The Republican Party has no program to provide jobs, rein in Wall Street, solve the health care crisis, or stop global warming - all issues of great concern to average Americans.
Their sole purpose and number one goal seems to be to stop the president by any means necessary.
They do this despite the fact that President Obama won his office with a plurality of 10 million votes. They deny the will of the people who in November 2008 voted for change and for a government that would make people's lives a little more bearable. A majority of voters spoke, and democracy should mean this new vision was given a chance to succeed.
However the prospect of going down that road created fear for the Republicans.
"Politics nowadays is about fatally crippling Obama and rolling back the Democratic surge, by any means possible," wrote Juan Cole, who heads the Global Americana Institute, in a recent opinion piece titled "Rightwing Politics is Mostly Dirty Tricks."
Thus we have had 40 Republican senators voting in lockstep to squash every initiative of the president. The 2008 election is undermined by the rule of the minority.
Cole says the Supreme Court ruling allowing corporations unlimited power to finance elections will allow corporations to defame candidates who "don't kowtow to them, deploying all the billions at their disposal." And he goes on: "This overturning of a hundred years of precedent by five far-right Republicans on the court was a deliberate attempt to undo the 2008 Democratic victory."
Labor and other people's organizations cannot begin to match the money of the big corporations. Imagine how our founding fathers, who fought to end rule by the all powerful king, would feel about that rule being transferred to the all powerful corporations? Now the richest and most powerful corporations have even fewer limits on how they use their limitless amounts of money to sway elections.
The work of the far right to obstruct democracy doesn't end in Congress or the Supreme Court. Last summer's tea baggers used intimidating tactics, from physical threats to shouting down those they disagreed with, to try and end the health care debate.
Dirty tricks are also employed. Because ACORN, the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now, registered hundreds of thousands of poor people to vote, they were deemed a threat by Republicans. James O'Keefe and others cooked up a scheme to set them up.
Four months later, that same O'Keefe led a Watergate-style raid on the offices of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) seeking to bug her offices.
In the coming legislative and political battles that working people and their allies will wage, it will be wise to keep this in mind: Progress will not come from the defeat of Obama; a growing far-right menace will only be emboldened.
The strongest advocates for Wall Street and corporate profits at the people's expense are found in the Republican Party. If we wish to defeat them, we better aim our political arrows accurately.
Photo: PW/John Rummel
