Tweet
I have to disagree with my friend Adam Bink on this one:
In other words, while I see headlines in other progressive media spaces "Obama flip-flops on drilling!!" and "which guy did we elect President again?!", I see it less as a flip-flop than a validation of (a) a previously-held position and (b) that he is more of a Conservadem than many are willing to admit.
While Adam is correct to point out that then-candidate Obama pivoted on offshore drilling in the final months of the Presidential campaign, he misses a few important points.
1. The piece he cites begins as follows: "Obama said he might support more drilling if it were paired with comprehensive energy conservation measures and alternative energy development."
Obama’s announcement on offshore drilling this week was a standalone measure. It was not in fact "paired with comprehensive energy conservation measures and alternative energy development." By taking this action without the accompanying positive measures, this is a step further in the wrong direction than what was signaled during the campaign.
And indeed, this is the bulk of the complaint from many progressive commentators. Joe Conason calls it "surrender, then negotiate" strategy. Matthew Yglesias doesn’t understand why Obama did this without getting anything in return. Steve Benen and Kevin Drum have similar concerns. While there would have been complaints on the substance of the policy either way — it is after all, extremely bad policy — they probably would have been more subdued if it wasn’t such a baffling move politically.
2. Adam writes, "Drilling has always been on the list of expendable issues." This is simply not true. If Obama said anything prior to August 2008 indicating he was willing to budge on the issue, I haven’t seen it. From at least 2005 until August 2008 — after he had secured the Democratic nomination — Obama argued convincingly against offshore drilling repeatedly. Think Progress has several examples:
"The days of running a 21st century economy on a 20th century fossil fuel are numbered – and we need to realize that before it’s too late."
"The truth is, an oil future is not a secure future for America."
"We could open up every square inch of America to drilling and we still wouldn’t even make a dent in our oil dependency." 9/15/05
"It would be nice if we could produce our way out of this problem, but it’s just not possible." 2/28/06
"Instead of making tough political decisions about how to reduce our insatiable demand for oil, this bill continues to lull the American people into thinking that we can drill our way out of our energy problems." 8/1/06
"Now is the time to end this addiction, and to understand that drilling is a stop-gap measure, not a long-term solution. Not even close." 8/28/08
So yes, for the last 90 days of the Presidential campaign, Obama expressed willingness to concede on offshore drilling. But for the previous 3+ years, throughout his Senate career and the long primary campaign, he argued against it over and over again. This is when all of us got to know Mr. Obama and what he stood for, and this is when Democrats selected him as their candidate for President.
In conclusion, I think it is perfectly reasonable for folks to express disappointment and outrage now that he has actually gone through with a 180 degree reversal on the issue. I’m not sure what any of us have to gain by pretending drilling was "always" an expendable issue or that this was exactly what he campaigned on.
40 Comments
Perhaps during the campaign, he didn’t know that he would actually be forced by his overlords to bomb Iran – thereby taking that oil off the market – just as they did with Iraq’s oil.
Oil, gold and silver are about to skyrocket.
I hadn’t thought of that reason, but you might have something there!
The real reason appears to be another health care monster–give up something to then say the cap and trade is bi-partisan and rahm it through–with no bipartisan support.
Obama was against drilling, Orahma, on the other hand, is for it.
Yes. Obama is a conservative.
Frankly I am glad the MSM & GOP continue to try to frame him as a liberal. If he gets his way and co-ops the GOP conservatives there will be little to stop him from his conservative agenda and we liberals would be truly under the bus.
Let the GOP do some of our work for us.
Hummmm. I have always said that Obama is a bigger liar than GWB ever was. He lied to get into office, and is now lying to stay in office.
Them framing him as a liberal does nothing but push the conversation even further into the right wing wasteland. There are pundits and headlines talking about how Orahma is being “centrist” for capitulating on drilling before negotiations even start. Huh?
You guys listen to Thom Hartman? He was talking about how Obama’s move was a master stroke. He has with one stupid announcement taken away the Republicans bumper sticker message “Drill baby, drill.” So he’s allowing it, but in the end it will not make more than half a year worth of oil based on the US’s rate of consumption.
It is a fair argument, but how many principles is he willing to compromise on under the guise of being about “hope and change” when he’d sell his soul if it meant he could get another few million from the corporations for his re-election campaign. I’m tired of him being framed as a liberal when he is anything but.
I hate the notion that the HCR law is seen as a “liberal” law by the masses when it clearly is not.
I saw it the later months of the campaign in 2008, everyone pings their hopes and dreams for the future to Obama “hoping” that he will keep that promise, but he never does. He equivocates and dances around issues, but never helps the people that so blindly pledged their support to him.
I really am curious what idiotic rhetoric is going to be used in the run-up to the 2012 election that will compel the “liberal base” to support him.
Obama is good on his word if by “alternative energy” he means drilling for oil and re-framing nuclear energy as “clean energy”. Bamboozled again.
The problem with this administration and the Democratic Party in general is very simple.
They stake out a position, enter into negotiations with the Reps or Blue Dogs through which they offer a myriad of concessions, take on a variety of Rep input, then when the Reps pull out, the Dems bravely say they are going to go it alone, but the Dems starting point is always the negotiated position, rather than their original position.
So the Reps get some of what they wanted without ever having to take risk or responsibility from their voters, but can go around to their district and talk about the good things in the bill (happening right now on HC to walk back the repeal rhetoric).
This was clear on HC and on the Dodd financial reform.
I am convinced that Team Obama ’12, is convinced that the base can be ignored with impunity. How else do you explain the sell-out HIR deals that he put on the table and then crammed down our throats, that all inured to the benefit of corporate America?
And, as soon as the ink is dry on HIR he pivots, not to jobs as promised 1-20-10, he channels Sarah Palin and goes straight to Drill-Baby-Drill.
For his latest sell-out, he gets nothing in return and we get screwed by Obama, yet again. Hard to grasp, but I feel certain that their calculus is that we have no where else to go. (They have not seen the easy chair in my living room where my butt will be parked until I find an honest progressive that will pay more than nuanced lip service to what I expect for my support.)
What is going on with this is just like with healthcare reform. Obama isn’t trying to please the republicans, but rather trying to please to corporate lobbyists. This is why over and over again Obama gives away something for nothing while usually claiming that he’s doing it to please Republicans, but not extracting any concessions when he’s doing it – this is meant to be merely cover. Obama is probably extremely energized to sell people out to corporate lobbyists even more since he got his fascist HCR passed. It wouldn’t surprise me if Mr Smug’s next act would be to explain how going to war with Iran is actually an act of peace and then having all the veal pinned organizations and stepford politicians explaining how Obama is being such a peacemaker going to war – we already saw a preview of this with Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech.
The Republicans are merely cover for the Democrats to deliver to the corporate lobbyists.
The one thing that Obama did with this is that he took an issue away from the Rs. Of course, the drilling may never happen and if it does, it will be a number of years down the road.
Yep, why buy into something when you can manipulate the Prez to get the same result and then say it doesn’t go far enough.
Obama was against warrantless surveillance and preventive detentions. Obama also was against the individual health insurance mandate, excise taxes on health care plans, and the Hyde Amendment.
I used to think that as a candidate, Obama was careful not to promise progressives very much because he knew he would be swerving right if he got the Presidency. But even those minimal promises have all been broken now.
Barack “Fraud” Obama – Man of Deception
I’ll be redundant: permanent republican majority achieved.
Candidate Obama was LYING about abso-effen-lutely everything, but hey: any means to an end, amirite? and anyway, “everyone knows” that politicians lie like rugs, amirite? So – eh? A few retarded libruls get the dander up. SO?????? Wacha gunna DO about it, pussy????
And so it goes: permanent republican majority achieved.
Obama got HIS; the rest a youse can get eff yerselves.
You mean Oh Bummah! is going to allow drilling so that the goopers won’t be able to make a bumper sticker? I don’t believe it but then I don’t believe a bloody thing coming out of the WH anyway.
thank you and amen.
can not get over all the head scratching on this – watched Maddow and Chris Hayes(sp?) do it on her show weds night – couldn’t tell whether they were genuinely puzzled or that they concur on bi partisanship-as-cover and simply couldn’t bring themselves to say it on air
12 million jobs lost…trillions in home equity…trillions lost in retirement and 401ks. The phantom recovery by trickle down regan economics is not going to happen. Gold 1125.00 that happened in the 80s recession. Stock is up after the bathers were washed out and corporations lowered their labor cost, downsized their commercial real estate lease.
Obama is a Chicago con man.
The policy announcement probably signifies an as-yet-undisclosed bargain made with entrenched energy corporates. Obama-Rahm didn’t do it “without getting anything in return”, it’s just that the administration is concealing the terms of the deal and the specific parties involved. We don’t know specifically what they got or from whom, but it’s not hard to guess. Energy policy will be written by energy lobbyists, just as health policy was written by AHIP & PhRMA.
I hope Barack “Fraud” Obama loses re-relection in 2010 and that the Democrats lose Congress this year!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I have absolutely no like or regard for these scumbags in the Obamacrat Party.
uh huh. already wondering just who (whom ?) is the Liz Fowler in the piece that Chairman Bingaman will no doubt be thanking
Thom Hartmann — the Gatekeeper for the Democratic Party and the other scum Obamacrats out there.
Thom Hartmann is lame and speaks in half-truths and distortions seemingly never holding the Democratic Party to its double-talking and back-stabbing.
This Liberal Gatekeeper Thom Hartmann views selling out the base for “masterful political skills” is a bunch of bullcrap. Hartmann still yells at Clinton over NAFTA but fails to realize that Barack “Fraud” Obama, also, supports free trade agreements and the same corporate neoliberal economic policies advocated by Ronald Reagan.
Obama did this to wrong foot the GOP after health care passed.
This helps take the spot light off an atrocious bill, thanks to Americas lack of a memory.
ya think?
maybe you’re right.
Jon Walker has a fresh cross-post available: Job Numbers Maybe the Most Important “Tracking Poll” for November
I’m with ya, it is just not too many choices on the liberal dial for talk radio. I really didn’t care for Thom’s ever changing view on the health care bill. Tired of listening to Bernie Sanders on his Friday show going on and on about how special interests run Congress. While I agree with him, what is he doing to make it better? Not much. Still has to get himself as slimy and dirty as the next guy to work out any sort of negotiated legislation.
Definitely not a Thom Hartman zealot, just raising the point he made.
Follow the money. That’s where this shit begins and ends. This was a gift … so lets see who benefits.
I posted about this when it was first announced, but it seems the comment is relevant again here because people continue to appear confused about Obama changing his positions. He can’t “flip-flop,” because he rarely takes a definitive position – other than give him what he wants, of course.
Obama is ultimately a seducer of the public. He says things that are intentionally misleading but legally speaking ambiguous, allowing the public to project upon him their (unfounded) hopes, while allowing him the freedom to do whatever he wants once they’ve given him what he was after.
Because it’s seduction, the naive, hopeful woman (the public) is led to believe she’ll feel good by giving herself up to make Barry feel good. In the end, the only one who feels good is Barry and his buddies.
The lesson is the same as in the bar, too – recognize and resist one’s own desire to be seduced and don’t fall for it.
-
Hard to say…nobody’s perfect.
But it says, right there at the beginning of the video on the little stand, “Change We Can Believe In.”
It was perfectly true – because the amount of change anyone being realistic could believe in was “Not Much.”
In the video, all he says is that drilling won’t lower gas prices. And he uses that statement to seduce the marks into believing that means he won’t open up drilling. The argument he makes is “McCain wants to drill because it will lower gas prices. It won’t lower gas prices. So vote for me, environmentalists!”
Here’s the extended quote from Obama’s summation:
And here we see a perfect example of the Obama con.
He intends to do a lot of things. That’s totally different than saying he ever will do them. (That’s exactly why the marketing slogan was “Hope” – because it allowed people to believe whatever they wanted, forever, without a single guarantee any of it would ever happen.)
And the grand finale is his emphasis is on the phrase “My job is to tell the American people the truth.” Leading the gullible to believe he intends to tell them the truth as President.
But the complete phrase is “My job is to tell the American people the truth about what’s gonna work when it comes to our long-term energy future and how we can provide some short-term relief to families.” (We would see this partial-truth sales job again in the insurance reform push.)
Leaving completely open the possibility of doing anything he damn well pleases as long as he tells people, and he happens to think it’s “the truth.”
And if we can remember all the way back into the distant past of the previous administration, Bush justified invading Iraq and killing hundreds of thousands if not millions because he believed the claims of Saddam Hussein having WMD’s were “the truth.”
“I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”
Suckers.
Thom Hartmann needs to have a discussion with Brendan Cummings, Public Lands Director at the Center for Biological Diversity. Mr. Cummings stated:
“Offshore oil drilling, announcing and opening up new areas for leasing, is a very slow process. The initial environmental harm comes quickly with the exploratory drilling, the seismic surveys, things of that sort. But the actual oil doesn’t come for market—to market for years, if not decades. So it has very little real impact on either the national or the global economy of oil.”
“Drilling in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas off Alaska is likely to be a disaster for the polar bear, for the native communities that live on the coast of Alaska, for the endangered whales of the area, for the coastlines of Florida, if we drill in those areas. And that’s not a left-or-right debate. That’s not a debate over protecting everything or an energy policy that allows greater access to American energy. You can’t debate an oil spill; you can only prevent it. And in certain areas of our country, certain areas of our coast, they’re so sensitive, the only way to truly prevent it is to never open these areas up for drilling in the first place.”
“In Alaska, one of the most contested lease sale areas is the Chukchi Sea of Alaska, which was open for drilling under Bush, offered for leasing in February 2008, an action that was almost universally condemned by Democrats in Congress, condemned by Obama himself, yet that area, yesterday Obama embraced it as “we will allow it to go forward.” Shell Oil has plans to drill in the area this summer. To date, Ken Salazar, Obama’s Secretary of Interior, has rubber-stamped Shell’s approval each step of the way. We’re fighting them in court. But Shell will be the first beneficiary of this.”
Discussion at Democracy Now
I have listened to Thom Hartmann for years. In the past, he often took the position for “we the people” and I believe he honestly has compassion for the working man. However, his recent push for health insurance reform as “a first step” in spite of the fact that he even acknowledges that the big winners will be the health care industry was something I found disconcerting. Now, he is claiming that “drilling” is a brilliant “political” move by President Obama (he should have a discussion with Brendan Cummings). So, he has lost some credibilty if he is going to become another Obama apologist.
Unfortunately, politicians are adept at double speak and President Obama is excellent as a “politician”. The problem for any politician who uses double speak during turmoil in a country is that citizens pick up much quicker that what they are saying is mere words. That is why FDR was so popular, he spoke to the people, followed through with actions supporting the people over corporate interests and the people in the country felt it and saw the results.
It’s gotten to the point now that if you want to know what Obama supports, you simply formulate the antithesis of what he’s saying and you understand his real position. This lie or game has become insidious as he will not hold anyone accountable, whether it’s Wall Street, the Bush administration crimes, or the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. And the media plays along like he’s all knowing or completely ignores it.
Almost the same way we figured out what bush supported. Just turn everything he says inside out.
“The normal functioning of the world usually serves to hide our state of truly catastrophic dispossession. What is called “catastrophe” is no more than the forced suspension of this state, one of those rare moments when we regain some sort of presence in the world. Let the petroleum reserves run out earlier than expected; let the international flows that regulate the tempo of the metropolis be interrupted, let us suffer some great social disruption and some great “return to savagery of the population,” a “planetary threat,” the “end of civilization!” Either way, any loss of control would be preferable to all the crisis management scenarios they envision. When this comes, the specialists in sustainable development won’t be the ones with the best advice. It’s within the malfunction and short-circuits of the system that we find the elements of a response whose logic would be to abolish the problems themselves. Among the signatory nations to the Kyoto Protocol, the only countries that have fulfilled their commitments, in spite of themselves, are the Ukraine and Romania. Guess why. The most advanced experimentation with “organic” agriculture on a global level has taken place since 1989 on the island of Cuba. Guess why. And it’s along the African highways, and nowhere else, that auto mechanics has been elevated to a form of popular art. Guess how.”
http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/texts/the-coming-insurrection/
“It’s gotten to the point now that if you want to know what Obama supports, you simply formulate the antithesis of what he’s saying and you understand his real position. This lie or game has become insidious as he will not hold anyone accountable, whether it’s Wall Street, the Bush administration crimes, or the insurance and pharmaceutical industries. And the media plays along like he’s all knowing or completely ignores it.”
Well, said. People post all the time on lefty sites “Obama should do this, Obama thinks this”, it’s irrelevent. The way to read Obama’s actions and words is to decode what reaction they are intended to get, there is no truth to be found in what he says. Then his intent is more clear.
Let’s face it, Obama is just a common liar. Time to start thinking about a replacement in 2012.
I’m with ADC14 on this one. Time to kick Obama to the curb and start looking for someone that has the balls to meet the real challenges we as a nation face today. Enough with all the hopey-changey shit that has did nothing be make him and our democratic administration a bunch of low life liars and swines.
yep—agree