(Washington, D.C.) – On Friday, President Obama pushed back making a decision on the long debated Keystone XL Pipeline until after the upcoming 2014 midterm elections.
Worried about upsetting his core constituencies, Mr. Obama decided that while he had his pen and phone out he would make a few other executive decisions as well.
Since it was too late to do anything about Easter, the President decided to push the observances of Memorial Day, the Fourth of July, and Labor Day back to the middle of November and after the election.
“The way I figure it, uh, if the Democrats win, the country will have half the month of November off, counting Thanksgiving, uh, to celebrate!” the White House said in a statement.
“And if we lose, well, we won’t care about ruining all those, uh, rich Republicans summer vacations at that point anyway. Hell, if we lose, I uh, might just cancel them altogether.”
It’s not all bad news though. Mr. Obama actually extended the Cinco de Mayo holiday to five days to pander to the Hispanic voting bloc and threatened to jack with Daylight Savings Time, scheduled to end just days before the election, just because he could. “Fall Back, my ass!” the President joked, “Not if we don’t have the votes to keep the Senate!”
Democrats across the country were buoyed by the power their leader was showing after the move on Friday. House Minority leader, Nancy Pelosi boasted, “First, he moved Obamacare deadlines back until after the election, then the pipeline, and now this. It’s energizing to know the President has the power to change time, space and whatever else he wants to until after the election! I’m thankful our Founding Fathers included these powers for the Executive Branch when they wrote the Magna Carta.”
“I think your example inadvertently supports what I was saying”… no, it wasn’t inadvertent. If you read it again I said quite clearly that yours is data, while mine was merely an anecdote.
I think your example inadvertently supports what I was saying, since Obama, too, circumvented the process by pretending to stand for “change,” which attracted all of those new, young voters, only to stab them in the back when he got elected by supporting Wall St over Main St, as they say, after the subprime debacle. More generally, he hasn’t used the bully pulpit to really fight for liberal values, to change the mainstream narrative the way Reagan or FDR did.
On economic matters, Obama defends the status quo and he’s afraid precisely of change. He’s no radical, transformative leader, but radicalism would be needed now to make the US more democratic, because the plutocracy’s entrenched.
Mind you, I’m not saying that more democracy in the US (i.e. more mass representation) would necessarily be a good thing at this point.
Obama was funded primarily by small donors and elected in the margins by new and often disenfranchised voters. Democracy is still alive, it’s just not doing that well. My example is anecdotal. The data supports what you’re saying, especially when you include all the state and local offices that have gone Red due to big outside funding.
Are you suggesting there are ways to circumvent elections and thus democracy? It’s almost as if the elections don’t mean much anyway, because it’s only the wealthiest supporters of the candidates who matter; many of the candidates have gerrymandered districts so they’re safe; and the parties agree on the neoliberalism that causes the inequality in the US, which is of central importance. It’s almost as if the elections were a sort of game, a superficial show of democracy to disguise all the ways in which the US isn’t particularly democratic.