I worked a little closer to the Obama campaign than I had for any previous Presidential candidate. My wife was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer just before the primaries and my insurance and employer both dropped us like hot potatoes with a layoff notice and an impossible $950/month COBRA. Through some online postings/bitching at various political pages I attracted the attention of the Obama campaign and Jim Messina and was asked to submit my story for possible use in the campaign. Messina decided not to use the story but it did (likely by clerical error) get me on the campaign insider call list and included in the mail list of about the top 100 campaign staff.
While I was no stranger to political campaigns, having managed a Democratic state Senate campaign, I certainly didn’t qualify for the access I was given, especially since Messina’s politics were far from my idea of what a Democratic campaign should look like. His specialty was making Democratic candidates out of closet Republicans in red states, as he did with Max Baucus in Montana, and that earned him the title of “the most influential man in Washington” that he carried into the White House as chief of personnel (greatly influencing Obama’s cabinet picks) and, later, into managing Obama’s second campaign. It was only after an argument with the President on a conference call concerning strategy in the 2012 campaign that the error of my inclusion was noticed and my access was cut off.
I’m relating this to dispel any idea that Obama was a “progressive” that was shown the dire consequences of governing according to his ideology. He was, from the start, the embodiment of third way Democratic policy, and Clinton’s third and fourth terms, right down to his zombie Clinton cabinet and rejection of any true progressive economics. Wall Street and the MIC couldn’t have been better served by either “bomb bomb bomb” McCain or Romoney. Progressives have been deluding themselves about the Democratic party and candidates for decades, but I think that bad trip has worn off. If we want to see “real” progressive policy and economics we are going to have to adopt, or create, another party as our venue.
