I Said It'd Take A Week

Before I started calling the Democrats and Obama sell-outs. Well, here we are, a little over a week later, and Obama is preemptively compromising with Republicans to open up additional areas to oil drilling and subsidize further nuclear power. Fucking fantastic.  Balloon Juice pretty much sums up my thoughts here.

I see no way that this is tactically smart. I could imagine including these measures in a Cap And Trade Bill as part of a compromise that gets more votes (guess what- it still won't get more votes from the GOP!) but this just strikes me as total POTUS fail.

Anyone got any silver lining on this one?

Comments

[99]

One silver lining: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2010_03/023133.php

This, at least in terms of schadenfreude, is another:
http://firedoglake.com/2010/03/31/surprise-republicans-suddenly-oppose-offshore-oil-drilling/

[Culturefuture.blogspot.com]

It's not a POTUS fail because Obama promised this back in August 2008, and therefore this is in the column of "Obama delivers as promised." Turns out we just didn't like it, this time.

I'm thinking that the offshore drilling thing is aimed more at the voters in 2010 than it is aimed at congressional GOP.

[Mark S.]

I don't think this should come as any real surprise. Our politics are characterized by the spectacle of democracy, of choice, of leadership and of change. The reality of these things simply does not exist. Put an idealist in power in Washington, regardless of their politics, and the machine will make them craven. That's all there is to it. (And this assumes that there actually are politicians with ideals to begin with.)

I hate to say it, but there is no silver lining in American politics. "The audacity of hope" is a great phrase, but little else. The project of hoping in a political process or system, particularly in a culture as addicted to spectacular capitalism as ours, is fundamentally doomed. Things will continue to be as they are, and worse, so long as we continue to subscribe to the belief that our current political structures are capable of positive change. They are not. Bureaucratic institutions are fundamentally incapable of anything apart from constructing mechanisms of self-perpetuation which inevitably means constructing a system of radical dis-enfranchisement in which the reality of change, choice, progress, what-have-you, is replaced by an image of these things, an image we can only long or hope for. But the status quo depends on preserving that longing.

Sorry this may seem all doom and gloom. Where to really find the silver lining? Not in our politics as they are. But in our capacity for consciousness, for uncompromising dissent and dissatisfaction; in cognitive dissonance and irrational exuberance. The silver lining is in our capacity to create, to play. There will never be a silver lining in politics.

-M