Obama Prepares to Triangulate Himself by Glen Ford

[YankeeLeft7x]

Obama's Deficit Reduction Commission = “Cat Food” Commission

Black Agenda Report
Wed, 10/20/2010 - 11:03 — Glen Ford

Obama Prepares to Triangulate Himself
by BAR executive editor Glen Ford

"....With 83 nominal members, the Progressive Congressional Caucus is, on paper, the largest of the House ideological groupings, but has been neutered since Barack Obama entered the White House....President Clinton skillfully triangulated his own Democrats, seeking to position himself between the party’s liberal-ish core and the Republicans, thus moving the center of political gravity rightward through the Nineties. Obama, whose first major act while still a candidate was to save the Bush bank bailout after it failed a first vote in October, 2008, has elevated Clinton-style triangulation to what he hopes passes for statesmanship. Obama likes to calls it “non-partisan,” “consensus-building” politics and other variations on the theme, but the result is always the same: the fundamental interests of corporations are protected at the beginning of the process, which can only end with the people in worse shape than before it started....Obama, a genius at creating opportunities for himself while undermining the life prospects of others, invented the deficit reduction commission as his customized vehicle to subvert his own party’s cherished “entitlement” programs: Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, and others. Republicans didn’t force his hand or box him in. Instead, Obama set the torpedoes in motion against entitlements in the days before his inauguration, declaring, on January 8, 2009, that an overhaul of Medicare and Social Security would be “a central part” of his presidency. Not long afterwards, he said that Social Security and other entitlements would be “on the table” for cutting. All this, before any Republican had blurted an angry word about Obama in congressional debate.... Obama’s ambush of entitlements is premeditated. He was determined from the very start to succeed where George Bush failed – by gutting Social Security. That’s how Obama measures greatness....The problem was, most Republicans remembered Bush’s Social Security debacle of 2005, and were not anxious to relive the experience...With Republicans in no mood to launch a legislative attack on Social Security, there was nobody for Obama to make one of his grand comprises with. So, in February of this year, he issued an executive order creating his own anti-entitlement missile, the 18-person panel that quickly became known as the “cat food” commission, harkening back to the pre-Social Security days when many of the elderly where reduced to eating cat food....Obama’s trick was to conjure up a political demand for the gutting of entitlements when no serious movement in that direction existed in the Congress...."

Read the entire article @:
http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/obama-prepares-triangulate-himself

[Jakes Progress]

1. There was no mandate to gut public schools either.

Two cherished and hard-won areas of victory for the Democratic party tossed aside in less than two years.