The angst on the left and in progressive circles over Obama’s perceived move to the center and center-right lingers. Many unanswered questions:
Who brung Obama?
What Change is Obama asking us to believe in?
Is Obama a liberal or a conservative who supports the status quo?
During the primaries Obama remained vague and is now amplifying and refining his positions on key issues – domestic and foreign – that are without clarity. I admit to phone-banking on his behalf because I wanted the Clintons gone.
To my dismay, soon after Obama clinched the nomination he quickly moved to load up on hires from the Clinton camp. Where’s the change? He has also made some stupid moves that enforce the charge he’s too naïve: appropriating the seal of the president of the U.S in his campaign logo, giving media access to his kids. Also, it is confirmed Obama’s acceptance speech in Denver will be given at the Invesco 75,000 seat stadium and he’s off to Europe where it’s planned he will give a speech in Germany at the Brandenburg Gate to 100,000. Bush is reported to have nixed the Brandenburg gate idea. I agree that Obama’s visit to Europe is not to campaign but to observe and listen.
Troubling too is the reality that Obama is leaving behind the core people who won him the primaries. Also, he’s alienating the African-American community at the street and leadership level – noted by the not so artful Rev. Jesse Jackson. Independents, another key base needed to win in November, are expressing doubts…seeing the Democratic Party candidate as gutless. Moderate conservatives see Obama as another Ronald Reagan!
There are three provocative essays that’s worthy of a read:
1. Delusions About Obama: Worse Than McCain? By Mike Whitney
2.Vilifying Black Men to Win Favor with the Man – Why Does Barack Obama Hate My Family? By Kevin Gray.
3.Contra Expectations: Obama isn’t Jimmy Carter–he’s Ronald Reagan By Eli Lake
Mike Whitney
Every four years, liberals and progressives are expected to set aside their beliefs and stand foursquare behind the Democratic Party candidate. This ritual is invariably performed in the name of party unity. It doesn’t matter if the candidate is a smooth-talking politician who’s willing to toss his pastor of 20 years overboard for a few awkward comments, or whether he refuses to defend basic civil liberties like the 4th amendment’s right to privacy. [.]
For nearly a year now, the public has been treated to regular doses of Mr. Obama’s grandiloquent oratory and his sweeping “Follow me to Shangri-la” promises. These flourishes are usually followed by “clarifications” on the central issues which identify Obama as a center-right conservative with no intention of disrupting the status quo. CounterPunch co-editor Alexander Cockburn summed it up like this in a recent article on this site:
“There have plenty of articles recently with headlines such “Obama’s Lunge to the Right”. I find these odd. Never for one moment has Obama ever struck me as someone anchored, or even loosely moored to the left, or even displaying the slightest appetite for radical notions, aside from a few taglines tossed from the campaign bus.”
Obama-boosters on the left simply ignore the facts because the thought of the unstable John McCain in the Oval Office with his stubby fingers just inches from the Big Red Switch is too much to bear. So, they throw their support behind Obama and hope for the best. But Obama has done nothing to earn their vote and there’s nothing to indicate that he has any interest in restoring the republic or putting and end to US adventurism.
Some Obamaniacs admit to feeling troubled from time to time. They worry that behind the rhetorical fanfare, Barack is just an empty gourd; a well-spoken pitch man with no moral core. Could he be another Slick Willie, they wonder; another self-promoting politico as eager to sell out his working class supporters as chase a frisky intern around the Lincoln bedroom? No one knows, because no one has figured out exactly why Obama is running. Does he really want to lift the country from the muck of 8 years of Bush misrule or does he just want to gad about on Airforce 1 and make pretty speeches in the Rose Garden? What really drives Obama? It’s a mystery.
But don’t be fooled, Obama could turn out to be worse than McCain, much worse. No one doubts that he is brighter and more charismatic than the irritating senator from Arizona. And no one underestimates his Pied Piper ability to galvanize crowds and stir up national pride. But what good is that? Obama works for the same group of venal plutocrats as Bush; a fact that was made painfully clear just last week when he voted to approve the new FISA bill that allows the president to continue spying on American citizens with impunity. Obama is a constitutional scholar; he understood what he was voting for..
[.]
No one has followed Obama’s rightward drift with greater interest and bemusement than the editors of the Wall Street Journal. They have faithfully chronicled all the vacillating, obfuscating and backpedaling and they’ve made up their minds; Obama is marching straight towards the welcoming arms of the Republican Party. That’s right; he’s gradually embracing the conservative platform and abandoning any pretense of liberalism. Two weeks ago the WSJ ran an editorial that summarized Obama’s metamorphosis in an article titled “Bush’s Third Term”:
“We’re beginning to understand why Barack Obama keeps protesting so vigorously against the prospect of ‘George Bush’s third term.’ Maybe he’s worried that someone will notice that he’s the candidate who’s running for it.
Most Presidential candidates adapt their message after they win their party nomination, but Mr. Obama isn’t merely ‘running to the center.’ He’s fleeing from many of his primary positions so markedly and so rapidly that he’s embracing a sizable chunk of President Bush’s policy. Who would have thought that a Democrat would rehabilitate the much-maligned Bush agenda?”
[.]
::: :::
(emphasis added)
Conventional wisdom holds the Democratic Party cannot win the White House without the African-American voters. They were late to the Obama bandwagon. It appears A-A are having second thoughts.
Kevin Gray’s essay “Why Barack Obama hates my family?” reflects Rev. Jesse Jackson musings….Obama’s vilifying blacks.
Kevin Alexander Gray is a civil rights organizer in South Carolina and author of Waiting for Lightning to Strike! The Fundamentals of Black Politics
Kevin Gray
Whenever I suggest to Obama insiders that he’s a lot like Bill Clinton, they go apoplectic. Yet, as race-baiting and race politics goes, Obama has proven himself to be as good, if not better than Clinton, long considered the modern master of race politics. If you believe, as I do, that he “played black men to court white voters,” then all Obama’s protestations about Bill Clinton’s race-baiting were just a ruse. And, in that light he is no better than Clinton when it comes to using race fears. He may even be worse than Clinton because he plays it both ways – assaulted and assailant. I’ll be willing to bet that if Clinton were honest in revealing how he really felt about Obama, that would be at the heart of his grievance.
No doubt, people are excited about the prospect of a young, vibrant, black person as president. They see their choice as between John McCain and Obama, and conclude that Obama is “the only option,” or say “He will never be as bad as Bush. He will never be bad as Reagan.” Or they say their man Obama “has a chance to win. We need to give him some latitude.” “We need to let the man do what he needs to do to win.” “We should trust him.” “Barack is one of us, no matter what he sounds like right now.”
As critical as I am, I actually want to believe he’s “one of us.” But I don’t see it.
That isn’t necessarily a bad thing for Obama. If people like me don’t see Obama as “one of us,” that strengthens the belief of the powerful that he is “one of them.”
For sure, Obama has most black voters in the bag. I’m pretty sure that my vote falls in the “doesn’t matter so much” column. And from listening to Obama, a whole lot of my family members’ lives don’t matter much either.
I’m not really looking for change from Obama should he win. I’m looking for the fight to come.
On Iraq, Obama is seen as walking away from his pledge to pull the troops. Eli Lake’s essay, Contra Expectations: Obama isn’t Jimmy Carter–he’s Ronald Reagan, examines the likely foreign policy direction of an Obama administration.
Eli Lake
During the primaries, Obama talked about the war on terrorism with the fastidiousness of a civil libertarian–emphasizing the constraints that he would impose on our military and CIA and rarely mentioning specific methods for prosecuting it. He has, for instance, talked extensively about closing the Guantánamo Bay prison and ending the policy of extraordinary rendition.[.]
Last November at a foreign policy forum in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Obama said there may be “40,000 hard-core jihadists with whom we can’t negotiate.” He went on. “Our job is to incapacitate them, to kill them.” In that spirit, he famously announced that he would strike terrorist bases in Pakistan if President Pervez Musharraf ever refuses to move on actionable intelligence against Al Qaeda–a threat that earned him the chastisement of John McCain, among others.
Susan Rice is tipped to be a senior figure in an Obama administration. Earlier this month, I sent her a handful of questions about counterterrorism policy. Her answers were filled with all the hedges and qualifications that you would expect in the middle of a campaign. She told me that Obama would eschew a “one size fits all approach” to fighting terrorism. “In some cases that may mean strong support for proxies (as in Anbar). In other places it may mean direct U.S. action. In others, it may mean relying more on an allied government or the international community.”
But there were several answers she provided that I found highly revealing. She described Obama’s opinion of America’s historic involvement with insurgency and counterinsurgency. She applauded the 1980s arming of the mujahedin resistance to the Soviets: “[S]upport for the Afghan resistance to Soviet aggression was the right decision in the 1980s.” And she said that the Anbar Awakening was “responsible for much of the security progress we have seen in Iraq,” though she insisted that Sunni militias must eventually be incorporated into state security forces. In light of some of the criticisms that have been lobbed in Obama’s direction, those are pretty suggestive allusions.
Of course, the Obama counter-terrorism policy is still a work in progress. As his recent zigzags illustrate, he still hasn’t figured out his stance on some of the larger questions. But, in discussing his plans for Iraq, he has made one key admission: He will listen carefully to the advice of his generals. You can easily see how this will play out. Obama will enter office with a set of somewhat inchoate instincts about American power and the importance of outsourcing force. These instincts will mesh with the evolving thinking of his top commanders, who have also begun to realize the limitations of an overstretched army and the value of counter-insurgency.
[.]
At least Reagan stood firm on his beliefs. Obama avoids being defined. Maybe that’s a strategy to prevail over the GOP.
There’s a need to know –
What is it we’re being asked to believe in?
Waffling and triangulation is not leadership.
If Obama is more Reagan than Carter, he had better give another speech –“I’m asking you to believe in …and my principles on key issues facing America are..and on which you can hold me accountable”
As the GOP struggles to define Obama, soon they’ll hit on the label: “Obama stands for nothing, yet he asks you to believe.”
That’s sure to resonate not just with the low info voters.
