Truest statement of the week

Recall that when President Obama came into office, with a solid Democratic majority in both houses of congress, he came off a campaign in which he had vowed to restore open constitutional government, to make it easier for unions to organize, to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to kickstart the recession-mired economy with a burst of major deficit spending. He did none of that, and the Democratic Congress did none of it for him either. Obama and the Democrats paid for their lack of decisive progressive action by losing Congress two years later and it’s been downhill ever since.
Now they’ve lost the White House too.

Unless that party wakes up and realizes that it needs a wholesale makeover, in the form of a return to its New Deal roots, it will lose the Congressional elections in 2018, and it will lose the presidential race in 2020, along with even more state governorships and statehouses (currently 32 of the 50 states are wholly in Republican hands).

-- David Lindorff, "The Left Needs to Be a Movement, Not a Bunch of Lobbyists" (COUNTERPUNCH).