Just before the then Senator Obama clinched the Democratic Party nomination for President in June, 2008, his primary opponent and major headache, Senator Hillary Clinton, went into an all-out attack, unleashing devastating ads that portrayed Obama as un-ready for the Presidency. Clinton's missives hit the mark and Obama failed to win a single big state that still had to vote in the primary contest. Clinton won New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, California and other big states.
Obama had won most of the small states and nearly all of the caucus states (the states that selected their presidential candidate in caucuses and not by direct vote.) Clinton no longer had a mathematical chance to overtake Obama through the primary process. The only avenue left for Clinton was the at-large primary voters consisting of the "super delegates" - the Senators, congressmen and other Democrats elected to public office.
If Clinton could convince the still-undecided super delegates to dump Obama because he could not win the big states, an argument could then be made at the convention floor to un-select Obama and throw the convention in the hands of all the delegates attending. Clinton's hope was that the delegates would negate the result of the primary process and select her in the end.
The super delegates refused to reverse the judgment of the primary process and lined up behind Obama. That was how Obama won the Democratic nomination for the Presidency.
The lesson that may be learned from this now seemingly insignificant episode is what many now feel is that Clinton may have been right all along. Obama may in fact not have been ready to be President when he became the 44th President of the U.S. And not because Obama was not qualified to take the 3:00 a.m. call, but rather the other calls that may come along in the rest of the 24-hour day.
Consider this: while Clinton was on the attack, getting Obama's nose bloodied in the process, Obama chose to be "above the fray," calling Clinton's attacks an indication that the campaign had entered "the silly season."
By dismissing the attacks lobbed at him by Clinton as silly, Obama never did address people's reservations about him. He dismissed them as silly and just walked away, thinking that the criticisms would all die on the vine.
And so it came to pass that during the nearly first two years of his presidency, Obama refused to engage those who questioned his citizenship at birth, those who maligned and smeared the health care bill, those who questioned his resolve because the stimulus bill that passed Congress was not large enough to put America back to work, those who complained that the Wall Street reforms did not reform Wall Street.
Obama seemed to trust the American people to come to the conclusion on their own that what he had done was actually good for the country. He assumed that, like his students at the University of Chicago, the American people would do their homework and conclude that everything that he had done as President was good for the American people.
Obama did not answer the passion of the opposition with his own passion during much of his first two years as President. He did so only in the last few months of the 2010 campaign, when the die had been cast. It was too little, too late.
Fast forward to today. After the drubbing the Democrats took in the last elections, during which the Republicans vowed to repeal the health care reform law, to investigate Obama's alleged attempts to offer Joe Sestak incentives to pull away from a fight for the Senate seat in Pennsylvania in favor of incumbent Senator Arlen Specter, to investigate Obama's natural-born citizenship status, to frustrate all efforts by Obama to solve the unemployment problem, Obama's first response was to offer an olive branch to the Republicans.
The Republicans do not want the olive branch. They want his head. The far-right's hatred for Obama is visceral. They don't like him as a human being, they will never cooperate with him if their life depended on that cooperation.
Obama obviously thinks it's the silly season redux. Professor Obama rationalizes this visceral hatred for him and acts as though it would all disappear if he looked in control, cool and above the fray.
My unsolicited advice to President Obama:
Mr. President, many of these people don't consider you their President. They see you as a black man who has desecrated the Office of the Presidency.
The American people want you to fight for them and fight your enemies hard if that is the only way you can defend the interests of the American people against the pro-Big Business, pro-rich, pro-Big Oil, pro-Health Insurance companies, pro-China, pro-Wall Street enemies of the people.
If you will not stand up to a Republican Party that clearly is not interested in the welfare of middle class Americans, a political party that has thrown its lot with the Mr. and Mrs. Bigs in America, then we grass-roots Democrats, the youth, the hopeful independents who put you in the Oval Office may have made a colossal mistake.
We expect you to fight for us, to take a stand, to show backbone. That backbone is very important to win the fight. It is not for bending backwards.
Your first major stand must be on the extension of tax cuts for the top 2% of Americans. Most Americans do not want to extend the tax cut for the top 2%. The tax cut has done nothing for Americans except increase our debt. We borrowed from other countries - China mainly - over the past ten years more than $1 trillion to finance the tax cut. We have been paying interest on that $1 trillion and will continue to pay interest on it till hell freezes over. Now, you are going to compromise and extend the tax cut for the top 2% to the tune of another $700 billion over ten years?
We middle-class Americans and - get this - many of the rich people themselves have drawn that line in the sand. Why do you not join us and be on our side? You know that it is wrong to extend that tax cut for the top 2%, yet, incredibly you are willing to extend it for perhaps two or three years, knowing that if you do that it probably will become permanent because the Republicans will not allow it to expire when the two or three years are up.
Please read this analysis published by Bloomberg News just last September:
"Give the wealthiest Americans a tax cut and history suggests they will save the money rather than spend it.
"Tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 under President George W. Bush were followed by increases in the saving rate among the rich, according to data from Moody’s Analytics Inc. When taxes were raised under Bill Clinton, the saving rate fell.
"The findings may weaken arguments by Republicans and some Democrats in Congress who say allowing the Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans to lapse will prompt them to reduce their spending, harming the economy. President Barack Obama wants to extend the cuts for individuals earning less than $200,000 and couples earning less than $250,000 while ending them for those who earn more.
“ 'I would tend to wonder how much the tax cut actually influences spending behavior,' said Chris Cornell, an economist who mined government reports back to 1989 for West Chester, Pennsylvania-based Moody’s Analytics. 'Spending by the top 5 percent of households seems much more closely tied to business- cycle issues than it does to tax-cut issues.'
"The Moody’s research covering couples earning more than $210,000 found that spending by the wealthy is more likely to be influenced by the ups and downs of the stock market than changes in income-tax rates."
This is not the Silly Season, Mr. President. This is not a game either. This is the season for demonstrating your allegiance to the American people. You are our leader and we expect you to fight our battles for us. There is a massive and long-term transfer of wealth from the middle class to the rich that has been going on since President Reagan sat in the Oval Office. We in the middle class are fighting back. We do not want to be impoverished in order to please those in the higher income brackets. We expect you to be our leader in this fight.
The American people do not want you to compromise on the tax cuts for the rich. They want those cuts to end on December 31, 2010. Period. And, if middle class taxes rise because all of the Bush tax cuts expire at the stroke of midnight on December 31, so be it.
You are a great orator. Go before the American people and explain to them why their taxes are going up. You should trust yourself and your ability to convince Americans that their tax rates are going up because Republicans have decided to play games. You have to have faith in the American people. You must learn from Bill Clinton.
President Clinton took a principled stand against the Republicans even to the extent of seeing the Federal government be in lockdown. The lights went out in the White House and most federal buildings, federal employees were furloughed and except for emergency services, the Federal government completely shut down. Eventually Americans turned their fury on the Republicans and Gingrich and his Republican cohorts caved.
This is the moment, Mr. President. The American people are behind you all the way on this. The American people are waiting for an opportunity to make shared sacrifices for the sake of the country, for the sake of their children and their children's children who will end up paying for the deficits to be created by the tax cuts for the top 2%.
They hear echoes of President Kennedy's speech that famously included a call to sacrifice. The American people are asking what they can do for their country. If their taxes have to rise to prevent the continuation of the scandalous tax cuts for the top 2% of society, they are willing to make that sacrifice.
And another thing, Mr. President. Do not walk like a lone basketball player when you alight from your presidential helicopter and across the White House grounds. Walk deliberately and powerfully, the way a Boss like the late Mayor Richard Daley would. And always have two or three VIPs walking with you. Do not appear on television again walking by yourself. It reinforces people's assessment of you as some kind of elitist and indecisive Hamlet.
Show that important people in this country are walking side by side with you. Biden, Hillary, Bill, Reid, Pelosi, Durbin and Schumer. Those people represent us in every way and have earned our trust. Those are people who are willing to do the right thing even if it means that they will lose an election.
When they walk with you, we are walking with you. Just remember that. As long as you are fighting for us, we will back you up. If you refuse to fight for us, we will find someone who will.
Your humble servant,
Cesar F. Lumba
