Follow on TwitterDNC Platform Change Vote Was Predetermined On Teleprompter, Delegate Voting Was Merely For Show
Controversy erupted at the DNC this week when Democratic party leaders forced a party platform change to reinstate language proclaiming Jerusalem as “Israel’s undivided capital,” and to reinstate references to God in the text.
The motion had to be voted on by a two-thirds majority of the delegates for passage, and it became clear, after several vote calls by LA Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a major majority did NOT want the platform changed.
Confused on how to proceed, the Mayor looked to a woman who came out and advised him, “Just keep going, they’re going to do what they are going to do.”
The mayor then pronounced, “in the opinion of the chair, two-thirds have voted in the affirmative,” provoking boos from the large crowd.
Well, now Fox News is showing footage of the DNC teleprompter the Mayor was reading from. It shows that the two-thirds majority needed for the passage of the motion had been predetermined by party leaders, with complete disregard for how the delegates actually voted. Apparently, they forgot to tell the Mayor in advance that the vote was merely for show; that the only results that mattered were written on the teleprompter.
What this so clearly highlights is the contempt that political power elites hold for the democratic process and the will of the majority — even within their own party.
Can A Democracy Function When The President Can Evade His Critics?
- Official White House Photo by Pete Souza
A democracy is built upon the premise that our elected officials will routinely be confronted on their policies in the public square. And from this public engagement, this battleground of ideas, Americans will be better equipped to determine the best policies, thereby ensuring the democratic process actually strengthens the health of the nation, rather than weakens it.
But for some reason, the President of the United States is free to elude this ongoing battleground.
Only at election time, every four years, is he expected to participate in a handful of debates, and these are somewhat controlled environments. Debate questions tend to be the predictable ‘establishment’ ones, unrepresentative of the ones many Americans would like answered. All third party candidates, and the important issues they would bring to this national contest, are deliberately and systematically banned by the two major parties.
Once elected, Presidents begin to mirror ‘regal’ figureheads, suddenly ‘above’ subjecting themselves to pesky, potentially embarrassing, press conferences. They sidestep any engagements where they might be confronted on controversial policies.
President Bush went as far as to build a literal fortress around himself. It was oft-reported how his administration aggressively “screen[ed] audience members, remov[ed] protesters, and script[ed] questions prior to Bush appearing at public events.”
There are literally no laws in place that require the President of the United States to confront his critics.
And their efforts to evade this form of ‘check’ on Presidential power only seems to be getting worse. Whereas George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton held 56 and 31 news conferences, respectively, during their first three years in office, George W. Bush held only 11, and Barack Obama has held only 17.
When they agree to appear in televised interviews, rarely is it ever a hard-nosed Q&A session. Instead they opt to appear on The View, Jay Leno, or some other non-serious venue, where they are more likely to field questions about their daughters’ grades than meaningful ones, like the signing of the controversial National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
When they do find it opportune to appear for questioning on actual news programs, they carefully select venues where they believe they can easily control their message. Accordingly, political pundits — all desperate for that coveted Presidential interview — treat them deferentially, by asking softball questions. When the odd tough question does get asked, more often than not, the pundits gladly accept whatever scripted non-answer the President gives them.
Access is the bread and butter of corporate-owned news networks. The White House’s limited and conditional access ensures the corporate media establishment remains compliant. Embarrassing the President on national television, by pinning him down on an obvious lie, would be construed as “an unwise business decision.”
It could be said that the only REAL interview that Obama has endured these last three years, occurred in October of 2010, when he chose to appear on left-leaning comedy program, The Daily Show, believing he would surely be in ‘friendly territory.’ He quickly discovered that the Left, as represented by Jon Stewart, were probably the most disenchanted of all his constituents. Something tells me Jon Stewart has now lost future ‘access’ to the President.
But this seems to be less of a problem in many European democracies.
When President George W. Bush, who rarely gave interviews, sat down in 2004 for a televised interview with Carol Coleman of Radio Television Ireland, he learned very quickly that he was indeed far from Texas. This interview was the first time in 20 years that an American President had granted an interview with the RTÉ. I suspect it will be the last.
Coleman asked questions regarding Bush’s controversial Iraq policies, and when he attempted to filibuster with meaningless slogans, she interrupted him to ensure he actually addressed the questions. Unlike the American media establishment, she did not graciously accept his meaningless talking points as legitimate answers.
The interview became extremely controversial in America. The White House complained to the Irish Embassy, Laura Bush canceled her later-scheduled interview with the RTÉ, and none of the U.S. main stream media networks would air it. When it was discussed on CNN’s Larry King show and CBS, it was described as ‘contentious’.
The U.S. establishment seemed stunned that a journalist would have the audacity to try and pin the U.S. President down on his policies, when she had to know that by not accepting his dumbed-down talking points, she would embarrass him. And surely that is not behavior befitting a King, err a U.S. President.
Coleman disagreed with those sentiments:
“In Ireland, we give all our politicians a tough time,” said Ms. Coleman, who agreed with the suggestion that European politicians are more battle-hardened by the parliamentary requirement that they face regular and direct questioning from the opposition. “I felt I did my job,” she said.
This mandatory parliamentary questioning that she refers to, is also required in Great Britain.
Every Wednesday, the British Prime Minister gets directly challenged for about half-an-hour by his opposition in Parliament at the PMQs (Prime Minister Questions). In order to withstand this confrontational barrage, the Prime Minister must have a firm working knowledge of all issues, and be able to articulate why his proposals and policies are the most logical and sensible courses of action.
Conversely, when a U.S. President makes a showing before Congress — usually only once a year, at his State of the Union Address — members of both parties rise and applaud as he enters, and remain standing and clapping until he takes the podium. From here, he has a one-way conversation with the elected body. He talks, they listen, he leaves, and they bid him farewell with another standing ovation. Just like a King addressing the members of his royal court.
It could be argued that Britain’s weekly televised PMQs helps to demystify that nation’s highest office. The Prime Minister gets seen as a mere mortal — required to be responsive to the peoples’ representatives. If caught unprepared, on any given Wednesday, he could seriously embarrass himself — all to be captured on television. The U.S. President, having no equivalent requirement, gets seen as more of an insulated, powerful, reverential figurehead — like a monarch, completely shielded from ever having to defend his policies against his critics.
As Carol Coleman of the RTÉ alluded above, when journalists witness their top leader having to defend his policies each week to the Congressional opposition, they begin to view that leader as someone open to tough scrutiny, rather than someone to be treated deferentially.
And if the President could no longer shield himself from ever having to publicly defend his policies, he might reconsider passing indefensible policies.
Imagine how different the health care bill debate would have been if the President had been forced to engage with Congress each week, and to take a visibly forceful stand on critical pieces of the legislation, rather than hide in the background, cutting back-room deals, and working the back-channels.
Another unforeseen repercussion from allowing U.S. Presidents to evade critical questioning, is it actually encourages incompetent, incurious, and inarticulate people to seek the highest office in the land. Case in point: George W. Bush. It would be highly doubtful that a person incapable of defending his policies to a non-deferential journalist, would consider running for an office that required him to defend the intellectual soundness of his policies every single week against his fiercest critics, on national television.
Even Tony Blair, who had a reputation for performing exceedingly well at PMQs, later admitted in interviews, that they had been a constant source of stress for him. At his final PMQs he told the MPs:
“This is still the arena that sets the heart beating a little faster. And, if it is on occasions the place of low skulduggery, it is more often the place for the pursuit of noble causes.”
It is ironic that the United States, a nation founded upon the rejection of monarchy, would allow its top leader to evade his critics, much like a monarch, while Great Britain — with a Queen still residing in Buckingham Palace — would demand the very opposite from its Prime Minister.
The American Left Awakens: As The Middle Class Goes, So Goes The Political Middle
It could be said that a democracy’s chosen economic model lives and dies by the prosperity of the majority. A thriving middle class has been the key stabilizing factor in American politics for generations. As such, systematic change in the United States has traditionally come slowly and incrementally.
But after a decade of zero job growth, while millions more Americans have continued to enter the labor market, they have witnessed unemployment rates rise and become fixed at levels rarely seen before. They have watched their wages drop, their cost of living rise (due in large part to high energy prices, high education costs, and runaway health care costs), and correspondingly, their quality of life erode.
The middle class is gradually disappearing from the U.S. landscape, and the ‘American dream’ is transforming into a fiction in the minds of millions.
This dream is based on an implicit agreement between the establishment and the masses, and is crucial for America’s brand of hyper-Capitalism to remain a viable economic model. It goes something like this:
If Americans work hard, and invest in a decent education, at worst they should expect a comfortable middle class existence, with prospects for future upward mobility based on merit and perseverance.
As long as this dream is deemed achievable in the minds of the majority, the political status-quo remains all-but a certainty. But the moment people stop believing it, the calls for serious systematic change begin to bubble up to the surface. And this is when the political middle dissipates.
Many economists hold that the dream actually vanished many years ago, but the establishment extended exorbitant lines of credit to Americans, which allowed them to enjoy a mirage of prosperity. In other words, a once prosperous nation on the decline became transformed into a debtor nation. But in doing so, the ‘American dream’ lived on in the minds of millions.
All it took was the massive financial meltdown of 2008, brought on by years of deregulation in the financial and mortgage industries, to pull the curtain wide open on the American dream. The collapse of the U.S. banking industry — which exposed a band of corrupted, highly-leveraged casinos masquerading as banks — rudely awakened Americans to their true state of affairs.
Twelve trillion dollars in ‘perceived’ wealth, mostly in home values, vanished into thin air. Many of those lucky enough to remain employed, found themselves under water with their mortgages. No longer able to sustain their middle class lifestyles with easy credit, consumer spending continued to dry up, and the economy spiraled even further into the doldrums.
The rationale George W. Bush and Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson used to sell the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to the American public was that if taxpayers bailed out these banks, they would in turn ‘loosen’ the credit markets by lending again to businesses and consumers, which would help to stimulate investment and demand.
Instead, the banks did just about everything, BUT resume lending. Having received amazing terms from the government, they invested in no-risk, interest-bearing Treasuries — to profit off the spreads and transaction fees. They paid themselves billions of dollars in the form of bonuses. In addition, these ‘Too Big to Fail’ banks used taxpayer money to buy-out struggling competitor banks, thereby growing even bigger.
Neither TARP, nor the $16 trillion in secret Fed loans to banks (both here and abroad), loosened the credit markets. Nor did they help millions of struggling Americans to stay in their bank-foreclosed homes. What the bail-outs accomplished was to send a powerful message to Wall Street: as long as these institutions remained ‘Too Big To Fail’ they could continue to take obscene risks, because the government could be counted on to cover their losses.
The effort was branded by most to be a colossal failure — a massive transfer of wealth from the ninety-nine percent to the one percent.
As the status-quo became untenable, many Americans began to abandon the political middle — once a seemingly ‘mainstream’ place to be — and split towards each end of the political spectrum.
Exiled from government, Republicans recast themselves as Tea Partiers — an ‘AstroTurfed movement’ that blamed ‘government’ for all the country’s woes. In particular, they blamed the new Democratic-controlled government, who’d been elected to clean up their mess. These right-wingers embraced pure unadulterated corporatocracy as the solution to problems created, ironically enough, by deregulated banks and corporations.
Democratic constituents felt relieved, having ushered Barack Obama into the White House on a populist progressive ‘CHANGE’ platform, along with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. The Left continued to place its faith in democracy — i.e. the ‘ballot box’ — as the appropriate venue for delivering change.
But once sworn in, Obama’s call for ‘Change’ insidiously shifted to a new call for ‘Bipartisanship’. He proceeded to prioritize ‘harmony’ between two diametrically-opposed parties over championing the progressive promises that got him elected.
Of course, this new ‘priority’ was merely a cover for appeasing the entrenched corporate interests. His largely-symbolic legislative victories were so watered down and corporate-friendly that they were routinely castigated by the Left. His advisers would complain bitterly how no one outside the White House would give Obama his due-credit for his ‘achievements’.
He governed like a pre-Tea Party Republican as he broke promise after promise. He proposed cuts to social security, Medicare, and Medicaid. He pushed the Bush-signed, NAFTA-like (job-exporting) trade deals which Congressional Democrats had defeated years before, and he even pressured Congressional Democrats to extend Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest 2%. In doing so, he grossly underestimated the populist angst that had swept him into office.
Obama’s duplicity led many of his once-energized supporters to conclude that America’s entire political process was something of a sham — that they’d once again been had.
And so they gave up waiting around for the Democratic Party to walk their talk, and took to the streets themselves in masses. On September 17, Occupy Wall Street began peacefully protesting in downtown Manhattan, and it has since spread like a forest fire into a nation-wide movement.
This huge, non-partisan, populist ground-swell blasts the Washington establishment for systematically exploiting and subjugating ninety-nine percent of Americans to appease the wealthy and powerful one-percent. The protesters demand an end to the corrupt and insidious relationship between government and corporations which perverts the very fabric of democracy.
Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, recently reflected on the underlying cause for the Occupy Wall Street protests on DemocracyNow:
“My biggest fear was that the Obama presidency was going to lead this generation of young people into political cynicism and political apathy,” Klein says. “But instead, they are going to where the power is. They are realizing the change is not coming in Washington because politicians are so controlled by corporate interest, and that that is the fundamental crisis in this country.”
It would appear the power-elite’s greed, corruption, and hubris has finally awakened a sleeping populist giant in the American people. And the longer the Democratic Party continues to promote policies right of center, the more those left-of-center will continue to detach from the party and the entire democratic process.
A new Washington Post/Bloomberg News Poll reveals that 44% of Democrats don’t believe the economy would get any worse should President Obama lose in 2012 to a Republican. Blue Texan from Firedoglake sums up this startling revelation:
“Let that sink in for a minute. The economy will be the number one issue in 2012 — and nearly half of the President’s own party doesn’t think it matters if he’s re-elected.”
Clearly, today’s definition of the political middle — which is where Obama loyalists contend he governs — has come to represent the painful and untenable status-quo to traditional Democratic supporters.
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