The Greatest Trick That Obama Ever Pulled Was Convincing the World He Was Powerless

I am, of course rephrasing Charles Baudelaire in the hed, though most people know it from the movie The Usual Susopects.

With all the talk of the Green Lantern theory of politics and the like, the centrists have maintained for decades that they simply lack to power to follow through on their promises.

The reality is that they are fine with the way things are, because they personally do very well under the current regime of inequality. 

That's also why the centrists want to keep the filibuster, it gives them another excuse not to do anything.

Of course, when the reactionary right takes the White House, whether it be Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, or Trump, they seem to have no problem making the United States a crueler and worse place.

Well, over at The Lever, David Sirota shines a light on what might be the only bright side to Trump being elected in 2024, he has shown that the centrist bleats about being powerless are a lie, and they always have been.

There are a few of us who are old enough to remember everyone in the Obama White House and in liberal media defending former President Barack Obama’s failures by insisting that he never had the power to do any of the big things he promised.

Those who pushed Obama to at least try to do what he promised were ridiculed by Ezra Klein as deranged believers in a so-called “Green Lantern Theory” of the presidency. When Obama’s own grassroots supporters tried to help round up congressional votes for his promised populist policies like a public health insurance option, Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel reportedly lambasted those supporters with epithets:

The friction was laid bare in August when Mr. Emanuel showed up at a weekly strategy session featuring liberal groups and White House aides. Some attendees said they were planning to air ads attacking conservative Democrats who were balking at Mr. Obama’s health care overhaul.

“F—ing retarded,” Mr. Emanuel scolded the group, according to several participants.

………

To be fair, former President Joe Biden rammed through Congress a much bigger stimulus package than Obama ever tried, and pockets of the Biden administration at the Federal Trade Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the Justice Department’s antitrust division did laudably exercise much more power to deliver than their Obama predecessors ever did. And yet, in his rhetoric and deference to norms, Biden himself did his own part to enshrine the overall idea of the powerless president as Democratic dogma.

………

I bring this all up not because I live eternally in the past, and not just because I’m still mad about what happened in the Obama years, and not because I still believe that was the entirely preventable meltdown that explains this whole godforsaken era. I bring it up with an eye on the future: I want to remind everyone in the horrible here and now that President Donald Trump’s ongoing second-term rampage of unilateral executive power shows what a complete lie all of that pretend Democratic powerlessness really was. And that reminder is important so that nobody accepts that horseshit excuse ever again. 

This is why the Democratic Party rank and file know this, which is why they want Chuck Schumer's and Hakeem Jefferies' heads on a pike.

They have seen what the, "Better things aren't possible," policies leads to, and that is Donald Trump.

Since the mid-1970s, the Democratic Party establishment (There is no Democratic Party establishment) has positioned itself as a ratchet, so while they were in charge, nothing would get much worse, but they would not reverse the evil done by the reactionaries when they had power.

This is unsustainable for us as a society, and that which cannot continue will not continue.