Lucas,
Okay, we can all breathe a sigh of relief.
There's no doubt that a Mitt Romney presidency would have been a disaster for America. An America under Romney would have been less secure, less safe, dirtier, more unjust, more unequal and downright meaner.
But by the time you finish this email, I hope you'll be ready to move past relief and double down on all the work we have in front of us.
President Obama's re-election offers us some important and time-critical opportunities.
The new political landscape — fundamentally the same as what we faced before the election — also presents many perils. Congressional Republicans and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have shown their ability to set the policy agenda even with Obama in the White House. And the Obama administration itself represents conflicting tendencies, too often more responsive to Big Business than the public interest.
Whether we can capitalize on the compelling opportunities and navigate the grave threats we face depends on the same thing: the extent to which we mobilize together.
Nothing good, and lots of bad things, will happen if we sit on our hands. But if we organize, we can stop Big Business and its political allies from driving forward a dangerous, anti-democratic agenda — and win some extraordinary victories.
Simply put, Obama's victory alone is not enough.
We — me, you and every public citizen nationwide — have a duty to fight plutocracy. Where Obama needs to be pushed, we will do the pushing; where he needs support, we will provide it.
SOME THOUGHTS ON THE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN
It is absolutely true, as the conservative punditocracy is now screaming, that Mitt Romney was a very poor candidate. He did not connect with regular people, he wasn't able to capitalize on high unemployment and a very weak economy, and he made a lot of stupid statements (even if they arguably reflected his true thoughts and attitudes).
Perhaps more importantly, Romney ran what must be one of the most cynical presidential campaigns in U.S. history. His extraordinary transmutation from a moderate Republican governor to "severe conservative" and back in the last weeks of the campaign to a moderate has no recent precedent. His refusal to explain the details of his single top policy initiative — a massive tax cut allegedly to be offset by unspecified savings — echoes nothing so much as Richard Nixon's secret plan to end the war in Vietnam. His positions on immigration, Medicare, Obamacare (née Romneycare), the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and more flip-flopped so dramatically as to make most politicians look clockwork consistent.
President Obama, by contrast, ran a disciplined and focused campaign. The Obama campaign defined Romney as an out-of-touch plutocrat. They effectively attacked Romney for proposing a resuscitation of the Bush administration agenda: tax cuts for the rich and deregulation.
However, as was widely noted, President Obama did not offer a bold vision for what he hoped to do in his next four years. He did not offer a Green New Deal to put Americans back to work by retrofitting buildings and installing other energy efficiency technologies. He did not talk about fixing the broken campaign finance system, even as we watched the super-wealthy and giant corporations try to buy the very election in which he was running.
The president was almost completely silent on what is quite likely the most pressing issue of our time: accelerating, catastrophic climate change. And he intimated that he's willing to cut a deal with Republicans to scale back Medicare and Social Security.
So, we have to look at the next four years with clear eyes.
At the same time, we have to remember that the president's campaign succeeded precisely because of its progressive strain (as well as his very strong organizational structure and other factors).
He won because he defended the more progressive initiatives of his first term, such as Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform. He won because he attacked Romney's proposals for favoring the rich and worsening inequality. He won by criticizing Romney for offshoring jobs. He won because he talked about a society in which we should all take care of each other, rather than one in which we're all on our own.
The course of the second-term Obama administration is not set. How progressive it turns out to be will depend precisely on how much we make it be progressive.
THE MONEY ELECTION AND VOTER SUPPRESSION
Of course, there's no way to analyze the 2012 election without highlighting the impact of Big Money, especially the $1 billion channeled through outside groups by giant corporations and the hyper-rich.
At Public Citizen, we've talked a lot over the past year about the impact of the Supreme Court's supremely misguided Citizens United ruling. As I outlined a few days ago, all of our worst fears have come to pass. Corporations and the mega-wealthy spent vast amounts of money on the election. Hundreds of millions were funneled through organizations that don't disclose their donors. We endured an onslaught of negative attack ads. A very tiny number of the super-rich had an outlandish, outsized impact. And much more.
On this score, it's very important that no one be fooled by the results of the election. Yes, the outside groups empowered by Citizens United spent most of their money on Republicans, and, this time, they lost more than they won. They did win a lot — House races, some Senate races, state and local races. Karl Rove, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and others of the Republican-supporting outside spenders will argue — and they will be right – that last night's results would have been more favorable to Democrats but for their spending.
Even more fundamentally, all politics now occur against the backdrop of Citizens United. That means that, on every single issue that matters to them, corporations and the super-wealthy have more power and influence than they did just a few years ago.
If you have even a rough sense of how Citizens United reshaped the election landscape in 2012, then you know that no politician can escape the dark shadow cast by that horrific decision.
There was some very good money-and-politics news.
Voters in Colorado and Montana, by 3-to-1 margins, passed statewide ballot measures calling for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United and restore our democracy. We're now up to 11 states! Voters in Chicago and other cities passed similar measures.
We know the American people are fed up with the corrupt corporate and super-rich domination of our politics, and they support a constitutional amendment to reestablish the principle that democracy is for people. Moving forward, we have a major opportunity to make historic change in this regard.
Another crucial note: This election saw, across the country, systemic efforts to deny Americans the right to vote, through voter ID laws and other measures. The election wasn't close enough for these throwbacks to dark periods in our history to alter results in the most high-profile elections, but it might have been. And many of the worst laws will take effect only in future elections. This is an issue to which Public Citizen is going to pay much more attention. We can't be a nation that walks backwards in the long struggle to expand the franchise.
LOOKING AHEAD
The re-election of President Obama and the surprising results in the Senate give us a real opportunity to aggressively pursue our bold agenda, starting with an all-out push to overturn the disastrous Citizens United decision.
You will, of course, be hearing a lot more from us about the work we face together.
Here's an overview of what's to come:
- Right away, we have some big opportunities. We're going to make a big push for President Obama to issue an executive order requiring government contractors to disclose campaign spending. That simple step could force election disclosure of most spending by Fortune 500 companies. And it's something the president can do on his own.
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The lame duck session of Congress that will begin next week poses many risks as well as opportunities. We're going to mobilize against dangerous proposals to impede the work of regulators at independent agencies like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. We're going to turn back efforts to undo key parts of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law. And we're going to guard against efforts to undermine the rights of victims of malpractice to win redress in court.
On the positive side, we expect to see a whistleblower protection law passed. And we're going to make sure that a financial speculation tax — a tax on Wall Street gambling, with the potential to raise hundreds of billions in revenue — becomes a serious part of the tax and budget debate.
- Going into 2013, we will continue to push our broad agenda, under conditions not too dissimilar from what we've had over the past two years. Winning on big policy issues is going to require strategic savvy. We'll respond opportunistically to new openings and forge some unlikely alliances to win some legislative victories. We'll push executive branch regulators to advance consumer protections, address climate change, make our economy more secure, strengthen our democracy and much more. And we'll build grassroots power to shift the contours of policy debate.
- Across party lines, we're going to start to hear even more wrongheaded claims about the need to weaken Medicare — to cut benefits, raise the eligibility age and perhaps increase the role of private insurers in the system. Public Citizen is going to devote a great deal of effort to defending and strengthening Medicare.
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We know that Big Money dominance in politics is the pivot point for the entirety of the progressive policy agenda. We aim to win important disclosure reforms — key to limiting corporate spending in elections — quickly, through an executive order and also through action by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which has been asked to require publicly traded companies to reveal their campaign spending. Meanwhile, we're going to ramp up our efforts to win a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United along with public financing of elections.
Polls show that by significant majorities, the public thinks Citizens United was wrongly decided. After the 2012 election, the public is more disgusted than ever with the unprecedented amount of dark money and the ubiquitous negative campaign ads. With your help, we're going to take the movement for a constitutional amendment to a whole new level.
Yesterday we took an important step as a nation. I couldn't be more honored to continue working with you as we blaze the trail to progress.
This is our time.
Onward,
Robert Weissman
President, Public Citizen