within the realm of the possible for them. Dumb as bricks, with no practical experience or knowledge of which to speak, is suddenly a virtue. Some of them said they would criminalize abortion in the case of rape and incest, or protect the rights of private businesses to discriminate against black people. Some have urged the use of Second Amendment remedies. At least one candidate led a program to openly intimidate black voters. And yet, a number of them found enough votes to take them to victory. They told the constituents they would protect the interests of the rich, and yet they were able to garner enough votes from the poor dumb citizenry to win the election. That's something, isn't it?
The bar of stupidity and intolerance is lowered every day, and yet someone will vote for these people. In Oklahoma, a state senator authored a measure to amend the state constitution, prohibiting state courts from considering international law or Islamic Sharia law when reviewing cases. The measure passed with 70 percent of the vote, and a federal judge overturned it, which shows that the federal government is necessary to protect us from the states.
The re-elected governor of Texas, Rick Perry, longs for the old days, a hundred years ago -- before the progressive movement and the New Deal, when there were no child labor laws, unemployment insurance, national income tax, consumer regulations or worker protections. He even wanted Texas To secede from the Union, and likely put an innocent man to death. And still, the citizenry of Texas rewarded Perry with a third term in office.
Meanwhile, in Arizona, the governor and a state legislator pass an anti-immigrant "papers please" law that was drafted by white supremacists and the private-prison industry.
Whenever you find deplorable laws, there were deplorable people behind those laws, driven by greed and fanaticism, and lacking in character, empathy, scruples, and a concern for the common good. America needs some sort of competency exam, some kind of quality control process for their elected officials. Where are the regulations? I know, elections are supposed to take care of that. Under normal circumstances, in a democracy with elected representatives, you should be able to count on an informed electorate to pick the best candidates based on the issues. But this is America, and there are several problems with that notion. Civic engagement is lacking, voter participation is low, and many who vote are low information voters. Public education and the news media have failed them. While democracy depends on an educated electorate, sadly, too many American voters are ignorant and ill-informed.
It does not help matters that the nation's politics are driven by a system of legalized bribery, blown wide open by the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. In this pay-to-play land, with the best system money can buy, democracy goes to the highest bidder. So what is considered corruption in your run-of-the-mill, Third World banana republic is the law in America, protected by the First Amendment -- because corporations are people, too.
Given the dysfunction, the gridlock and the mean-spiritedness in our politics, it is no wonder that the best and brightest too often flock to other disciplines, leaving the barrel scrapers to fill the vacuum of political leadership. And yet, someone somewhere out there will vote for them.
November 12, 2010
November 5, 2010
Americans, Your Country Isn't So Great
This is a commentary I was bound to write regardless of the outcome of the midterm election. I start by saying that your country is not so great, Americans. Any discussion of "what went wrong" must be prefaced with that statement. Harsh words, perhaps, but I do not utter them in haste. And we need to say it over and over again until we change it.
The United States is at the bottom of the barrel. We don't live well. Since the 1970s, the bottom 90 percent has experienced income stagnation, while the top 1 percent has seen its wealth skyrocket. In America, two-thirds of income gains in recent years went to the top 1 percent. The gap between rich and poor hasn't been so great since 1928, right before the first Great Depression, with the top 20 percent controlling 84 percent of the wealth. In Sweden, the top 20 percent owns 36 percent. Canada and Western Europe all have greater social mobility than the so-called "land of opportunity," and with far more generous benefits, over a month of vacation, real universal health care -- you get the picture. If the citizens of all of these advanced nations are living better than Americans, then what is so special about America?
And yet, this recent election is a testament to this country's proclivity -- with help from the bottom 90 percent -- to keep things the way they are, if not worsen them. Some people vote with the oligarchy against their own interests because they simply lack the proper information. There's lots of blame to go around.
Turnout from the base. Young voters and African-Americans, a key part of the Democratic base, refused to show up in the numbers they should have to turn this thing around. And 29 million people who voted in 2008 stayed home this year. If you don't use democracy you lose it. But then again, perhaps many felt as if they had no reason to vote. And their silence is as deafening as the noise made in the voting booth. There is no question that the president lost touch with his soldiers, far more than a hundred interviews on hip-hop radio stations could ever make up. This is not to excuse those who sat out of the race, but it's trickier than that. The reality is that the White House appeared arrogant and distant, even dismissive and impatient towards its progressive supporters-turned-critics. Obama must answer to the voters, not scold them, but he got it twisted somewhere along the way.
Anti-Wall Street sentiment. Clearly, the voters who went against the Democrats were mad at Wall Street. One would conclude that an anti-Wall Street fervor should favor the Democrats. But the Democrats are as much a party of corporate enablers as are the Republicans. Obama decided to cozy up to the bankers and prop them up rather than tear them down for the havoc they engineered. Plus, he surrounded himself with dead weight -- Wall Street shills and neoliberal Clinton insiders among his closest advisors. These individuals have utter contempt for unions, "the professional left" and other components of the base. This was not the change the Obama supporters thought they were getting in November 2008. Meanwhile, average Americans observed that as they struggled through hard times, with mounting bills, chronic unemployment and foreclosures, the banks were not left wanting.
Compromise. "We were in such a hurry to get things done that we didn't change how things got done," President Obama said. And he is right. Cutting deals with lobbyists and watering down health care reform for the sake of putting another notch in your belt is the old way of doing things. Compromising with the other side from a position of weakness and giving away the store before the negotiations even start -- well that's just plain naïve.
Also naïve was the administration's belief that it could compromise with Republicans, the extremists who awake every morning wishing and hoping for his downfall. Perhaps it would have been possible decades ago, but not now. Wasting too much time on this quixotic dream of compromise as an end, rather than one of various possible means to an end, gave the Republicans their opening. Now, the GOP is even more extreme, racist and uncompromising after its Teabilly infusion of white supremacists, Christian Taliban, conspiracy theorists and certified kooks.
A weak, fraidy cat administration. Obama failed to exert his power and authority in many ways, often appearing weak and equivocating. His heart just wasn't in it. The stimulus was a half measure that was not bold enough, and contained tax cuts designed to attract Republican support that never came. The plan failed to restore the 11.5 million jobs needed to get America back to pre-recession levels. And Obama continued Bush's trillion dollar folly in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bigger than the rest of the world's armies combined, the U.S. war machine sucks up nearly half of the discretionary dollars in the federal budget, crippling our ability to compete with China.
Obama did not take the jobs problem seriously enough soon enough, and the lunatic right gave him a beat down with it, dismissing his entire agenda as ineffective and creating a top-down faux populist movement to mess him up. The Citizens United decision all but guaranteed a conservative multi-billion dollar buyout of the election by the Koch brothers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Fox and an array of sketchy, shady interests, anonymous and unaccountable.
The Economy and F.D.R. It's the economy stupid, but it's what you do and say as a leader in tough economic times that matters. Oddly, candidate Obama's effective communication strategy has not translated into President Obama the great communicator. The use of the narrative is important, particularly in bad times, and Reagan knew it. President Obama could have traveled the F.D.R. route and crafted a message of economic populism, with Wall Street greed and predatory capitalism as the clear enemy, and himself as the national hero who has come to make things right. If the narrative resonates with an approving public, who cares which party controls Congress?
President Roosevelt betrayed his class, saying "I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made." In his inauguration speech, he said the "Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.... The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit." Not having sought enemies--though the enemies found him-- Obama chose not to follow F.D.R., and is paying a price. Yet he must do this very thing if he wants a second term.
A New Movement. A sustainable movement for social and economic justice must help this president to place him on the path of greatness that these crisis times demand, that his campaign promised. Nothing less than America's future is at stake. Whether it is an internal effort to wrest control from the corporatist neoliberals smothering the Democratic Party, or an independent movement, or both, it must be done. I refer to this genuinely organic, bottom-up antithesis of the Tea Party as the "Hot Chocolate" Party, to coin a term from my father-in-law. Hot chocolate is a sweet mix of diverse ingredients that brings comfort on cold days. Minimally caffeinated compared to tea, it can ease fatigue and positively affect health.
Despite their immediate victory, it is almost certain that the GOP Hate Caucus is running on borrowed time. It is expected they will disappoint immensely. Devoid of ideas, they will die from a combination of infighting, overreaching, and insurmountable demographic shifts in the nation. But in the meantime, progressives must sustain a movement to provide cover and apply pressure to Obama and any subsequent presidents.
Roosevelt asked civil rights leader A. Phillip Randolph to "go out and make me do it," that is, make him use his power and the bully pulpit to right the wrongs and do the things they both agreed should be addressed. We, too, must make Obama do it, for him and for ourselves.
The United States is at the bottom of the barrel. We don't live well. Since the 1970s, the bottom 90 percent has experienced income stagnation, while the top 1 percent has seen its wealth skyrocket. In America, two-thirds of income gains in recent years went to the top 1 percent. The gap between rich and poor hasn't been so great since 1928, right before the first Great Depression, with the top 20 percent controlling 84 percent of the wealth. In Sweden, the top 20 percent owns 36 percent. Canada and Western Europe all have greater social mobility than the so-called "land of opportunity," and with far more generous benefits, over a month of vacation, real universal health care -- you get the picture. If the citizens of all of these advanced nations are living better than Americans, then what is so special about America?
And yet, this recent election is a testament to this country's proclivity -- with help from the bottom 90 percent -- to keep things the way they are, if not worsen them. Some people vote with the oligarchy against their own interests because they simply lack the proper information. There's lots of blame to go around.
Turnout from the base. Young voters and African-Americans, a key part of the Democratic base, refused to show up in the numbers they should have to turn this thing around. And 29 million people who voted in 2008 stayed home this year. If you don't use democracy you lose it. But then again, perhaps many felt as if they had no reason to vote. And their silence is as deafening as the noise made in the voting booth. There is no question that the president lost touch with his soldiers, far more than a hundred interviews on hip-hop radio stations could ever make up. This is not to excuse those who sat out of the race, but it's trickier than that. The reality is that the White House appeared arrogant and distant, even dismissive and impatient towards its progressive supporters-turned-critics. Obama must answer to the voters, not scold them, but he got it twisted somewhere along the way.
Anti-Wall Street sentiment. Clearly, the voters who went against the Democrats were mad at Wall Street. One would conclude that an anti-Wall Street fervor should favor the Democrats. But the Democrats are as much a party of corporate enablers as are the Republicans. Obama decided to cozy up to the bankers and prop them up rather than tear them down for the havoc they engineered. Plus, he surrounded himself with dead weight -- Wall Street shills and neoliberal Clinton insiders among his closest advisors. These individuals have utter contempt for unions, "the professional left" and other components of the base. This was not the change the Obama supporters thought they were getting in November 2008. Meanwhile, average Americans observed that as they struggled through hard times, with mounting bills, chronic unemployment and foreclosures, the banks were not left wanting.
Compromise. "We were in such a hurry to get things done that we didn't change how things got done," President Obama said. And he is right. Cutting deals with lobbyists and watering down health care reform for the sake of putting another notch in your belt is the old way of doing things. Compromising with the other side from a position of weakness and giving away the store before the negotiations even start -- well that's just plain naïve.
Also naïve was the administration's belief that it could compromise with Republicans, the extremists who awake every morning wishing and hoping for his downfall. Perhaps it would have been possible decades ago, but not now. Wasting too much time on this quixotic dream of compromise as an end, rather than one of various possible means to an end, gave the Republicans their opening. Now, the GOP is even more extreme, racist and uncompromising after its Teabilly infusion of white supremacists, Christian Taliban, conspiracy theorists and certified kooks.
A weak, fraidy cat administration. Obama failed to exert his power and authority in many ways, often appearing weak and equivocating. His heart just wasn't in it. The stimulus was a half measure that was not bold enough, and contained tax cuts designed to attract Republican support that never came. The plan failed to restore the 11.5 million jobs needed to get America back to pre-recession levels. And Obama continued Bush's trillion dollar folly in Iraq and Afghanistan. Bigger than the rest of the world's armies combined, the U.S. war machine sucks up nearly half of the discretionary dollars in the federal budget, crippling our ability to compete with China.
Obama did not take the jobs problem seriously enough soon enough, and the lunatic right gave him a beat down with it, dismissing his entire agenda as ineffective and creating a top-down faux populist movement to mess him up. The Citizens United decision all but guaranteed a conservative multi-billion dollar buyout of the election by the Koch brothers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Fox and an array of sketchy, shady interests, anonymous and unaccountable.
The Economy and F.D.R. It's the economy stupid, but it's what you do and say as a leader in tough economic times that matters. Oddly, candidate Obama's effective communication strategy has not translated into President Obama the great communicator. The use of the narrative is important, particularly in bad times, and Reagan knew it. President Obama could have traveled the F.D.R. route and crafted a message of economic populism, with Wall Street greed and predatory capitalism as the clear enemy, and himself as the national hero who has come to make things right. If the narrative resonates with an approving public, who cares which party controls Congress?
President Roosevelt betrayed his class, saying "I ask you to judge me by the enemies I have made." In his inauguration speech, he said the "Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.... The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit." Not having sought enemies--though the enemies found him-- Obama chose not to follow F.D.R., and is paying a price. Yet he must do this very thing if he wants a second term.
A New Movement. A sustainable movement for social and economic justice must help this president to place him on the path of greatness that these crisis times demand, that his campaign promised. Nothing less than America's future is at stake. Whether it is an internal effort to wrest control from the corporatist neoliberals smothering the Democratic Party, or an independent movement, or both, it must be done. I refer to this genuinely organic, bottom-up antithesis of the Tea Party as the "Hot Chocolate" Party, to coin a term from my father-in-law. Hot chocolate is a sweet mix of diverse ingredients that brings comfort on cold days. Minimally caffeinated compared to tea, it can ease fatigue and positively affect health.
Despite their immediate victory, it is almost certain that the GOP Hate Caucus is running on borrowed time. It is expected they will disappoint immensely. Devoid of ideas, they will die from a combination of infighting, overreaching, and insurmountable demographic shifts in the nation. But in the meantime, progressives must sustain a movement to provide cover and apply pressure to Obama and any subsequent presidents.
Roosevelt asked civil rights leader A. Phillip Randolph to "go out and make me do it," that is, make him use his power and the bully pulpit to right the wrongs and do the things they both agreed should be addressed. We, too, must make Obama do it, for him and for ourselves.
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