The conservatism of Obama

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Occupy Des Moines is the Democrats’ problem

Former Obama fans now see the party as part of the system they seek 'to undo

DES MOINES–”They’re closing, so if you want to get arrested, come now!”

An older woman made the announcement as she breezed into and Occupy Iowa Caucus’ headquarters early Thursday afternoon: word had gotten out about the group’s latest demonstration. They’d already hit local offices for Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, and the Wells Fargo branch irresistibly close to Romney’s campaign headquarters, and now their next target apparently knew they were coming.

The occupiers scurried to their cars, armed with their anti-Wall Street placards still fresh with marker ink. While navigating the streets of downtown Des Moines, Jess Mazour, 24, fumbled with her cell phone and a Ziploc bag of reporters’ business cards as Katie Rockey, 19, fed her phone numbers from the back seat.

“Let me call Channel 13,” Mazour said. “I know that number by heart.” After an answer, she began her spiel: “I’m calling to let you know we’re headed to occupy Iowa’s Democratic headquarters right now.”

Welcome to the latest and perhaps most unique iteration of Occupy Wall Street, where a splinter cell of Occupy Des Moines protestors, many of them former Obama supporters, are heading the movement’s first significant injection of street politics into electoral politics. And if what’s happening in Iowa augurs anything for the 2012 cycle, Democrats nationwide will be facing a vote of no confidence from former allies who now see the party as part of the system they’re trying to occupy. Earlier this week, when more than 100 progressive occupiers caucused to pick their candidates of greatest “dispreference,” the largest number, 30, picked Barack Obama.

“I voted for Obama in 2008, and I feel really let down by what’s happened since then,” said Ross Grooters, 37, of Pleasant Hill, Iowa. His mother-in-law had to move in with him, his wife and his daughter after she lost her job and then her home.

If disruption is the name of Occupy’s game, Occupy Iowa Caucus has already succeeded in Des Moines. The local Obama campaign office was conspicuously shuttered on the day occupiers had identified it as a protest target. Meanwhile, state Democratic leadership had no idea what to do with the few dozen protestors — many of whom they’ve worked with before — who then decided to show up on their headquarters’ doorstep for a sit-in instead.

“You are preventing them [Democratic volunteers] from entering or leaving,” a frustrated Iowa Democratic Executive Director Norm Sterzenbach told the occupiers, who later dubbed him Scrooge McDemocrat. “I see that as a violent action.”

“We will defend our right to do a nonviolent protest,” replied occupier Frank Cordaro, 60, something of a local legend; he’s a Catholic anarchist who’s been arrested more times than he can remember.

“Well, we see it as violent, and I’ll treat it as such,” Sterzenbach told Cordaro.

State Democratic party chairwoman Sue Dvorsky tried to be more patient with the protestors, but even patience proved incompatible with the Occupiers’ demands.

“I’m just here to listen,” Dvorsky said as a small crowd of occupiers gathered around and volleyed anti-corporate grievances at her for 20 minutes. “I just don’t know what you want from us.” We want to talk to Obama on the phone, the occupiers said, and ask him to take corporate money out of politics. “We do not have the ability to get the President on the phone and to get him to do the things that you want to do,” Dvorsky replied.

Democratic Party, meet Occupy Wall Street. To many outsiders, the Occupy movement has a particularly infuriating brand of Zen obliqueness to it because of its refusal to appoint leaders and lay down clear, negotiable demands, the typical mode of American activism. The movement sort of exists for its own sake; there’s no obvious authority that will realistically give it the kind of vast economic reforms that many occupiers would like to see, so many participants figure they’ll band together, stick around and raise hell until an authority exists that can.

“No longer does it matter who gets elected,” Cordaro told me earlier this week. “Tweedly dee, tweedly dum. There could not be two more different presidents in our history than George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and yet the corporations still run the system.”

This Democrats-equal-Republicans rhetoric, at least among the far American left, isn’t particularly new. But what’s new is that Iowan occupiers, which includes a somewhat broader ideological array of members than the left’s usual suspects — there are Occupy nuns! — are starting to act on it, and the upcoming caucuses gives them the perfect opportunity.

No one here has uttered the phrase “lesser of two evils” by my hearing, and that doesn’t bode well for a Democratic party already facing an enthusiasm gap against its motivated Republican opposition. State Democratic executive director Sterzenbach said liberal activists had never picketed its headquarters or shown such open confrontation since the movement’s first sit-in at party headquarters last week. Twelve were arrested on Thursday night.

Occupy Iowa Caucus faces its own pitfalls, for those in New Hampshire watching Des Moines’ experiment for cues. The movement’s leaderless structure and diverse ideological grievances have made for sluggish decisionmaking sessions on who and where to protest — a major impediment for activists facing a Jan. 3 deadline to inspire statewide voters to vote “no preference” on both parties’ ballots.

The result is that all the protests have thus far looked the same: a few familiar die-hards decide at the last minute to sit down in front of a given candidate’s doorway for the sake of getting arrested in front of a few cameras.

It’s worked so far; the Des Moines movement’s received exactly the boon of journalistic interest that it clearly craves and needs for new members. But in Iowa, where the relationship between the activists and the police remains startlingly polite compared to the bitterness harbored in many coastal Occupy movements — there have been no incidences of rough arrests — could the lack of violence lead to media and public disinterest? It’s hard to say, when so many national journalists are here and starved for a stories beyond candidates desperately shaking strangers’ hands.

But for the occupiers risking arrest, it’s become the only conceivable course of action anybody can think of. Take Grooters and Shawn Gude, 22, two 2008 Obama voters who decided to tape dollar bills to their mouths and stand in front of the front doors to state Democratic headquarters until the police came to remove them.

“There’s nothing for a citizen in a democracy left to do than put his or her body on the line and stand up for his principles if voting has become meaningless,” Gude said, his back to the glass, before sheepishly correcting himself: “I should say insufficient, rather than meaningless.”

“It’s not that these aren’t issues that everybody knows or understands,” Grooters added helpfully.

“Well, we have dollar bills taped over our mouths, so it’s a little more difficult to express ourselves,” Gude replied, and that’s about when the cops came to take them away.
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Matt Pearce is a contributing writer for The Los Angeles Times, The New Inquiry, and The Pitch in Kansas City. You can follow him on Twitter at @mattdpearce. More Matt Pearce

Yeah, so?

When republicans elect their messiah, they worship him and proclaim that everything he does is wonderful.

When democrats elect their messiah, they hold his feet to the fire.

Granted that's been the way for too long and it's problematic no matter who's doing it, which is why I'm so thrilled to see first the Tea Party break from Republican orthodoxy and make a credible threat to throw GOP elections unless they return to core principles, and now some signs that OWS is rejecting "lesser evil" arguments in favor of demanding candidates they actually want. It's a rare heartening sign in troubled times.

The tea party hardly represents a return to core principles.

what good is an even more extremely divided political landscape?

Good afternoon. Let begin by saying that although this has been billed as an anti-war rally, I stand before you as someone who is not opposed to war in all circumstances.

The Civil War was one of the bloodiest in history, and yet it was only through the crucible of the sword, the sacrifice of multitudes, that we could begin to perfect this union, and drive the scourge of slavery from our soil.

I don’t oppose all wars.

My grandfather signed up for a war the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, fought in Patton's army. He saw the dead and dying across the fields of Europe; he heard the stories of fellow troops who first entered Auschwitz and Treblinka. He fought in the name of a larger freedom, part of that arsenal of democracy that triumphed over evil, and he did not fight in vain.

I don’t oppose all wars.

After September 11th, after witnessing the carnage and destruction, the dust and the tears, I supported this Administrations pledge to hunt down and root out those who would slaughter innocents in the name of intolerance, and I would willingly take up arms myself to prevent such tragedy from happening again.

I don’t oppose all wars.

And I know that in this crowd today, there is no shortage of patriots, or of patriotism.

What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perles and Paul Wolfowitz and other arm-chair, weekend warriors in this Administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.

What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Roves to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone thru the worst month since the Great Depression.

That’s what Im opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.

Now let me be clear: I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity. He’s a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him.

But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history.

I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.

I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the middle east, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Queda.

I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.

So for those of us who seek a more just and secure world for our children, let us send a clear message to the president today.

You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s finish the fight with Bin Laden and Al Queda, thru effective, coordinated intelligence, and a shutting down of the financial networks that support terrorism, and a homeland security program that involves more than color-coded warnings.

You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s fight to make sure that the UN inspectors can do their work, and that we vigorously enforce a non-proliferation treaty, and that former enemies and current allies like Russia safeguard and ultimately eliminate their stores of nuclear material, and that nations like Pakistan and India never use the terrible weapons in already in their possession, and that the arms merchants in our own country stop feeding the countless wars that rage across the globe.

You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s fight to make sure our so-called allies in the Middle East, the Saudis and the Egyptians, stop oppressing their own people, and suppressing dissent, and tolerating corruption and inequality, and mismanaging their economies so that their youth grow up without education, without prospects, without hope, the ready recruits of terrorist cells.

You want a fight, President Bush? Let’s fight to wean ourselves off Middle East oil, through an energy policy that doesn't simply serve the interests of Exxon and Mobil.

Those are the battles that we need to fight. Those are the battles that we willingly join. The battles against ignorance and intolerance. Corruption and greed. Poverty and despair.

The consequences of war are dire, the sacrifices immeasurable. We may have occasion in our lifetime to once again rise up in defense of our freedom, and pay the wages of war. But we ought not we will not travel down that hellish path blindly. Nor should we allow those who would march off and pay the ultimate sacrifice, who would prove the full measure of devotion with their blood, to make such an awful sacrifice in vain.

In the year since President Bush announced the surge – the bloodiest year of the war for America – the level of violence in Iraq has been reduced. Our troops – including so many from Fort Bragg and Pope Air Force Base – have done a brilliant job under difficult circumstances. Yet while we have a General who has used improved tactics to reduce violence, we still have the wrong strategy.

I saw Obama as a moderate in 2006. If you are realizing in 2012 that he isn't a flaming liberal, I figure you are at least six years late.

The first thing that Obama did was to destroy the space program by cancelling George Bush's manned mission to the Moon. Obama justified his action saying that we need a more revolutionary propulsion system to get us to Mar's but Obama wants to hand over the space program to private enterprise.

what good is an even more extremely divided political landscape?

What do you mean NASA has become a mockery of itself?

I mean that NASA used to be a bottom-up engineering organization and is now, and has been for some decades, a top-down bureaucratic organization.

It serves no obvious purpose other than to provide resume jewelry for a bunch of stuffed suits and to blow up the occasional space vehicle on the launch pad.