Gee, I thought I Was Voting For A Democrat In November, Not A Post-Partisan-- 1,445 Days 'Til We Get Another Chance

Will Obama roll over on Hilda Solis' nomination?

Hard to imagine that the President of the United States-- even a post-partisan wimpy one who is apparently keeping his powder bone dry for something important (I can't wait to find out what's important enough for him to fight for)-- offers someone a great Cabinet job that they're not remotely qualified for and certainly don't deserve by any stretch of the imagination and the answer "yes, but only if..." and then makes what most people would think of as a pretty hostile demand. That's what's happened with Obama's choice of reactionary New Hampshire Senator Judd Gregg. He said he'd take over the Commerce Department (which he has advocated abolishing) but only if he were guaranteed that a Republican were named to the Senate seat he's leaving. Republicans have done a great deal of damage inside the Commerce Department; I have no doubt that Gregg will continue that tradition. What a deal! America gets a crappy Commerce Secretary and Blue-trending New Hampshire gets an appointed Republican senator who would never have been elected. And the Democratic Senate caucus still doesn't have enough votes to override the shrill and fanatic Obstructionist Caucus.

And why should President Post-Partisan stop there? Sure, he's got 3 Republicans in his Cabinet already but that isn't enough, not by a long shot, for the Republicans who are walking all over him. How about Doctor "Dollar" Bill Frist for Health and Human Services? After all-- even though most Republicans are salivating to get a total pushover like Daschle into the job, someone whose every instinct will be to please the Insurance Industry and the HMOs and compromise on every single issue that caused Americans to vote for Obama -- some overtly partisan extremists-- who are a little slow on the uptake about the new post-partisan rules-- are demanding that Obama withdraw Daschle's name "effective immediately." (An even better idea would be to have an independent auditor audit the taxes of Daschle-- and every member of the Senate. You think they'd go for that? Why not?)

And the radical right's next target, of course-- like who couldn't have guessed this was coming-- is Labor Secretary-Designate, Rep. Hilda Solis, the only proven progressive in the Cabinet and someone who has the nerve to favor working families and their aspirations over the bottom line greed and selfishness of the kind of unfettered corporatism that finances American politics. The far right wants her head-- on a pike-- and Obama has given them no indication that if they whine enough he won't be willing to work something out, something nice and post-partisan. Like maybe bring back McConnell's "wife." Now, her tenure didn't bother anyone at all... except some dirty, smelly workers.

It's obvious that Solis is going to turn back all those strides that have been made in the last 8 years turning the Department of Labor back into an organization that protects working people instead of what Business and their GOP lackeys thinks it should be doing: policing unions and supporting Big Business. After all, Judd Gregg can't be expected to do that all himself. You know, post-partisan politicians care about their careers of course, but they don't get all steely about the vision thing the way the partisans do. Big Business and it's bought and paid for advocates-- the GOP + the Blue Dogs and DLC types-- know exactly what they want and how to go about getting it. And it doesn't look like Obama is going to do much to stop them; in fact, it looks like he's happy chucking the one who brung him to the dance for the ephemeral support of those who would have barred him at the door. Good luck with that.

Meanwhile, the vision thing. Republicans and their ilk inside what we used to think of as the working family party, have a vision for America. They even got to try it out. After Obama's political hero abolished slavery, it took the most recent breed of his political party's leaders to bring it back. They tried it out in an American colony, a commonwealth in the Marianas, on the island of Saipan. You may remember back before Colorado voters only bestowed 42% of their votes on Bob Schaffer in his bid to become a senator, the hard right ex-Congressman had some trouble explaining away his Jack Abramoff-funded adventures in the Marianas-- particularly why he called the Saipan's system of indentured servitude a "model" for a system he would like to see imported onto the mainland. Most Colorado voters seemed a little turned off to the prospect. At least they were smart enough to send him packing. Fully half the voters in northern San Diego County (CA-50) didn't care that their congressman, Brian Bilbray, who also took one of the Abramoff junkets, said much the same thing: that it is a place to seek "answers for the rest of the American family." I want to wish that vision on the families of the folks who voted for him. And Thomas Frank explains it beautifully in The Wrecking Crew-- How Conservatives Rule.

The CNMI [Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands] system was the product of a unique economic deal the islands had struck with the world; a deal in which wages could be kept extremely low, workers had no citizenship rights, and virtually the entire power of the state stood behind employers as they extracted profit from the toil of others. For most of the workers who came to the island, this arrangement meant indentured servitude; for a few, it was tantamount to slavery. For Tom DeLay the situation was so gratifying that he promised personally to block all efforts to divert all efforts to divert Saipan from its chosen course. "Stand firm," he once told a gathering of the island's overlord. "Resist evil. Remember that all truth and blessings emanate from our Creator."

...But in some fundamental way Tom DeLay was right about Saipan. So were all those newspaper columnists and feature writers who described the place as "America's Hong Kong" or "a free-market model." Let us give them their due here: what happened on Saipan really was an experiment in the free market, in about as unregulated a state as it gets. It really was a model from which all the world could learn what happens when the laissez-faire believers get their way.

...So let us look closely at Saipan, this laboratory of misgovernment and exploitation. It was here that conservatism confronted-- and vanquished-- the original, fundamental enemy: labor. The war mobilized the entire right wing-- from Christian soldiers, to national securitarians, to populists and libertarians. Saipan is where the fight against the left distilled itself down to its one essential and irreplaceable component: the war on the worker.

Bring that back to today and those same forces-- the ones who fought the U.S. in the 1860s, the ones who ordered the murders of union organizers for opposing child labor, for demanding the eight-hour day and the weekend, for insisting on safety regulations in factories and mines and, worst of all, for demanding a right to collective bargaining and a minimum wage-- are hysterically fighting the Employee Free Choice Act, and the one member of Obama's nascent Administration willing to stand up for it. It is driving the right insane and they are threatening to wreck everything if Obama doesn't give them their way on this.

And just as the right's twisted vision and barrage of propaganda persuaded dolts like Bob Schaffer and Brian Bilbray that a system of slavery was actually a worker's paradise, a very well financed campaign-- tens of millions of dollars worth-- has mobilized to convince Americans that the rights of workers is an insidious and dangerous and un-American thing. They'll say anything; they always do. This isn't what you ever hear from O'Reilly or Hannity or Coulter or Limbaugh or any of Limbaugh troops in Congress: