The Nation's deeply deceptive Obama-endorsement editorial

On October 3, 2012 (in the issue dated October 22), The Nation published an editorial titled "Re-Elect the President."

It is an utterly dishonest case for voting for Barack Obama, instead of, say, a left third-party candidate.

Note: Sentences, below, in italics are paraphrases. The numbered sections correspond to the editorial's eleven paragraphs, and each is headed by a brief restatement of the paragraph's topic.


1. Some progressives are disappointed in Obama, and not without reason, but Romney's election would be a disaster.

From the start, this is world-class propaganda:

Progressive opinions on Barack Obama’s first term are as conflicted as his record. These differences are a sign of a diverse and spirited left, and we welcome continued debate in our pages about the president’s record and policies. But that discussion should not obscure what is at stake in this election. A victory for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan in November would validate the reactionary extremists who have captured the Republican Party. It would represent the triumph of social Darwinism, the religious right, corporate power and the big money donors who thrive in a new Gilded Age of inequality. It would strike a devastating blow to progressive values and movements, locking us in rear-guard actions on a range of issues—from the rights of women, minorities, immigrants and LGBT people to the preservation of social insurance programs and a progressive tax structure. Inside the Democratic Party, Obama’s defeat would embolden the Blue Dogs and New Dems, who have greased the party’s slide to the right. Whatever disappointments we have with Obama’s first term—and there are many—progressives have a profound interest in the popular rejection of the Romney/Ryan ticket.

The editorial begins by softening up the target reader, a lefty/liberal/progressive planning not to vote for Obama's reelection.

You can and should fit inside the Democrats' big tent. (Your principled objections to Obama, nay your mere "opinions," are no reason to stray beyond the shallow end.)

The Nation welcomes critiques of Obama's presidency. (So long as those critiques aren't actionable at the one time in four years that voters have their say.)

Without the guidance of The Nation's editors, you may have trouble seeing "what's at stake." (If you're rejecting the mainstream alternative to Mitt Romney, you just haven't given it ample thought. Leave that to us!)

What, more than anything, marks this editorial as propaganda is that it's built on quasi-assertions, dubious things it aims for you to believe, but which it never quite crosses the line into outright claiming.

It masterfully paints a picture of a disastrous sea change if Romney beats Obama, a picture that invites us to ignore that both candidates are opportunistic narcissists with no fixed political philosophy beyond abject fealty to moneyed interests.

From the introductory passage quoted above, we are to believe that Romney represents the GOP far right and that Obama represents a healthy alternative not just to him, but also to the Democrats' conservative Blue Dog element.

The Nation's editors don't actually say that Romney is an extremist, nor that he'll enact a hard-right agenda. You're just supposed to read that into the negative space. A Romney win would, in some undefined fashion, represent a "victory" for rightwing extremists. It would be an undefined "triumph" for the oligarchs and other such evil constituencies who, presumably, hold sway only with the GOP.

By leaving it to you to fill in the blanks, the editors don't have to contend with Romney's background as a blue-state GOP "moderate," one who bested a rogue's gallery of bona fide hard-right rivals in the primaries. They don't have to contend with Obama's cruising to victory in 2008 with massive (and well-reciprocated) support from Wall St. And so forth.

Another ominous "victory" the editors trump up is that the dreaded Blue Dogs will get the upper hand if Obama is defeated. Little matter that Obama was recently quoted as calling himself a Blue Dog, a shoe that comfortably fits the unilateral creator of the Simpson-Bowles austerity commission. If the Blue Dog isn't elected, the Blue Dogs will have won!

Through such sleight of hand, The Nation's editors nudge you into thinking that the drone king, the man who's fighting to make indefinite detention the law of the land, the man who says he doesn't differ much from Romney on Social Security "tweaks," represents something significantly different from both Romney and the Democrats' "slide to the right."


2. Some important topics haven't been discussed in this campaign.

Courtesy of The Nation's editors, we learn why Obama's reelection rhetoric has included scant mention of such big topics as climate change, poverty, American militancy, and the growing security state.

The cause? "The Republican Party’s rightward lurch, as well as the Romney team’s recurring gaffes and its naked hostility to vast sectors of the American electorate." Because of such things, Obama is not sounding "a broad call for change that distinguished his 2008 election."

The premise for this curious assertion is, as best I can glean, that Obama's doing very well, thank you, in cultivating his base. So, there's no motivation for him to use his campaign to galvanize opinion about, and rally interest in solving, some of the most vital issues of the day.

If you've observed that, on those matters, Obama hasn't done much—or is actively retrograde—don't trust your lyin' eyes. It's gotta be the gaffes!

One day, the last child might ask, "Mommy, why didn't they stop climate change?" If she read The Nation's thoughtful analysis, she'll know what to say: "Mitt Romney said too much dumb stuff!"


3. Don't expect Obama alone to accomplish radical change, despite the old "audacity of hope" rhetoric.

Kind of a head-fake here. It starts all cynical-like. These savvy editors aren't starry-eyed:

As such, we have no illusions about the audacity of hope, no faith that the re-election of President Obama

But it immediately switches to the implication that, for progressive ends—the radical agenda that The Nation champions, no less—Obama is necessary but not sufficient:

alone will accomplish the radical change this magazine has championed.

Don't "expect elected officials to make change from above," we're told. Where did you ever get the idea that a politician was going to bring change? It's not like they have special authority to implement policy. Nope, it's all on you, as you're about to be told relentlessly.

You'll never guess where we're supposed to start! Shockingly, it's by reelecting Democrats (and Dem-caucuser Bernie Sanders), and by electing still-more Democrats like "crusader" Elizabeth Warren, the Iran sanctions enthusiast and Medicare for All opponent.

Note that this section starts with "As such," which connects it to the previous graf, about Obama's eliding several vital issues from his campaign spiel.

Turns out the omission of that "broad call" for progressive reform isn't just streamlining the messaging of an auspicious reelection bid. It's now an indication that Obama (alone) won't bring home the tempeh on those issues.


4. The 2008 election proved to be an opportunity for change, notably for LGBT activists.

Getting Obama to belatedly budge from some of his reactionary positions on gay rights has, indeed, been among the few "make-me-do-it" accomplishments of (largely) left-side activists in the last four years.

Since 2004, Dick Cheney has spoken out for marriage equality. In 2008, Obama campaigned against it, avowing—in Rick Warren's mega-church—a religious objection to it. He opposed same-sex marriage because, he said, "God's in the mix." Was that "a powerful symbol of the differences between Republicans and Democrats on social issues"?

Despite his having spoken out against DADT, Obama's DOJ fought the Log Cabin Republicans in their suit to end the bigoted policy. Was that a "powerful symbol of the differences between Republicans and Democrats on social issues"?

Obama eventually did end DADT, when a bill with his own party's imprimatur hit his desk... in so doing, spelling the end of the Obama DOJ's appeal against what would have been a Republican-led victory against the policy.

More than the 2008 election itself, the 2012 reelection campaign has proven to be an opportunity for a few concessions.

This year, in the face of considerable pressure from the LGBT community as he was fundraising for his final election bid, Obama relented on same-sex marriage. He finally signaled his so-called "evolution" (i.e., the end of his cynical, calculated opposition—or do you really believe an urbane fellow like Barack Obama had heartfelt religious objections to gay equality?).

A sitting president's public statement in favor of same-sex marriage was undeniably a milestone on the road to gay equality. But Obama went no further than The Most Evil Vice President Ever, advocating the same states-rights approach. He did not stand up for marriage equality as a civil right.

Obama's "evolved" position truly is a "powerful symbol." Unfortunately much of that power is deployed as a dispensation chit ("pinkwashing," some call it) with the Democratic base, used to secure unconcern about countless policies liberals would decry under Bush, McCain, or Romney.

And as a practical matter, come November 7th, when Obama is done trading more-or-less symbolic concessions for funding and votes, where would such leverage come from again?


5. Though Obama has been harsh on undocumented immigrants, the Dream Act is one grassroots victory.

While admitting that Obama has been aggressive against immigrants, this part doesn't state that he has deported people at a record pace, a fact I'll wager The Nation's editors would readily cite were it on a Republican's record. The editorial also fails to note that this was another belated, substantially symbolic election-phase move to cultivate an important demographic. And, again, it doesn't address that such leverage over Obama disappears forever in about a month.


6. Other grassroots advocacy wins under Obama include feminist and environmental issues.

"Famously," as the editors note, early in Obama's term, he signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

It's famous because hyping the significance of this checklist item is a favorite pastime of Obama partisans.

As Firedoglake blogger David Dayen put it:

the legislation that could have made a difference was left behind. And it severely damages the credibility of the Administration and its allies to keep waving the bloody shirt of Lilly Ledbetter when it actually did pretty much nothing for the larger cause of equal pay and equal work.

The Nation's editors favorably describe the results of feminist pressure on Obama about the Affordable Care Act, leaving out of their narrative that he legitimized religious exemptions to contraceptive coverage (they chalk up his Rube Goldberg compromise as a progressive win). They also don't mention that, as a bargaining chip to help pass the ACA, Obama signed an executive order making the Hyde Amendment (which had been subject to annual renewal) into a permanent law, a law that bans government funding of most abortions. And separate from the ObamaCare agenda, Obama blocked girls under 17 from getting over-the-counter access to Plan B contraception. This, we have been told, is what a feminist looks like.

And how's this for good news on the environmental front?

Environmentalists rightly despaired as a new breed of science-denying Republicans beat the president into passivity on the issue of climate change, but they didn’t quit. They got militant, circling the White House and enduring mass arrests, forcing the administration to postpone construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.

See what The Nation's editors did there?

• They juxtaposed Keystone XL—a project whose main risks are water and ground contamination—with climate change, to give the impression that any Obama administration concessions on it are progress on that aforementioned, dangerously neglected issue
• They, again, pin Obama's general inaction (or worse) on climate change on the GOP. No mention of his deep ties to all manner of energy interests. No mention that he's "The Most Powerful Man in the World," blessed with legendary oratory skills and the Bully Pulpit. Those mean old Republicans made the man we're urged to reelect passive on a global existential threat.
• They treat Obama's simply delaying, until after the election, the Keystone XL project-approval decision as a big success story... even though subsequent to the announced delay, he made a photo-op of not just approving but fast-tracking part of the pipeline, gushing (so to speak) that "we’re drilling all over the place right now."

7. We need grassroots action to make Obama improve on the economy and civil liberties.

The editors start really heaping it on here, so let's examine the full text the rest of the way.

Progressive movements will need this full range of strategies if we are to make headway in the two areas where the president has disappointed most: the scale and terms of the economic recovery, and the escalation of the national security state with its erosion of civil liberties.

The aforementioned relatively small successes, many of which relied on reelection-phase pressure that vanishes after the election, somehow point the way to making Obama not horrible on the economy and civil liberties.

On the former, Obama’s Recovery Act saved hundreds of thousands of jobs, prevented mass destitution and staved off a depression.

Here we get a popular and completely unprovable Democratic trope, alt-reality certainty that without Obama's actions, we'd be in a depression (instead of in this swell economy).

But from the beginning of the financial crisis, progressive economists were calling on the president to champion a much larger stimulus and to reject the mantra of deficit reduction. What they lacked was a wide-scale social movement to turn their proposals into demands.

They also lacked a president who wasn't joined at the hip to Goldman Sachs.

Into that vacuum rushed the Tea Party, which offered sham solutions but at least spoke to the disorientation of the downwardly mobile. Only when the crisis had hardened into gridlock in Washington, did the uprisings in Wisconsin and Ohio come—and then Occupy. Absent those movements, the president’s first instinct was to turn to the technocrats whose priority was always to keep Wall Street intact. Only when challenged by the 99 percent did he begin to speak about the “breathtaking greed of a few, with irresponsibility all across the system” and to make the case for reducing inequality and restoring basic economic fairness.

Good gravy! What's wrong with Obama's Wall St.-first economic policies is that left-populist movements didn't get popular at the right time? And what's wrong with Obama's policies is technocracy, rather than plutocracy?

Should Obama win re-election, surely he will owe a large debt to the street activists, whose protests against the 1 percent made so effective the Obama campaign’s attack on Romney for his Bain economics and his apparent disdain for the “47 percent.”

The big payoff for people who slept in tents to protest economic injustice: talking points to reelect the old boss.

Come 2013, that debt should be called in, forcefully, to push for real financial regulation and job creation.

At this point, The Nation's editors have tired of concealing their contempt for you and your intellect.


8. Obama's been admirable about war, not so good on civil liberties.

To his credit, Obama presided over the end of the Iraq War

"Preside over" is deft weasel-wording, suggesting it was Obama's presidentin' that done it. This slyly feeds the popular misconception that Obama facilitated the war's end.

The troop withdrawal was dictated by the agreement Bush made with the al-Maliki government. Obama simply happened to live in the White House when it came due. By what logic is this "to his credit"?

Obama had promised to pull out the troops well ahead of that deadline. In fact, he said it was the first thing he would do as president. More specifically, he promised to recall a brigade each month.

Not only did Obama break those promises, he tried to convince Iraq to extend the war beyond the Bush deadline. To his credit, of course. And credit not just from The Nation's editors, but also from hawkish "centrists" and conservatives.

Per Politifact:

The timetable was longer than what he originally set out, and some experts give him credit for that. Michael O’Hanlon, a fellow with the centrist Brookings Institution who generally approves of Obama’s strategies, said Obama first pledged to leave Iraq in 16 months but ended up staying nearly twice as long. 

"I actually think that was the right decision,"  O’Hanlon said.  "I think he got the balance about right. And that was based on the realities on the ground in Iraq, not based on the politics here at home." 

Jim Phillips, a Middle East analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation, agreed that more time was better.

"President Obama was wise to drop his campaign promise to withdraw a brigade from Iraq every month once he took office. That would have led to much greater risk in consolidating the gains of the troop surge," Phillips said.

Still, Phillips thinks the pullout in late 2011 was rushed. Even though that deadline was set by the Bush administration, it was widely expected that it would be extended.

Obama’s team failed to negotiate an extension because Iraqi authorities would not bend on one key point: granting immunity to U.S. forces in Iraqi courts.

As Democrats would be quick to point out in a McCain presidency, America maintains substantial quasi-military forces in and around Iraq. And, as The Nation is aware, our special forces presence in Iraq is now on the rise.

Back to the text, and the rest of the paragraph's opening sentence:

and is bringing the war in Afghanistan to a close.

Obama ordered a near-tripling of the US presence in Afghanistan, only recently drawing the size back down to "pre-surge" levels.

Under Commander-in-Chief Obama, the number of US troops killed in Afghanistan has doubled. And heaven knows how many more Afghans have died.

Now, after four more bloody years of America's longest war... and a deal to keep the US in Afghanistan until 2024, Obama avows plans to more or less end the war in 2014. To his credit.

For some reason, The Nation didn't take this editorial as an opportunity to credit Obama for his undeclared war in Libya, his even less-declared wars against Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen, and his deploying special ops forces in twice as many countries as his notorious predecessor did.

But there is no denying this president’s spinal collapse when it comes to defending core civil liberties. Obama promised to close Guantánamo, then reversed himself. He did not end military tribunals and restore the rule of law for terror suspects. He launched a drone war that is killing civilians and fueling a backlash against the United States throughout the Muslim world. And he has not rolled back the imperial presidency of George W. Bush, as he promised; indeed, in some instances, more power has been concentrated in the White House by a president who now reserves the right to extrajudicially assassinate US citizens.

There is plenty of denying in portraying a massive assault on civil liberties as a "spinal collapse," rather than the act of a man with extraordinary agency.

If Obama slaughtered people, without the barest shred of due process, The Nation would say he was just being spineless. In fact, they just did.

Obama's "promise" to close Guantánamo was hollow to begin with. He merely planned (and possibly still does) to relocate it to Illinois. That would change everything!

Even when acknowledging that Obama has granted himself the ultimate law of tyrants, summary execution of his subjects, the editors' finesse is impressive.

They use a twisty, semi-passive construction, "more power has been concentrated in the White House by a president" and say that he "reserves the right to extrajudicially assassinate US citizens." He doesn't merely "reserve" this unconscionable, self-claimed "right." He exercises it, even on American-born teenagers.

And what look at Obama's civil liberties abuses could leave out his war on whistleblowers? Well, this one from The Nation, for one.


9. The left hasn't protested Obama as fiercely as it did Bush. But Romney would be worse.

But while the antiwar and civil liberties communities have challenged Obama, he has largely been spared the vigorous denunciations liberals heaped on Bush. We have never been silent about our objections to Obama’s misdeeds, and we don’t ever intend to be.

The left doesn't challenge Democrats' misdeeds as vigorously as it does Republican misdeeds. But that doesn't mean The Nation will stop murmuring truth to power!

But if on some foreign policy and national security matters the president has shocked his progressive supporters by edging the needle to the right, 

Proper appreciation of such artistry calls for super slo-mo.

The editors raise the notion of being shocked while taking stock of Obama's brutal ways. Seems fitting, given that we were just talking about his arrogating to himself the right to murder anyone on a whim.

But the shock is quickly and expertly absorbed. What shocks us isn't the policy itself. It's that the man from hope-and-change has moved, no, just "edged" some policies to the right.

Mitt Romney promises to move it even further—embracing again the “enhanced interrogation techniques” promoted by Bush and Cheney and moving into lockstep with Israel’s dangerous war games with Iran.

Sure, Obama kills people based on vague profiling (or any other standard he chooses), but Romney will go all the way to torture... and without, for once, using his signature technique: outsourcing.

For months, Obama's been rattling a saber at Iran, intoning about "last chances" and "all options on the table," committing cyberwarfare, and coordinating unjustified sanctions that harm millions.

Obama's Peace President mystique surely makes it easier for him to play three-card monte with a populace perhaps a little chastened by the Iraq War and its deceptive marketing.

His rhetoric stirs up domestic panic about Iran's "nuclear program," helping fool the public into believing Iran has an active nuclear weapons program without quite stating it (if he doesn't get reelected, maybe The Nation's hiring), and that it's our prerogative to attack them if they did.

But this is all fine and dandy, or at least good enough, so long as we fear that Mitt Romney might do worse.

No matter who is in the White House, a revived peace and antiwar movement has a lot of work ahead of it in the next four years—but it is impossible to imagine any progress on that front with a Romney administration in power.

Because of liberal assent, Obama "has largely been spared the vigorous denunciations liberals heaped on Bush."

Dutifully reelecting him will galvanize lefty dissent how, exactly? That's not the editors' problem, as they chuck the ball (or, rather, roll a Sisyphean rock) into the activists' court for the umpteenth time.


10. A Romney win will set America back.

Picking up the no-progress-under-Romney theme from the previous paragraph:

Indeed, this is true for any cause that progressives care about. Republican rule in Washington promises not just the closing of progressive possibilities but the repeal of gains won by the great social movements of the twentieth century.

The focus here is exclusively on progressive accomplishments of the past and the future. Romney, they say, threatens the progressive gains of the last century, and his election will preclude further progress.

The editors are sensible enough not to stake their case for Obama on his supposed policy achievements, such as the corporatist Affordable Care Act.

Vote for Obama, they argue, not because of anything he's achieved or is likely to achieve, but because the scary Republican will be worse.

While it's not an entirely unreasonable argument, it's a withering measure of the state of American democracy under the two-party system.

It would mean the entrenchment of the class interests of a tiny, disconnected elite that looks down on the rest of society with barely concealed contempt and has made explicit its aim to shred the social contract and rig the game in its favor, whether through an assault on voting rights, an expansion of the power of big money in politics or by stacking the courts with right-wing extremists.

The Nation's editors are too smart to claim that the ObamaDems represent something apart from "the entrenchment of the class interests of a tiny, disconnected elite." So, once again they point you in the direction of believing a tribally flattering untruth—that the GOP is the sole party of the elites—while maintaining their plausible deniability.

Even when it comes to the old standby, Supreme Court picks, the editors want you to be afraid of what Romney will do, but without sticking their necks out to say what Obama would do.

They and we have no basis to assume that Obama, given the opportunity, will improve (from a left perspective) the Supreme Court.

His appointments thus far, replacing Democrat-appointed GOP-appointed left-leaning justices, have not moved the court to the left. He nearly voted for John Roberts's confirmation, until an aide convinced him it would look bad on his résumé.

How would Obama fill a currently conservative seat on the Supreme Court? Would he pick a reliably left-leaning vote? Would he seek a court make-up that slaps him down on matters like indefinite detention, strip-searches, and assassinating American citizens?

We simply don't know. But that's not important now, it's time to cowboy community-organizer up, fear the uniquely evil GOP, and vote for four years much like the last four. And like the eight years before them. Etc.


11. You must vote for Obama, after which it's your job to make progressive policy happen.

The threat is clear: we can’t afford a Romney/Ryan victory.

The threat is as clear as it can be given that the editors have failed to make much of any concrete policy distinctions between the two parties' tickets.

Progressives made real advances during Obama’s four years in office, and we can build on the lessons and struggles of his first term if he’s given a second.

Even though those lessons and struggles primarily indicate that Obama is opposed to left/liberal/progressive values and interests. And most of his few, and largely symbolic, concessions to us were reelection ploys, secured through leverage we'll never have again.

But with the so-called fiscal cliff looming at year’s end, and with Obama gesturing toward a Grand Bargain that concedes far too much to the right, it would be a mistake to believe we can cast our votes and go home, secure in the knowledge that our nation’s social contract with all its citizens will be protected.

That is, vote for Obama with the full expectation that he'll immediately try to harm you by slashing the safety net. But that's not what's in his heart, mind you, he's just "conceding" to the right.

What was true in 2008 is still true today: electing Obama is a necessary first step, but the more complex challenges commence after election day.

In conclusion: You have two jobs.

First, vote for Obama's reelection. Second, somehow compensate for the fact that Obama is disinclined to do any good. Got it?