Many of us that deem ourselves progressives have long held that there are not two parties anymore, that the lines between Republican and Democrat are so blurred as to be almost indistinguishable. So contemptuous am I of the so called ‘two parties’ that I have voted for third party candidates in major elections since 1992 just to voice my disgust and almost regardless of who the third or fourth party candidate was. Not so in 2008. In 2008 I voted for a third party because neither Barack Obama or John McCain spoke to my values although at the time, I was greatly relieved that Obama and not McCain took the election.

Today, I read an editorial in the local Coos County Advocate, the local Democratic party periodical and found proof positive right here in River City that the party lines are merged.

Democrats and liberals are disappointed that their president is not pushing a left agenda. President Obama
has the political capital and won’t spend it. Republicans and Fox News viewers jump on every statement out of the president’s mouth like it’s food for a pack of starving wolves, to be gobbled and spit back out without digesting. No one
is happy, and apparently no one is listening.

President Obama is not a liberal. Candidate Obama wasn’t either. Barack Obama said he wanted to be president not of Blue America, nor of Red America, but president of the United States of America. We liked the sound of that. Most Americans are sick of the division in this country. We long to be united again. Our president is alone in his ability to accept what that means. Striving for consensus means seeking the middle ground.

One of the main reasons I didn’t vote for Obama is because I was listening and the author is right, he is not a progressive liberal president. What is confusing to me is why, if consensus is the aim, bother with the facade of having two parties? Why fight tooth and nail to elect a centrist? Really, what is the bloody point?

Obama has disappointed me greatly from his Bushian fear inciting bromides about freedom and democracy and evil and al Qaeda and terrorists to justify the occupation of Afghanistan to the complete and utter sellout to Wall Street.

Barack Obama ran for president as a man of the people, standing up to Wall Street as the global economy melted down in that fateful fall of 2008. He pushed a tax plan to soak the rich, ripped NAFTA for hurting the middle class and tore into John McCain for supporting a bankruptcy bill that sided with wealthy bankers “at the expense of hardworking Americans.” Obama may not have run to the left of Samuel Gompers or Cesar Chavez, but it’s not like you saw him on the campaign trail flanked by bankers from Citigroup and Goldman Sachs. What inspired supporters who pushed him to his historic win was the sense that a genuine outsider was finally breaking into an exclusive club, that walls were being torn down, that things were, for lack of a better or more specific term, changing.

Then he got elected…

As far as I can tell, from the utter failure to pass significant health care reform that reins in the 30% insurance company profit and makes health care affordable for all Americans, to the Wall Street bailout, Dems and Repubs, outside of feigning populism or pimping free trade are just different breeds of fox working out how to guard the hen house.

Voting for a centrist isn’t bridge building, it isn’t a way to mend great divides, it is a lazy sellout, it is like teaching class to the one third student body in the middle while ignoring the rest, it is a sure fire road to group think banality, stale and mundane status quo and bloated inertia . Mostly, it is downright undemocratic.