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Published on The Nation (http://www.thenation.com)
http://www.thenation.com/article/163802/should-obama-face-challenge-democratic-primary
John Nichols | October 5, 2011
The Illinois 10th Congressional District Democrats work in Barack Obama’s political heartland, the northern suburbs of Chicago, which so warmly embraced a young state senator’s bid for the US Senate in 2004 and the presidency in 2008. Long before Obama became a national phenomenon, he had liberals swooning in Glenview, Deerfield and Northbrook. But early last month, after President Obama overruled his own Environmental Protection Agency and scuttled anti-smog regulations, the blog of 10th District Dems featured a plaintive post: “Do I still believe his promises? I want to… I really want to.” Even as the grassroots group was spreading the word that “volunteers are needed for Avon, Antioch, Grant, and Lake Villa for President Obama’s campaign,” sincere activists were speculating on its website about whether President Obama is a “monumental fraud.” The frustration with Obama is real and widespread, extending from environmental issues to economics to foreign policy. “I’ve been going door-to-door a lot in the past few weeks” for Democratic candidates, says Sharon Sanders, a member of the group. “We’re only hitting Democrats, and they are so discouraged about everything—as I am.”
So what about a challenge to Obama? Should a progressive take on the president in the rapidly approaching Democratic caucuses and primaries?
“Boy, have I given this some thought,” says Sanders. “I’m fifty-fifty on it. On the one hand, it would wake up Obama and the Democratic voters and perhaps get them out to vote.” On the other hand, she worries about taking steps that could strengthen the hand of conservative forces she fears are hellbent on “destroying any fragment of what’s left of our democracy and taking away all essential government programs.”
In labor temples, lecture halls and library meeting rooms across the country in recent months, I have had hundreds of discussions with folks like Sanders: hard-working, deeply committed grassroots party activists who line up well to the left of a president they see as too quick to compromise on economics, civil liberties and wars. Some prominent progressives have stepped up, endorsing a letter in mid-September arguing that without a primary challenge, “progressive principles past and present [will] be betrayed.” The signers include Ralph Nader, Cornel West, Gore Vidal, Jonathan Kozol, Rabbi Michael Lerner, former South Dakota Senator James Abourezk and Friends of the Earth president Erich Pica. It is not just unmet expectations that lead roughly a third of Democratic voters to tell pollsters Obama should face a primary challenge; it is also a sense that the president cannot energize the Democratic base and win in 2012 unless he is forced to define himself as a dramatically more progressive candidate.
Once upon a time, the sense of malaise and frustration of so many of the party faithful, along with encouragement from prominent activists and ideologues, would have guaranteed a primary challenge to a sitting president. It would have come from a prominent senator, like Estes Kefauver in 1952, Eugene McCarthy in 1968, Edward Kennedy in 1980—or, in the Republican column, from an ideological gadfly like Ronald Reagan in 1976 or Patrick Buchanan in 1992.
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