“Are there any adults left in the Democratic Party?”

So, the first thing I want to say is that I am an independent. The second thing is that the header is in quotes because it’s the punchline to a Harper’s Magazine essay written by John R. MacArthur. Harper’s Magazine is the second oldest magazine in the country. It was first published in 1850. It has a long place in US journalism history for publishing thoughtful essays and fiction of some of America’s greatest writers. John “Rick” MacArthur is its president and grandson of the founder of the magazine. You may frequently see the bug for the MacArthur foundation on all kinds of PBS programs like Frontline. The title of his essay is “President Obama Richly Deserves To Be Dumped”.

Wow.

The essay begins by quoting Bill Moyer’s recent comments about the Presidential speech in Osawatomie, Kansas. MacArthur characterized Moyer’s speech to Public Citizen as one that “puts the lie to our barely Democratic president’s populist pantomime, acted out last week in a Kansas speech decrying the plight of “innocent, hardworking Americans.” He then continues to quote Ron Suskind’s “Confidence Men” as an example of showing how Obama is basically a product of a neoliberal system who has a penchant for picking the wrong people for the most important jobs on purpose.  His argument is that picking plutocratic functionaries is actually what Obama was placed in the White House to do.  He is a tool of the plutocracy that’s residing in the Democratic Party. MacArthur is most concerned about an Obama that rails against bankers on TV and then invites them to a mega fundraiser the next night.  This is concern from a man that was born into the 1 percent.  He believes that this hypocrisy should put an end to the presidency of Obama and argues that dems of the little d should start a movement to replace him immediately.  This is the second time we’ve heard this call.

BostonBoomer offered up some similar evidence to this profile in a Politico piece that quotes Obama as saying that he had no idea about the full extent of the economic crisis. This is ridiculous on all levels. Obama had ongoing advice from Warren Buffet and Paul Volcker as well as many many insiders in Wall Street as early as 2007.  The Confidence Men narrative is full of examples of how much Obama knew and to what extent the entire thing was minimized or just whiffed because of a lack of credible leadership. The backroom wranglings of Rahm and Geithner to thwart Sheila Bair and other regulators meant to hold account Citibank in particular just completely blows this quote right out of the realm of truthfulness. Bair was prepared to bust up Citibank ala what happened to GM and–if Suskind’s account is true–Obama felt that was the correct way to go.  It is also evident from the book that Christie Romer couldn’t get Obama’s ear on her analysis of the crisis.  Obama walked out of a meeting on the economic crisis at one point and left the decision making to Geithner, Emmanuel, and Summers.  He actually told them to work it out amongst themselves and get back to him later. The book shows a President who did anything but attempt to grasp the depth of the crisis and make his staff handle Wall Street appropriately.

President Barack Obama said Tuesday he wishes he knew the full extent of the economic crisis when he took office, if only so he could have let Americans know just how tough the coming years would be.

“I think we understood that it was bad, but we didn’t know how bad it was,” Obama said in an interview with KIRO in Seattle. “I think I could have prepared the American people for how bad this was going to be, had we had a sense of that.”

MacArthur characterizes the Osawatomie speech as “a new standard in deception” and calls the President a functionary for party and party donor interests.

But Obama’s hypocrisy in Osawatomie, Kansas, set a new standard in deception. Among other things, his speech blamed “regulators who were supposed to warn us about the dangers of all this [the unfettered sales of bundled mortgages], but looked the other way or didn’t have the authority to look at all. It was wrong. It combined the breathtaking greed of a few with irresponsibility all across the system.”

What’s truly breathtaking is the president’s gall, his stunning contempt for political history and contemporary reality. Besides neglecting to mention Democratic complicity in the debacle of 2008, he failed to point out that derivatives trading remains largely unregulated while the Securities and Exchange Commission awaits “public comment on a detailed implementation plan” for future regulation. In other words, until the banking and brokerage lobbies have had their say with John Boehner, Max Baucus, and Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner. Meanwhile, the administration steadfastly opposes a restoration of the Glass-Steagall Act, the New Deal law that reduced outlandish speculation by separating commercial and investment banks. In 1999, it was Summers and Geithner, led by Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin (much admired by Obama), who persuaded Congress to repeal this crucial impediment to Wall Street recklessness.

MacArthur fails to mention that Confidence Men also details the gutting of the Volcker Rule and the Consumer Protection Act by Chris Dodd with tacit approval from the White House. I don’t buy this reviewer’s take that it was just Democratic Senators who supported this effort.

Suskind’s reporting on what happened next is stunning: While the country endured a nail-biting period of doubt and even terror over the economy’s spiral,  Democratic senators seemed not to have the best interests of the nation and their newly elected president in mind. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act was denuded by Sen. Christopher Dodd, himself. Without the young and inexperienced president’s knowledge, Dodd “had discreetly gutted the Volcker Rule.

“Many were critical of the lame-duck senator (Dodd) for not being more aggressive in his reforms, alleging that his interests were inexorably linked with the lobby he so closely served. But Dodd remained steadfast, arguing that he simply wanted to produce the strongest possible bill that could feasibly withstand a vote.

“The Volcker Rule, with teeth, was dead,” Suskind writes.

Obama, already bloodied from more than a year of contentious attempts at repair and reform, and the Democrats took a “shellacking” in the 2010 midterm elections, losing the House of Representatives to the Republicans. With unemployment hovering around 10 percent, the lack of job creation hurt the president. “People liked the president, but only 32 percent felt real confidence in him as a leader,” Suskind writes.

A stream of wealthy traders and CEOs people this story of confidence run amok, including a JPMorgan investment banking head. After picking up the bill at an expensive extended family dinner, his 80-something steelworker father takes him aside: “Bill, is what you’re doing legal? I don’t see how it can be.” The banker retires and gets involved with financial reform — in London.

MacArthur continues his rant with a bit on Afghanistan which is interesting in the context of the President winding down the Iraq War on Bush’s terms and not his own.  You may recall that Bush signed the agreement to get us out of Iraq right now.  The announcement of that signing was met with two shoes from a journalist. Obama tried to negotiate further US presence.   He is undoubtedly going to take credit for this too, however, as witnessed by his “mission accomplished’ presser complete with the requisite prop soldiers today.  You can read more on that from Juan Cole at Informed Consent.

MacArthur’s essay calls for a Dump Obama movement akin to the Dump LBJ movement of 1967.  He believes that a modern day Allard Lowenstein could arise and change the current dynamics of 2012.

You may say it’s too late, that Obama is impregnable. Consider Gene McCarthy’s obscurity on November 30, 1967, when he announced his insurgent crusade. At the time, many Americans confused him with Senator Joe McCarthy (R., Wis.), the notorious communist hunter, and in January 1968 a Gallup poll showed him winning just 12 percent of the votes in a presidential election. But on March 12, McCarthy nearly beat Johnson in the New Hampshire primary. The opposition was galvanized, Robert Kennedy jumped into the race, LBJ announced he would not seek re-election, and American democracy was revived.

Granted, there are big differences between 1968 and 2012 — for one thing, there’s no military draft to frighten the young — but the great issues are the same: an immoral war and a merciless money power. Moreover, high unemployment and the dominance of Wall Street do frighten the young. They need a tribune.

I was struck by this Eugene McCarthy quote.

“Party unity is not a sufficient excuse for silence”

Of course, RFK eventually became the frontrunner in that race until his assassination. (I have to admit to being too young to really grasp all of this at the time but I know that many of our readers can give fuller accounts than me so I’ll defer to them.)  While the McCarthy run ushered in the Nixon era and is considered a huge black period in the time of the Democratic Party, the lesson here is that no one need accept an incumbent president as inevitable.  Just as Republicans struggle with their terrible, horrible, awful, very bad choices in the Republican party, the Democrats provide no choice at all but a severely weakened and demonstrably inept incumbent President.

The most irritating thing is that any independent run is likely to be a gadfly like Donald Trump or NY Mayor Donald Bloomberg.  Party entrenchment is killing the US during its most vulnerable time since the run up to World War 2.  Are these folks really the only choices a country as big, educated, and powerful as the US can come up with?  Just as the right wing media  is attack the Gingrich insurgency, is there really any way for independents and fed up partisans to create a movement to get a real choice?  I, for one, desperately would like a real choice. As far as I am concerned, the only people that are running for President right now are ones that I’d rather see completely out of public life. Is there anyway that a real leader could actually launch an authentic insurgent candidacy in this age of crony capitalists and pols?