Waiting for Godoma by George Held

Disenchanted Democrats have vowed to make President Barack Obama feel uncomfortable in the run-up to the mid-term elections in November. At a weekend conference of 47 progressives in New Paltz, NY, complaints about the President’s tendency to compromise on party values were rife.

Noble Gardener, spokesperson for the rump group, told the press, “We’re going to hold Obama’s feet to the fire till November. If he doesn’t embrace the need for change he promised us, our supporters will withhold our votes for Obama-backed candidates.”

Asked how such a small number of voters could effect change they can believe in, Ms. Gardener argued that their symbolic clout was greater than their numbers might suggest. “Every time we raise our voices, Fox News gives us lots of face time,” she said. “This causes conservatives to ramp up their election efforts against Obama’s candidates. So we’re counting on him to accommodate our views so that we’ll shut up and the conservatives will slack off.”

Critics on the left suggested that this strategy was “arrant nonsense,” in the words of Dan Klutz, an off-off Broadway labor organizer. “We’re taking a page from Sam Beckett and waiting quietly, if absurdly, for the President to find his radical mojo,” said Mr. Klutz. “Call it ‘waiting for Godama.’ The Vladimirs and Estragons of the Left must react to Mr. Obama’s quietude with Beckettian existential patience.”

Meantime, new polls show that the President will need every vote he can get to keep his party in power come November. Undaunted, Mr. Klutz said that Godama might show up in November. “After all,” he added, “he hasn’t showed up since 1953, so we might not be waiting much longer.”

Author bio:

George Held is chief correspondent for www.infauxtainment.com, a topical satire blog, and contributes often to The New Verse News (http://newversenews.blogspot.com/), a blog for progressive polical poems. His fourteenth collection of poetry, AFTER SHAKESPEARE: SELECTED SONNETS (Cervenabarva Press), will appear this fall.