The Obama Republicans - Democratic Underground

Jeff In Milwaukee

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Wed Feb-20-08 09:39 AM
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The Obama Republicans

In 1960, when members of the Screen Actors Guild struck over the issue residuals from motion pictures being broadcast on television, SAG President Ronald Reagan was the chief negotiator for the union. The target of the strike was MCA, the company that owned Reagan’s program “General Electric Theater” and of which Reagan was a producer. So Reagan was simultaneously representing union members against MCA while he was, in fact, clandestinely on MCA’s payroll.

The deal that Reagan brokered literally gave away the residuals for every motion picture ever made prior to 1960 – and it cost actors millions in forfeited income. The big payday for Reagan came a few years later, when studio heads purchased 236 acres of real estate from Reagan at a price of $1.93 million dollars – even though the land appraised at only $900,000. It pays to have wealthy friends and no conscience.

Why bring up the activities of a crooked union president nearly fifty years after the fact? Because Ronald Reagan is, and will always be, the embodiment of the modern conservative movement. The Republican Party has spent the past thirty years pretending to represent the interests of average Americans, while simultaneously on the payroll of corporate interests.

A truck driver in Storm Lake, Iowa votes Republican because the Republicans are the party of “family values,” but his wife ends up waitressing part-time because his salary can no longer pay the bills. And so their kids are left home alone after school three days a week. An factory worker in Lima, Ohio votes Republican because the Republicans are strong on defense, but he was laid off from his job at the Lima Tank Plant three years ago, and there aren’t any other factory jobs available.

Meanwhile the Republican Party, while feigning outrage over “government regulation and high taxes,” quietly slashes taxes for CEO’s and provides tax breaks to corporations that ship manufacturing jobs overseas. With the “culture wars” serving as a convenient diversion, working-class Americans have hardly noticed that their standard of living has declined from the moment that conservative policies because their ascent.

This might have gone on forever had the conservatives not overplayed their hand. The invasion of Iraq, which was nothing more than a gas station hold-up gone bad, got working class Americans (whose sons and daughters make up the bulk of our armed forces) thinking that maybe something wasn’t quite right. Saddam was toppled. Saddam was executed. And still their kids kept coming home in government coffins.

And then Katrina very nearly wiped out the City of New Orleans, and the government seemed utterly incapable responding to an emergency. And then there’s the deficit. He might not be a Wall Street economist, but the tool-and-die worker in Sheboygan knows a bad idea when he sees one – and $5 trillion in debt over the past six years looks like a pretty bad idea. The country is on the wrong track, but what do the Republicans offer: Stay The Course.

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that Barak Obama is getting support from people who previously regarded themselves as Republicans. They’ve been lied to for a generation now, and they’ve just now come to the realization that the people they trusted have sold them out. They’re learning just now that the Republican Party never cared for working people, small towns, hard work, and family values. And they’re looking for new allegiances.

I keep reading posts that these new voters will destroy the Democratic Party, and I couldn’t agree less. These are people who should have been voting Democratic all along, and were it not for thirty years of careful and effective propaganda, they would have. These people might not be as liberal as some (most) of the people here on Democratic Underground, but they’re still new to this business of voting Democratic. They’ll come around.