Progressives split from left

By Kevin Brown

The Guardsman

A group of progressive democrats met at The Unitarian Universalist Church of San Francisco on Thursday, Sept. 22, to voice their frustrations about President Barack Obama and decide whether or not they should even support him in 2012.

The meeting was led by Karen Bernal, chair of the California Democratic Party’s Progressive caucus, who is fed up with President Obama’s corporate-friendly domestic policy.

“By supporting Obama the Democratic Party is right alongside the Republicans on a path straight to hell,” Bernal said, “but the Democrats are just skipping along and stopping once in a while to smell the flowers on the way. We need to turn around and head the opposite direction completely.”

She advocates a third candidate to run against Obama in the next election to send a clear message that the democrats are way off course.

“Obama has lagged on restoring our civil liberties that have been compromised since The Patriot Act. In fact America has grown even more repressed under the Obama administration than it was under Bush,” she added.

Bernal believes that instead of blindly following Obama just because he claims to be a democrat, a greater emphasis needs to be put on continuing the progressive movement as a whole.

“Even though Obama is dismantling The New Deal, privatizing Social Security, and further diminishing all the public benefits which the progressives worked so hard to get and that we now consider birth rights, the Democrats continue to demonstrate loyalty to a president instead of the virtues of the party.”

Bernal’s main frustration with the democrats is their obsession with “the eternal now,” and she said

“We can’t keep thinking election to election. Progressivism should be a movement, and progressives should not be so concerned with just getting a democrat elected.”

She suggests that a third more progressive candidate would shine light on the fact that Obama is not really a leftist, and also that it would force him to fight for the youth vote.

Obviously this radical disapproval of the incumbent democratic president has been met with scorn by fellow Democrats who still support Obama, and as of now the CA Progressive Caucus is suspended and no longer even recognized by the Democratic Party, which will hold a vote Oct. 22 to decide whether to terminate the suspension or to kick them out of the Democratic Party completely.