It is no secret that Barak Obama, in presenting himself as the candidate of “change” while failing to give a single example of where he would break decisively with the policies of Bush/Cheney, is being the quintessential politician. (And no, things like failing to make Bush’s tax cuts permanent do not constitute decisive change. As for what to do about the occupation of Iraq, Obama bases his candidacy more on his having been against the invasion in the first place than on explaining how he will actually get us out.)
Like many others, I have been persuaded to support Obama by BooMan’s sensible argument that if Obama actually advocated progressive policies, the media would have quickly destroyed his candidacy, as it did Edwards’. In my opinion, two positions of Obama’s provide fairly convincing evidence, however, that Obama simply is not a progressive, and the reason that he does not express progressive ideas is simply that he does not believe in them, as opposed to keeping quiet for tactical political reasons.
Thus, what we have with Obama is Kerry in 2004 all over again. The difference between Obama and Kerry is that (1) Obama is younger; (2) he is more articulate and charismatic; (3) he has darker skin, subliminally suggesting to people that he must be more progressive than Kerry. (Sure, Obama was a community organizer, but then, Kerry famously spoke against the Vietnam war.) Another difference between 2004 and 2008 is that John McCain is a much weaker candidate than Bush was in 2004. But my concern here is not whether Obama has a good chance of beating McCain, but whether it is likely that Obama will institute the policies we want, as opposed to policies that would match more closely the “compassionate conservatism” which Bush promised in his 2000 campaign that he would give us.
The two signs of Obama’s true political colors I have in mind are his obsequious and fawning embrace of AIPAC after he had secured the nomination and his refusal to embrace universal health care.
The outstanding thing that distinguishes him from both Hillary Clinton and John McCain is his uncompromising opposition to the war in Iraq from the very first moment. That was courageous. That was unpopular. That was totally opposed to the Israel lobby, all of whose branches were fervidly pushing George Bush to start the war that freed Israel from a hostile regime.
And here comes Obama to crawl in the dust at the feet of AIPAC and go out of his way to justify a policy that completely negates his own ideas.
OK he promises to safeguard Israel’s security at any cost. That is usual. OK he threatens darkly against Iran, even though he promised to meet their leaders and settle all problems peacefully. OK he promised to bring back our three captured soldiers (believing, mistakenly, that all three are held by Hizbullah – an error that shows, by the way, how sketchy is his knowledge of our affairs.)
But his declaration about Jerusalem breaks all bounds. It is no exaggeration to call it scandalous.
NO PALESTINIAN, no Arab, no Muslim will make peace with Israel if the Haram-al-Sharif compound (also called the Temple Mount), one of the three holiest places of Islam and the most outstanding symbol of Palestinian nationalism, is not transferred to Palestinian sovereignty. That is one of the core issues of the conflict.
On that very issue, the Camp David conference of 2000 broke up, even though the then Prime Minister, Ehud Barak, was willing to divide Jerusalem in some manner.
Along comes Obama and retrieves from the junkyard the outworn slogan “Undivided Jerusalem, the Capital of Israel for all Eternity”. Since Camp David, all Israeli governments have understood that this mantra constitutes an insurmountable obstacle to any peace process. It has disappeared – quietly, almost secretly – from the arsenal of official slogans. Only the Israeli (and American-Jewish) Right sticks to it, and for the same reason: to smother at birth any chance for a peace that would necessitate the dismantling of the settlements.
In prior US presidential races, the pandering candidates thought that it was enough to promise that the US embassy would be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. After being elected, not one of the candidates ever did anything about this promise. All were persuaded by the State Department that it would harm basic American interests.
Obama went much further. (Uri Avnery)
The only reason I can see why Obama went further than either Bush or Clinton in expressing an utterly irrational support of the positions of the Israeli right is that he wanted to pre-commit himself to unconditional support of Israel, to dispel any fears by AIPAC that because of his more worldly background, he may be more thoughtful in his support of Israel than our recent presidents.
I didn’t think much about Obama, as opposed to Hillary Clinton, giving people the “choice” not to participate in his health care plan until I read John Cassidy’s recent piece in the New York Review of Books: Economics: Which Way for for Obama? Cassidy convincingly explicates Obama’s economic philosophy as “behavioralist”. This is both because the various economic policies Obama’s campaign have outlined follow the tenets of behavioralist economics, and because his “senior economic adviser, Austan Goolsbee, is a former colleague of his at Chicago”. While Goolsbee is not a Chicago school monetarist, he is not a Keynesian, either, and his views are very much in accord with those of the behavioralist school, which presents itself as a middle ground between monetarism and Keyneseanism, as Cassidy shows.
Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, in the book that Cassidy reviews, have described the political philosophy underlying and emerging from behavioralist economics as “libertarian paternalism”. To quote from their book:
Libertarian paternalism is a relatively weak, soft, and nonintrusive type of paternalism because choices are not blocked, fenced off, or significantly burdened. If people want to smoke cigarettes, to eat a lot of candy, to choose an unsuitable health care plan, or to fail to save for retirement, libertarian paternalists will not force them to do otherwise–or even make things hard for them. Still, the approach we recommend does count as paternalistic, because private and public choice architects are not merely trying to track or to implement people’s anticipated choices. Rather, they are self-consciously attempting to move people in directions that will make their lives better. They nudge.
A nudge, as we will use the term, is any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives. To count as a mere nudge, the intervention must be easy and cheap to avoid. Nudges are not mandates. Putting the fruit at eye level counts as a nudge. Banning junk food does not.
Many of the policies we recommend can and have been implemented by the private sector (with or without a nudge from the government)…. In areas involving health care and retirement plans, we think that employers can give employees some helpful nudges. Private companies that want to make money, and to do good, can even benefit from environmental nudges, helping to reduce air pollution (and the emission of greenhouse gases). But as we shall show, the same points that justify libertarian paternalism on the part of private institutions apply to government as well.
Discussing the Clean Air Acts, Thaler and Sunnstein write:
The air is much cleaner than it was in 1970…. Philosophically, however, such limitations look uncomfortably similar to Soviet-style five-year plans, in which bureaucrats in Washington announce that millions of people have to change their conduct in the next five years.
As far as one can tell from the public record, this matches very well the views of Barak Obama. As Joshua Frank points out today in CounterPunch:
Obama supports the death penalty, opposes single-payer health care, supports nuclear energy, opposes a carbon pollution tax, supports the Cuba embargo, and will not end the vast array of federal subsidies to corporations, including those to the oil and gas cartel.
And as the United States economy slides into a deep recession, Barack Obama is promising more of the same, despite his criticism of John McCain’s economic plan. But behind the curtains of Obama’s strategy team is the same set of economic troglodytes intellectuals that led us in to our current financial disaster.
Obama’s advisory team includes Harvard economist Jeffrey Liebman, a former Clinton adviser, who believes we ought to privatize social security. Then we have the renowned David Cutler, another Harvardite, who believes our economy can be boosted through an increase in privatized health care costs. Writing for New England Journal of Medicine in 2006, Cutler explained, “The rising cost … of health care has been the source of a lot of saber rattling in the media and the public square, without anyone seriously analyzing the benefits gained.”
And that’s just the tip of a very large iceberg.