Elie Mystal On the Electoral Peril Facing the Biden Administration by Younger Black and Brown Voters in 2024 Because of His Present Stance On the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict in Gaza and Beyond

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/biden-israel-palestine-policy-election/?custno=&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%2010.23.2023&utm_term=daily

Politics 

Biden’s Israel-Palestine Policy Could Cost Him the Election
by Elie Mystal
October 23, 2023
The Nation 

PHOTO: US President Joe Biden meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (R) in Tel Aviv on October 18, 2023. (Israeli Government Press Office (GPO) / Handout/ Anadolu via Getty Images)

When I read or listen to white people in the media talking about Biden’s approach to this crisis—I’ve heard pundits call Biden’s trip to Israel his “finest hour”—I’m left with the impression that they just don’t know or haven’t considered how electorally disastrous it could be for Biden to lose Muslim and Arab American support. There are over 200,000 Muslims living in Virginia; there are 150,000 Arab Americans; in 2020, Biden won that state by around only 500,000 votes. In Michigan, there are over 350,000 Muslims; 200,000 Arab Americans live in the state; Biden won that state by around only 150,000 votes. Any significant weakening of this support puts Virginia in play, and makes Michigan functionally unwinnable for Biden. And I shouldn’t have to tell you that there is simply no path to Biden’s Electoral College success without Virginia and Michigan.

If we broaden things out beyond the Muslim and Arab American populations, there are other dangers. If young, college-age people of color sour on Biden and stay home, Biden has problems across the upper Midwest. And anything less than overwhelming and enthusiastic support from African American voters costs Biden Georgia and Pennsylvania.

Perhaps in response to this basic electoral math, Biden has in recent days appeared to soften his tone. In an address to the nation from the Oval Office on Thursday night, Biden tried to express empathy for both Israelis and Palestinians. He denounced anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. He said that we “can’t ignore the humanity of the Palestinian people,” and said that Israel would follow the “laws of war” and protect Palestinian civilians “as best they can.” During his visit to Israel last week, Biden said that Israel should not make the same mistakes this country made after 9/11, an extraordinary statement both because American presidents don’t often admit to war mistakes, particularly on foreign soil, and because this particular American president was, in fact, a cheerleader for our post-9/11 wars of vengeance.

The president used nice words, but it escaped no one’s notice that he was saying all of these appropriate words regarding the dignity and humanity of the Palestinian people while justifying his request to send billions of dollars in military aid and weapons to Israel. Biden did not call for a cease-fire, did not call for a de-escalation, and did not even call for “peace.”

I know that some people, establishment politicians especially, want this speech to be enough. They want to acknowledge the humanity of Palestinians, while treating the government actively denying them human rights as a passive force without alternative choices. But that frame simply isn’t working on voters of color who know all too well how powerful governments justify killing us. From where I sit, his speech did nothing to instill confidence in voters of color that Biden will take a stand against war crimes. His “bear-hug Bibi” strategy (which is to say, the idea that Biden should get close enough to the Israeli government that he can use soft power to restrain it) might play well in diplomatic circles and among voters who are inclined to give Biden the benefit of the doubt, but, on the street, all people are seeing is the blank check Biden appears to be giving to Israel, and none of the restraint. This isn’t a “messaging” problem for the Biden administration. The problem is that Biden’s actions scream to the world that he values an Israeli child more than a Palestinian one.

It also must be said that Biden’s lack of support for Palestinians is being viewed in the context of his enthusiastic support for Ukraine. The situations are far from analogous, but Biden literally linked his support for Ukraine and support for Israel together in his Oval Office address. It’s a politically tone-deaf comparison for Biden to make, because linking the two doesn’t work in his favor. It’s simply not lost on voters of color that when a white country was invaded, Biden sent guns and missiles and money, while all he seems to have for Palestinians is some bottles of water chucked at them from Egypt, and the hard-won pronouncement that not every single one of them is a terrorist who should be deleted from existence.

Remember too that, whenever the Republican House of Representatives stops beclowning itself as comic relief for the rest of the world, the very first thing they’re going to do is pass a massive aid package, at Biden’s request, that sends literal billions of dollars to Ukraine and Israel. I can tell you right now, that package is going to go over like a bag of bricks among Black voters. While Biden is functionally making it rain on foreign allies, the child poverty rate—which disproportionately affects Black families—has doubled. Is it fair to blame Biden for Manchin’s inconceivable decision to let American kids go hungry? No. Is it easy to explain to a struggling Black family why we have money to aid Ukraine and Israel but not Detroit and Philadelphia? No, it is not.

Let me first say that, as a Black person, I am getting really sick of white liberals using Trump as a specter who will emerge from white people’s closets to punish Black people for anything less than full-throated support of Biden. Just ask Jim Jordan how threatening people you need to vote for you works out.

Moreover, I feel like white commentators too easily forget that we live in a country where Trump is a looming threat only because a significant majority of their own cousins and uncles and spouses are set, once again, to vote for a raving orange clown, no matter how many times he gets indicted for crimes. White folks are the ones threatening the future of American democracy: To save it, Democrats need supermajorities of Latino, Asian American, Pacific Islander, and Arab American voters, and they need Black people to continue supporting Democrats by well over 80 percent margins, and they need all those groups to turn out. So, just maybe, the white anti-Trump crowd could listen to voters of color with some respect when they try to tell you what’s wrong with their political approach.

In any event, the “Trump would be worse” argument, while unquestionably true, isn’t the slam-dunk white Democrats want it to be. At least not now, when Biden is the one in charge, and Biden is the one standing with a hard-right foreign regime that is perceived as denying political participation, freedom, and basic human rights to an oppressed population.

Of course “now” is an important word when discussing the politics of the moment. A reasonable defense of Biden’s political calculus is, perhaps, not that his position is defensible to voters of color but that in 13 months many of those voters won’t care about his indefensible positions. I’ve certainly noticed that at least some of the people who are suddenly concerned about a free Palestine couldn’t have found the Gaza Strip on a map before Hamas killed over a thousand Israelis. People who didn’t care about the intolerable conditions in Gaza three weeks ago might well not care about the situation there 13 months from now. If there is one thing I know for a locked fact about the American electorate, white, Black, brown, or other, it’s that we are a fickle, ill-informed, deeply unserious people.

And yet, the fact is that this war has scarcely begun. Israel is preparing for a ground invasion (one that Biden has given his “private backing” to, of course), and when it invades, its soldiers will be fighting an urban war against a terrorist group using guerrilla tactics. It will not be quick. It will not be pretty. Civilians will die. Pictures of the dead will be shared on the Internet. And even if the war does somehow, remarkably, end soon, the larger situation will remain far from resolved.

I don’t think Biden or his administration knows how bad it has been for him with his non-white base over the past few weeks. I know that while some people have tried to get the message through privately, many of the people, like me, who would normally be raising the alarm publicly have been terrified of saying anything. Speaking for myself, I’m worried that anything less than full-throated support for the Biden administration and the Israeli government will be amplified by anti-Semites to justify the slaughter of Jews, and I’m also worried that anything less than full-throated support for the Biden administration and the Israeli government—literally any sympathy for the plight of Palestinians—will be twisted in such a way as to label me a terrorist sympathizer who stands with Hamas. For the first time in my life, I’d rather be writing about Clarence Thomas.

But I write because I want Biden to get reelected, and that simply cannot happen without the overwhelming support of young people and people of color. I write because the Arab American activist who has to go door to door in their community to drum up votes for Biden in Michigan is getting no help from the administration. I write because the Black voter registration volunteer who is trying to get people excited to vote for Biden is getting laughed out of the apocryphal barber shop. I write because Biden is losing, and if he continues to only listen to white media pundits who go on Fox News to laud his speeches, he will spend 2025 working on his presidential library from Delaware.

If you see Biden running around next October playing defense in Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, you’ll know that he got this message too late. Democrats have a nasty habit of listening to non-white voters for only six weeks every four years. If Biden tries that strategy this time, Black and brown voters might stay home, and white people will elect Trump to unleash Armageddon.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: 

Elie Mystal is The Nation’s justice correspondent and the host of its legal podcast, Contempt of Court. He is also an Alfred Knobler Fellow at the Type Media Center. His first book is the New York Times bestseller Allow Me to Retort: A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution, published by The New Press. Elie can be followed @ElieNYC.

Why the new Joe Biden Administration must forcefully and forthrightly address and support the needs and desires of Black America

How Biden Can Support Black America thenation.com https://www.thenation.com/article/society/blm-biden-debt-police/ Racism and Discrimination Black Lives Matter Feature January 11/18, 2021, Issue  How Biden Can Support Black America We should fill the streets to remind him that the millions who elected him expect to see policies that will improve our lives. by Barbara Ransby January 4, 2021 The Nation On November 7, in his first speech as president-elect, Joe Biden promised Black America that he would have our backs. But which Black America is he pledging to support? Having our backs does not mean multiracial cronyism; it means resources and results for those who need them most. We cannot let cosmetic cabinet appointments and historic “firsts” take the place of policies that steer money from the richest individuals and corporations to poor and working people, or allow the new administration to ignore economically disenfranchised communities of color.  Police violence has long been at the forefront of Black demands for justice. As we mark the end of one phase of resistance (the campaign to oust Donald Trump) and embark upon the next (the renewed fight against neoliberalism), we must remind ourselves of the interconnectedness of race and class. The George Floyds, the Breonna Taylors, the Tony McDades, and so many more were beaten down not just by ruthless and racist cops but also by a political and economic system that abandoned their communities decades before their deaths. Biden’s first 100 days, and his agenda for Black America, need to begin by acknowledging this fact.  Biden’s First 100 Days: Biden Should Establish an Office of Climate Mobilization Varshini Prakash Biden Must End the Forever Wars David Klion The Case for Wide-Scale Debt Relief Astra Taylor More in this series Biden talks a lot about the middle class and then segues to middle-of-the-road solutions to grave economic realities. We need robust policies like the Green New Deal and the Movement for Black Lives’ Breathe Act. The Rev. William J. Barber II and the new Poor People’s Campaign have underscored with eloquent persistence the disgraceful fact of continued poverty in one of the wealthiest nations on the planet. We need policies that reverse the obscene economic disparity in this country, with the richest 400 Americans owning more wealth than 60 percent of the overall population. More than 20 million jobs were lost because of Covid-19; many will not come back without some kind of government intervention. The government’s disinvestment in services and infrastructure has affected all low-income, under-resourced communities, but communities of color have taken a disproportionate hit. That hit occurred before Covid-19 and has been exacerbated by it. Instead of looking back to the years of Barack Obama—or worse, Bill Clinton—Biden must embrace a bold, forward-looking approach, even though he does not seem exactly bold or forward-looking. In fact, many of his cabinet appointees were plucked right from the Obama administration. Almost anything will be a relief from Trump’s pro-billionaire policies, but Biden and the corporate Democrats have their own wealthy friends. Brian Deese, Biden’s choice to lead the National Economic Council, and Wally Adeyemo, his pick for deputy treasury secretary, both have ties to BlackRock, which manages trillions of dollars of global assets. Others on the Biden-Harris team have been corporate board members and consultants, paid to maximize profits for their gluttonous clients. These are the interests that Biden’s new economic leaders are used to serving. We should be very skeptical that on January 20 they will immediately betray those loyalties to serve the rest of us. Even if Biden had appointed a more principled team of economic experts, many Democrats already bemoan that they may not be able to accomplish much, because depending on the outcome of the Georgia runoffs, a GOP-controlled Senate would block their best efforts. That’s not an acceptable excuse. The Biden administration needs to take unilateral action wherever possible with executive orders, personnel decisions, and the imposition of regulations on corporations. As Biden transition adviser and Roosevelt Institute director Felicia Wong told The New York Times, “There’s a tremendous amount that can be done without Congress.” And here is what is most necessary right now: emergency Covid-19 economic relief and a nationwide moratorium on evictions and foreclosures. The cash payments thus far have been woefully inadequate, and the suffering has been extreme. Based on data reported by 40 states, Northwestern University cardiologist Dr. Clyde Yancy found that one in every 1,850 Black Americans has died from Covid-19, a mortality rate almost two and a half times higher than that for whites. If Black people were dying from Covid at the same rate as whites, Yancy added, 13,000 more of them would still be alive today. To track the real economy, Biden and his aides will need to resist touting the stock market as a metric of economic success. It is not, and neither is the gross domestic product, which tells us an average while obscuring the disparities that coexist with economic growth. Even unemployment statistics are misleading and understate the problem. Millions of Americans in cities like Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit, and St. Louis have simply given up looking for work, are struggling in the underground economy, or are incarcerated and therefore not reflected in most unemployment numbers.  If you like this article, please give today to help fund The Nation’s work. Debt relief, especially for student debt, is also critical. The solution, though, is simple: Just eliminate student debt entirely. It is scandalous that so many hard-working students will spend a lifetime trying to pay off their principal because they dared to pursue an education. As a result of relentless campaigns by groups like the Debt Collective, the Biden administration is likely to propose some kind of debt relief. In a December 7 press conference, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer announced that Biden is considering $50,000 in student debt forgiveness, which could be enacted via executive action. Bernie Sanders’s proposal to forgive the entire $1.6 trillion in student debt better approximates a just response to the crisis, but we are unlikely to see that from Biden’s administration. Another thing Biden can do without Congress is to rigorously enforce existing laws that close tax loopholes, restrict corporate profits, and garner revenue for social programs. Raising the minimum wage for federal contractors to $15 an hour should also be a no-brainer—and even $15 is too low now. Health care, like education, should be a right and not a privilege. It is a shame that Biden refused to commit to Medicare for All during his campaign, and while he has given a nod to an improved climate policy, the Green New Deal is not on his agenda. It should be.  Related Article The Nation Now Is the Time to Make Good on the Promise of Justice for All by Rep. Ayanna Pressley Finally, the Movement for Black Lives laid out a set of principles to combat racism with the Breathe Act, a far-reaching progressive policy that would be a game changer in terms of fighting the kind of systemic racism that Biden has said he opposes. The Biden transition team has reached out to various civil rights leaders, including the Movement for Black Lives, to listen to our concerns. But it has to do more than perfunctory listening sessions. The Breathe Act rests on four pillars: divesting from carceral institutions, which have failed to solve the issues of harm reduction and security; investing in community-based and community-led programs of accountability and harm and violence prevention; offering resources to build healthy, sustainable, and equitable communities throughout the country, including jobs and much-needed human services; and finally, making sure public officials are accountable to the communities they are sworn to serve, especially the Black communities that are most often neglected and ignored. These priorities embody the principle of self-determination and are the antithesis of Biden’s 1994 “lock ‘em up” crime bill and Clinton’s “abandon the poor” welfare reform policy. According to the Movement for Black Lives’ Monifa Bandele, this omnibus bill “is a bold, new vision for community safety that ends mass incarceration and criminalization while channeling federal dollars into non-punitive, public-safety-focused interventions as well as the educational, health, and other social investments that communities need.” Biden isn’t likely to enact all of these measures, but we must lean on him heavy and hard. We need to organize. We need to converge on Washington, DC, on Inauguration Day for a progressive (and mask-wearing) show of strength and unity. We should fill the streets, in DC and throughout the country, to remind Biden that the millions who elected him expect to see policies that will improve the lives not only of working people of color but of everyone—well, almost everyone. The 1 percent, of course, should see their power and wealth more fairly distributed. That is what a truly just transition would look like. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Barbara Ransby is a historian, writer, and longtime political activist. She is a distinguished professor of African American studies, gender and women’s studies, and history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she directs the campus-wide Social Justice Initiative. IMAGE: What The River Brings, Amir Khadarvia M4BL. NOTE:  This post can also be found here at the Panopticon Review On Facebook page.

Michelle Goldberg On the Rightwing Demagoguery of the Republican Party, Political Violence, and the Enduring NeoFascist Influence of Donald Trump On the Ideological Identity and Practice Of American Democracy

"What's Past is Prologue..."

"The most deadly, dangerous, and powerful enemy of African Americans, Latino Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans in general, Women in general, the poor in general, the working class in general, children in general, Freedom in general and Democracy in general in American society today is the truly heinous Republican Party and their endless number of severely bigoted and demagogic minions, mentors, sponsors, and supporters. Anyone who doesn't know or believes this blatantly obvious fact is not only a hopeless FOOL but ultimately deserves their "fate.”

—Kofi Natambu, July 15, 2009

"The Republican Party is the most dangerous organisation in human history. 'Has there ever been an organisation in human history that is dedicated, with such commitment, to the destruction of organised human life on Earth?' Not that I'm aware of."

--Noam Chomsky, April 24, 2017

"Trump is not just an ethically dead aberration. Rather, he is the successor of a long line of fascists who shut down public debate, attempt to humiliate their opponents, endorse violence as a response to dissent and criticize any public display of democratic principles. The United States has reached its endpoint with Trump, and his presence should be viewed as a stern warning of the nightmare to come. Trump is not an isolated figure in US politics; he is simply the most visible and popular expression of a number of extremists in the Republican Party who now view democracy as a liability."

--Henry A. Giroux, "Fascism in Donald Trump's United States", December 8, 2015

 

https://www.nytimes.com/.../republicans-civility-benson.html

 

Opinion

 

No One Expects Civility From Republicans

 

What’s worse: making Sarah Sanders leave a restaurant, or terrorizing election officials?

 

by Michelle Goldberg

December 7, 2020

New York Times 

 

PHOTO: Credit...Damon Winter/The New York Times

nytimes.com
Opinion | No One Expects Civility From Republicans

 

Perhaps you remember the terrible ordeal suffered by the White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders at the Red Hen in 2018. She was awaiting her entree at the Virginia farm-to-table restaurant when the co-owner, appalled by Sanders’s defense of Donald Trump’s administration, asked her to leave. This happened three days after the homeland security secretary at the time, Kirstjen Nielsen, was yelled at for the administration’s family separation policy as she tried to dine at a Mexican restaurant in Washington.
These two insults launched a thousand thumb-suckers about civility. More than one conservative writer warned liberals that the refusal to let Trump officials eat in peace could lead to Trump’s re-election. “The political question of the moment,” opined Daniel Henninger in The Wall Street Journal, is this: ‘Can the Democratic Party control its left?’”
 

Somehow, though, few are asking the same question of Republicans as Trump devotees terrorize election workers and state officials over the president’s relentless lies about voter fraud. Michigan’s secretary of state, Jocelyn Benson, described her family’s experience this past weekend: “As my 4-year-old son and I were finishing up decorating the house for Christmas on Saturday night, and he was about to sit down and to watch ‘How the Grinch Stole Christmas,’ dozens of armed individuals stood outside my home shouting obscenities and chanting into bullhorns in the dark of night.”

 

PHOTO: The house of Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s secretary of state, was besieged by Trump supporters, some armed, over the weekend. Credit...Nicole Hester/Ann Arbor News, via Associated Press
So far, what happened to Benson doesn’t appear to be turning into a big cultural moment. There’s no frisson of the new about it; it’s pretty routine for Trumpists to threaten and intimidate people who work in both public health and election administration.
 

The radically different way the media treats boundary-pushing on the left and on the right is about more than hypocrisy or double standards. It is, rather, an outgrowth of the crisis of democracy that shields the Republican Party from popular rebuke. There’s no point asking if the G.O.P. can control its right. It has no reason to.

 

Democrats have just won the popular vote in the seventh out of the last eight presidential elections. In the aftermath, analysts have overwhelmingly focused on what Democrats, not Republicans, must do to broaden their appeal. Partly, this stems from knee-jerk assumptions about the authenticity of the so-called heartland. But it’s also just math — only one of our political parties needs to win an overwhelming national majority in order to govern.
Republican extremism tends to become a major story only when there are clear electoral consequences for it. Pat Buchanan’s demagogic culture war speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention was seen, at the time, as shocking, and elite Republicans later believed it helped George H.W. Bush lose the election. Twenty years later, after Mitt Romney’s defeat in 2012, Republicans undertook an “autopsy” and went public with the results of focus groups calling the party “scary,” “narrow-minded” and “out of touch.” There were always zealots in the modern Republican Party, but there were also forces interested in quarantining them.
After that autopsy, Reince Priebus, then the Republican Party chairman, called for a more “inclusive” G.O.P., saying, “Finding common ground with voters will be a top priority.”
 

Trump would prove that wasn’t necessary. In 2016, he got a smaller percentage of the popular vote than Romney did four years earlier, but still won the Electoral College. And while widespread revulsion toward Trump was a problem for him this November, down-ticket Republicans performed far better than almost anyone expected.
As a result, the effect of right-wing fanaticism on mainstream public opinion has become a non-issue. It doesn’t matter if Biden voters don’t like paranoid militants, many of them armed, menacing civil servants. The structure of our politics — gerrymandering in the House and the rural bias in the Senate — buffers Republicans from centrist backlash.

One thing would change this dynamic overnight: a Democratic victory in the Georgia Senate runoffs on Jan. 5. Republicans might learn that there’s a price for aligning themselves with a president trying to thwart the will of the electorate. They might regret the arrogance of Senator David Perdue, who didn’t deign to show up for a Sunday night debate with his Democratic opponent, Jon Ossoff. Trumpism might come to be seen as an electoral albatross, and Republicans would have an incentive to rejoin the reality everyone else operates in.
But unless and until that happens, few will be able to muster much surprise when Republicans condone the most outrageous right-wing thuggery, because few will expect anything else.

 

The uproar over shunning Sanders was an outgrowth of an old liberal quandary — how a tolerant society should treat those who conspire against tolerance. The people screaming outside Benson’s house raise an entirely different question, about how long our society can endure absent any overlapping values or common truths. You can condemn an anti-democratic party for behaving anti-democratically, but you can’t really argue with it.

 

More from Michelle Goldberg:

Opinion | Michelle Goldberg

The Post-Presidency of a Con Man

Nov. 13, 2020

 

Opinion | Michelle Goldberg

The MAGA Revolution Devours Its Own

Dec. 4, 2020

 

Opinion | Michelle Goldberg

De Blasio Has Actually Got Something Right

Nov. 30, 2020

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Michelle Goldberg has been an Opinion columnist since 2017. She is the author of several books about politics, religion and women’s rights, and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2018 for reporting on workplace sexual harassment issues. @michelleinbklyn
 

A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 8, 2020, Section A, Page 27 of the New York edition with the headline: No One Expects G.O.P. Civility.

 

NOTE:  This post can also now be found here at the Panopticon Review On Facebook page.

The Road We Must Travel Now

Why the American Left and Progressives Everywhere Must Critically Challenge And Create Viable Alternatives to the Conventional Politics of the White House and Congress in the Age of Obama

by Kofi Natambu

"One cannot change in one's head that which can only be changed in society."

--C.L.R. James  (1901-1989)

"The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.”

--Karl Marx  (1818-1883)

Now that we have done our national civic duty and successfully stopped the truly insidious far rightwing team of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan from entering the White House and taking over the federal government (a very important and absolutely necessary struggle that we as critically engaged citizens should make no apologies for)  we should also not delude ourselves that the mere re-election of President Barack Obama is any kind of ultimate solution to or panacea for the ongoing political, economic, and cultural crises that continue to wrack and oppress this society.  Nor should we allow ourselves the self indulgent luxury of pretending that we can fundamentally change the general direction and ideological identity of this society and culture without critically and relentlessly challenging the President and all other branches of the federal government from Congress to the Supreme Court to meet our general collective demands for deeply rooted structural and institutional transformations of our political economy in the areas of employment, education, housing, healthcare, energy policy, climate change, tax policy, corporate and Wall Street regulation, foreign policy, the political and legal protection of human and constitutional rights for women, Black and Latino American citizens, and the national LGBT community, immigration policy, national budgetary priorities, and defense spending.  

Needless to say what is now going to be required of us all--and particularly those of us from both independent  leftist organizations and Democratic Party affiliated progressive/liberal tendencies alike--is a simultaneously visionary, pragmatic, highly disciplined and well coordinated long range strategy of consistently fighting for major political and economic reforms from the organizational and tactical standpoint/viewpoints of both the "insider" liberal and "outsider" radical leftist positions that will:

1) Openly endorse and support the President when he does the right thing

 2) Heavily critique and oppose him vigorously when he doesn't--and most importantly--

 3) ALWAYS DEMAND MORE than what is being "offered" by the two major political parties at any given time.  An integral part of this broadbased strategic approach will be the corresponding insistence that our various reasons and motivations for critical intellectual engagement and grassroots mass movement will be our clear and uncompromising adherence to basic and ethically principled ideas and values.  

In pursuing this objective of seriously transforming our relationship to the government and our electorally chosen "representatives" in what is obviously an antiquated and largely dysfunctional political system we must not lose sight of what WE are doing and why.  Our fundamental task and larger obligation is to strongly `repudiate and dismiss the shallow and infantile "politics of celebrity" and its many false and manipulative guises (especially with respect to the President!) and concentrate all of our political and moral energy instead on who and what really matters--the millions of largely anonymous but absolutely essential group of poor, working, and middle class American citizens who very much need and desire large scale and fundamental changes in the very form and content of our political economy and culture in every area of contemporary life in the United States.

Finally we must NEVER conflate or confuse what we do on our own behalf as citizens in this Republic/Empire with that of ANY of our 'chosen representatives' no matter who they are or what political party they belong to.  This especially applies to our ongoing and inherently complicated relationship with President Obama who despite our general support for him electorally in the last two presidential elections we should never forget is not making many  of his most important decisions about governing according only to what WE need and want.  Which is to say the following:  Barack Hussein Obama is a bourgeois politician first, last, and always and is primarily concerned with his relative position and status vis-a-vis his professional colleagues, friends, and enemies on both sides of the aisle as well as in the corporate capitalist and financial worlds both here and abroad and thus is not fully beholden in the final analysis to our fundamental interests and desires either politically or ideologically.  What this means of course is that it is then our responsibility and obligation AT ALL TIMES to fight tenaciously in a very serious and sustained manner for what we KNOW we really need and want regardless of what the Democratic, Republican, and Tea Parties want or insist upon at any given time.  This also means that when Obama inevitably turns his back on or "betrays" us--which like any politician he surely will do as he has done in the past when he personally finds it necessary or desirable to do so--WE will have to have the guts, organized strength, independent conviction, and bedrock clarity of thought, purpose, and values to collectively stand up to him and his administration and to strongly demand of him what we should routinely demand of all our politicians and public surrogates for our interests, beliefs, and needs:  That he prioritize and fight for what we sent him and his colleagues to the White House and Congress to do on our behalf as citizens no matter what powerful countervailing forces from the elite ruling classes in either the political or economic spheres are insisting upon otherwise.

Needless to say our fundamental commitment to protecting and advancing our own collective interests, desires, and needs will require that unlike what we did far too often over the past four years we must not simply or passively give this President, his administration, and Congress a pass while we lazily sit back and take idle rhetorical potshots at the government and our other major social, economic, and cultural institutions without building and sustaining a well organized, and well coordinated NETWORK and broadbased COALITION of truly grassroots activist and public intellectual venues and organizations that are fully prepared to critically engage and challenge all our "leaders and institutions" including the President to do what's right, necessary, and important for the American people over and above the oppressive, selfish, greedy, and exploitive interests and desires of the ruling class elites who presently dominate and control our political economy and culture.  Real change and transformation on a mass scale like always is truly up to us and NOT the elites (even the ones we say we admire!).  After all, what we need to or should be pursuing on our collective behalf is not in the end about any of our various "personal" attitudes or stances toward the President or any other public figure in government or the corporate world either positively or negatively, but is wholly dependent upon how and why we make our most fundamental hopes, dreams, desires, and expectations known and manifest in concrete, real, and viable ways in the world we actually live and work in, not merely the one(s) we wish or imagine ourselves to be in.  In other words:  This really is our chance to change the direction of this society and culture and with it our lives.  Let's not blow it...