This piece appears in this morning's edition of THE BALTIMORE SUN. Dear President Obama: You were elected not to avoid the confrontation with the evil powers still ruling the right wing, but to fight that battle and win it.
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The following piece appears in today's Baltimore Sun
Dear President Obama,
Since your
inauguration, your power has diminished and the prospects for your being a
transformational president have declined. Here's why, and here's how you can
restore that potential with which you began your presidency.
First the
why: Once in office, you grew weaker because you detached yourself from the
forces that swept you into the
White
House.
It was a moral and spiritual force that lifted you to the
presidency, a force expressed by the yearnings of millions for America to rise
from the darkness into which your predecessor had led us.
The
unprecedented nature of your election - a relatively inexperienced black man
reaching the highest office in the land - was possible only because of the
unprecedented nature of the moral and spiritual damage the Bush presidency had
inflicted upon the nation (with its reign of lies, fomenting of division, waging
of unnecessary war, and usurpatious trampling on the Constitution and the rule
of law) and because of the sense of purity and elevation you conveyed in your
campaign.
On Election Night, illuminated by the spirit that shone in the
faces of the throng in
Grant
Park and, indeed, around the world, your potential to reshape this country
was huge.
You are smaller now, and this diminution was not
inevitable.
You were brought to power as the champion of light over
darkness, and you squandered it by neglecting that role. In this, there have
been three main errors.
First, you spoke to us mainly as a policy wonk
and did little to connect your plans with our moral and spiritual
yearnings.
Second, and more important, you too readily muddied the moral
waters, blurring the battle lines. Perhaps underestimating the strength
available to you from a course of greater boldness and moral clarity, you were
over-eager to make bargains - often bad ones, at that - with the forces you had
been elected to combat.
To name one area of such muddying: Political
reality may have dictated "looking forward and not backward" when it came to
prosecuting or even investigating the previous administration's crimes - though
they're crimes of the kind about which our Founders worried most. But why send
your own
Justice
Department into court to defend the indefensible?
(Like, most
recently, arguing for the immunity of those in
George
W. Bush's Department of Justice who wrote memos in apparent bad faith to
declare legal what were crimes: If the memos' writers are immune because they
simply gave opinions, and if everyone who follows those opinions is immunized by
the memos, then all future presidents have a blueprint for committing any crime
they choose.)
But perhaps still more important than your muddying the
moral waters has been your failure to deal with your opposition for the amoral
force it is. It may be good political strategy not to look "backward" at the
darkness of the Bush presidency, but it is a major strategic mistake not to
confront that same force of darkness so relentlessly assaulting you now on
issues ranging from whether you were born in the U.S. to whether you're coming
to take people's guns away to whether you're dismantling American
capitalism.
That your opposition is animated by that same dark spirit is
shown in their making a divisive war of nearly every issue; in their continuous
propagating of fear-mongering lies; and, above all, in their overriding
commitment, even at a time of multiple national crises, to making you fail,
simply so they can regain power.
But, except for rare instances, you've
ignored how extreme and destructive is your opposition's behavior by the lights
of American ideals and the standards of American history.
Yes, you've
denied some of their lies, but you've not called out the lying. When
Sarah Palin
and her ilk accuse you of supporting death panels, and you respond by saying,
"That's not true, there are no death panels," the national conversation centers
on the question: "Are there death panels?" But if you say, "It's unpatriotic for
Republicans to degrade our national discourse with fear-mongering lies," then
the media will focus on the question: "Are the Republican peddling lies?" The
first question undermines you; the second discredits your opposition.
It
is because of your failure to fight back that the Republican Party - behaving
more scandalously than any political opposition in memory - has grown stronger,
while you have grown weaker.
Your September speech on health care reform
to the Joint Session of Congress proved that when you act as the champion of the
good and opponent of evil, you grow in power. Overnight, by inspiringly
connecting your goals with our moral and spiritual ideals, and subtly but
forcefully calling out the dark doings of your opposition, you turned the
direction of the political struggle around.
Every day, you should ask
yourself: "What can I do in that same spirit - holding up the torch and fighting
the darkness - that I expressed in that speech?"
Your opponents are
relentless, single-minded and ruthless in their efforts to weaken and destroy
you. This is a continuation of the same struggle for which Americans chose you
to be their champion. It's your job not to ignore the battle but to fight and
win it.
Authors Bio:Andy Schmookler, an award-winning author, political commentator, radio talk-show host, and teacher, was the Democratic nominee for Congress from Virginia's 6th District. His new book -- written to have an impact on the central political battle of our time -- is WHAT WE'RE UP AGAINST. His previous books include The Parable of the Tribes: The Problem of Power in Social Evolution, for which he was awarded the Erik H. Erikson prize by the International Society for Political Psychology.