If you’re like me, and you’ve been somewhat perplexed by some of the things the Obama Administration has been doing, you need look no further than a blog posting from 2008 by one of the founders of the Weather Underground; Mark Rudd.
Back in ’08, it appears Rudd was trying to assure his fellow radicals and progressives that what Obama was going to do would have reason, and in the end, they would all be able to understand it in retrospect. Believe me. Nothing this president has done has been without reason, either by action or inaction. His choices, after reading Rudd’s piece, are all very clear to me now.
To begin with, Rudd explains how Obama got elected in the first place, and why he positioned himself the way he did in his piece titled “Let’s Get Smart About Obama:”
Obama is a very strategic thinker. He knew precisely what it would take to get elected and didn’t blow it. He used community organizing methods to mobilize a base consisting of many people who had never voted before or who regularly don’t vote.
But he also knew that what he said had to basically play to the center to not be run over by the press, the Republicans, scare centrist and cross-over voters away. He made it.
I’ve often wondered what the Obama governing doctrine was, and it appears at times he’s wandering aimlessly without purpose. Au contraire – it is completely intentional.
…he has a narrow mandate for change, without any direction specified. What he’s doing now is moving on the most popular issues — the environment, health care, and the economy. He’ll be progressive on the environment because that has broad popular support; health care will be extended to children, then made universal, but the medical, pharmaceutical, and insurance corporations will stay in place, perhaps yielding some power; the economic agenda will stress stimulation from the bottom sometimes and handouts to the top at other times.
Sound familiar? Remember, Rudd wrote this piece back in ’08 just after Obama’s election. It was like Rudd had a window into the future; perhaps a “playbook” he knew well and understood Obama also knew well. Coincidence? I think not.
What about his decisions to keep some of the original players in place?
On foreign policy and the wars and the use of the military there will be no change at all. That’s what keeping Gates at the Pentagon and Clinton at State and not prosecuting the torturers is saying.
Rudd then goes on to explain the small, incremental steps Obama must take to get to the point where he will have everything in place to release the progressive hounds across the land, to set in motion a completely new “fundamentally transformed” America.
Move on the stuff you can to a small but significant extent, gain support and confidence. Leave the military alone because they’re way too powerful. For now, until enough momentum is raised. By the second or third year of this recession, when stimulus is needed at the bottom, people may begin to discuss cutting the military budget if security is being increased through diplomacy and application of nascent international law.
If memory serves me correctly, aren’t they currently all discussing exactly how much we’ll have to cut from the military budget? The only problem with this thought process is things aren’t going the way Rudd planned – there is no increased diplomacy or security. The rest of the world hates us now more than ever before, and Obama’s rating in the Muslim world is now lower than W’s was. Let’s hope this unfortunate state we’re in stops the “application of nascent international law.” But as we’ve all noticed lately, Obama seems to bow before the U.N. more often than he comes to Congress on issues of foreign policy.
And what about all the nonsense the news is reporting on? Seems like we have constant news breaking on Friday nights, all the small issues seem to be the big “news” stories, but nobody’s really talking about the real things that are going on. Sheer luck or bad timing? Nope… part of the plan.
…you have to be able to look like you’re doing one thing but do another. That’s why all these conservative appointments are important: the strategy is feint to the right, move left. Any other strategy invites sure defeat. It would be stupid to do otherwise in this environment.
Look to the second level appointments. There’s a whole govt. in waiting that Podesta has at the Center for American Progress. They’re mostly progressives, I’m told (except in military and foreign policy).
Don’t you all remember the elites on both the left AND right saying “Glenn Beck is crazy,” he’s just a “conspiracy theorist” with all of his shows about the people the president surrounds himself with? Crazy? Really? It is and was part of the plan. It’s like Glenn previously said: it’s like they’re trying to break down the entire makeup of our society, all the while building a gigantic structure to just hang in place until all the internal pieces of the progressive puzzle have been assembled, and then a switch will be flipped on, giving life to the exoskeleton that exists and the rest will fall in place. Seriously, I want you to stop reading this for just a moment, think about all the things Rudd said in his piece, what’s really happening in this country right now, and ask yourself – was Glenn right? He always said he hoped he was wrong, and I did, too, but it appears he was too close to the progressive sweet spot. Perhaps that’s why he left Fox to pursue this beast with his own machine.
Rudd puts the final call out to top off Beck’s predictions and observations about what’s happening:
Our job now is to organize both inside and outside the Demo (sic) party. There’s already a big battle in the Demo party at every level. Here in the New Mexico State Legislature, the progressives are challenging the conservative Dems for leadership; the same is true in Congress. If you can’t stand to work in the party, work on putting mass pressure on issues such as healthcare and jobs and the war from outside.
ACORN, SEIU, AFL-CIO anyone?
We should all say a prayer of thanks to Glenn for awakening a previously sleeping citizenry. And let’s hope he has much more success with Mercury Radio Arts in combating this cancer that is the progressive movement, as it has metastasized throughout this country. It must be defeated by whatever means. Rudd’s call to action must be met by equal and opposite action by the Tea Party and other grassroots movements. We cannot rest for one moment. The progressives surely won’t.
