Lead, Follow, Or Get Out Of The Way

Here’s a very interesting graph, and one that Barack Obama would do well to pay attention to, if you ask me. It illustrate an estimate of how the American voting population falls along a traditional left-to-right, liberal-to-conservative spectrum based on public opinion polling data and compares it directly to the ideological positions of the total membership of the U.S. House Of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. As you can see, overall Congress is considerably more conservative than the geneal populace; while there’s not an extreme difference in the medians between the House and the public, there’s a greater discrepancy between the public and the Senate, and in terms of overall distribution there are substantially more liberals in the general populace than in either house.

Here’s the blog where this graph came from. The blog promotes a recently-published book about the inequities in America and how they translate into voting habits. If you check out that link, be sure to look at the three other graphs which compare the same sort of data for “red”, “blue” and “battleground” states. The picture changes a bit when you consider these graphs; in “blue” states, members of Congress are significantly more liberal than their constituents (especially in the House), and in “red states” the conservative extreme is even more pronounced.

This webpage is where the graphs actually originate, and the purpose of the graphs was to respond to the Republican talking point that Obama was “the most liberal member of the Senate”. Once your head recovers from some of those animated cloud graphs, you should be able to see that based on his overall record in the Senate, Obama was nowhere NEAR the liberal end of the ideological spectrum. He plots firmly in the middle of the liberal “hump” of the Senate distribution, putting him very near the liberal hump of the general public — but that’s a long way from the far left end. McCain is similarly positioned on the right-hand side.

So, if this election is about the MIDDLE, why is it being waged on the right? Sam Smith, who publishes the political blog “The Progressive Review”, offers up a particularly scathing assessment of how far Obama is skidding to the right as he is supposedly “tracking to the middle”:

– Favors expanding the war in Afghanistan
– Leaving a sizable force in and near Iraq following what he calls a “withdrawal.” A large mercenary force would probably also be left.
– Aggressively opposed the impeachment of Bush. This same advisor says he would “be stunned” if his candidate appointed a strong critic of corporations to the Supreme Court.
– Has offered no major new ideas for dealing with the nation’s economic crisis.
– Supports Bill Clinton’s assault on social welfare.
– Supported making it harder to file class action suits in state courts
– Voted for a business-friendly tort bill
– Voted against a 30% interest rate cap on credit cards
– Had the most number of foreign lobbyist contributors in the primaries
– Is even more popular with Pentagon contractors than McCain
– Was most popular of the primary candidates with K Street lobbyists
– Has a top economic aide who has written enthusiastically about Milton Friedman and denounced the idea of a moratorium on mortgage foreclosures.
– Has no meaningful urban policy
– Supports the war on drugs
– Supports the crack-cocaine sentence disparity
– Supports Real ID
– Supports the PATRIOT Act
– Supports the death penalty
– Has lent his support to the neo-liberal Hamilton Project, which was formed, as one journalist put it, “to counter populist rebellion against corporatist tendencies within the Democratic Party.”
– Has considered naming as vice president or cabinet members rightwing Republicans rated 0% by SANE, AFL-CIO, NARAL, Alliance for Retired Americans, Human Rights Coalition and the League of Conservation Voters, and who oppose abortion and favor privatizing Social Security
– Voted for a nuclear energy bill that included money for bunker buster bombs and full funding for Yucca Mountain.
– Supports federally funded ethanol and is unusually close to the ethanol industry.
– Supports the No Child Left Behind Act.
– Opposes reintroduction of the fairness doctrine for radio and television.
– Is using hawkish foreign policy advisors involved in past US misdeeds and failures.
– Strongly supports Israeli aggression and apartheid.
– Favors turning over Jerusalem to Israel
– Favored cluster bomb ban in civilian areas
– Opposes single payer healthcare
– Wouldn’t have photo taken with San Francisco mayor because he was afraid it would seem that he supported gay marriage
– Favors a national service plan that appears to be in sync with one being promoted by a new coalition that would make national service mandatory by 2020, and which is in line with a bill for such mandatory national service introduced by Rep. Charles Rangel.
– Has dissed both Ralph Nader and Paul Wellstone
– Supports immunity from prosecution for both telecoms engaged in illegal wiretapping and the government officials that had them do it.

You don’t have to imagine. It’s Barack Obama, whose nomination was assured thanks to a con game that even outdid the one that worked so well for Bill Clinton and which left America essentially without a liberal voice for eight years.

This May article by George Packer in The New Yorker documents the increasing downward slide of the Republican Party, which truly hit its pinnacle with Richard Nixon, not Ronald Reagan and makes the assertion that this election is as much a watershed for the re-emergence of the Democratic majority as 1964 was for the Republicans. And yet…and yet…Obama offers nothing, not one single thing in his platform to differentiate himself from the contemptible Pelosi and Reid or from the utterly corrupt McCain beyond flowery rhetoric. If this really is the end of the modern conservative movement, it’s not dying without the supposed liberal establishment trying to breathe a little more life into it.