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.
Am I the only one on this blog who was extremely disappointed by Obama’s prostration before AIPAC? Is this the kind of “change” Obama is going to give us?
And this is not just about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Obama made it as clear as he could that he is going to sacrifice US national interests to the interests of Israel, as AIPAC perceives them. And AIPAC under no circumstances wants us out of Iraq.
From the Black Agenda Report, Freedom Rider: Obama Obliterates Iran :
Obviously, for anyone who gives a shit, this pandering by Obama goes beyond the requisite lurch to the right that so many recent democratic presidential candidates has made customary. He will apparently say whatever is necesarry, depending on who he’s talking to at any one time. He needs a fleet of buses now if he plans to throw the entire Palestinian population under the bus.
Pretty sickening and disheartening. Even for someone like me who has low expectations of him to begin with.
and yet, he is still under a nasty assault by Lieberman (and his soul mates) for being insufficiently pro-Israel.
So you’re saying that Obama should be praised for standing firm against right wing Israeli interests because Lieberman isn’t yet satisfied and wants more?
Lieberman is a unique animal. Mainly, I think because the power he percieves himself to have because of the current makeup of the balance in the Senate gives him room (so he believes) to bark louder. Any leverage he has is due mainly to the leadership having no backbone and being unwilling to take any risks whatsoever with theior majority. Lieberman should have been discredited, disgraced, and renounced by the leadership a long time ago. But like their performance in every other regard since being given a majority, they have failed. Miserably.
Obama made it perfectly clear that he can pander with the best of them. The more the man speaks, the less he actually says, so far as I’m concerned.
Nope, didn’t bother me in the slightest.
Trolls don’t count. Neither do sheep.
What is to be done?
You seem confused. Your complaint is that Obama is not a progressive.
Wow. How very perceptive of you. He never claimed to be a progressive.
Progressives are not generally electable. I’ll take a centrist democrat like Obama, and thank you to quit the whining until after the election. Then, whine away.
So, it’s a “centrist” position to embrace the fantasies of the Zionist right-wing? Give me a break.
Obama might never have claimed to be a progressive, but Booman suggested that Obama is a “stealth” progressive. My diary was suggesting that that reading of Booman’s of Obama is becoming less plausible.
And there is no reason for me to quit my “whining” as you call it, since criticizing Obama from the left on a progressive blog cannot possibly hurt him.
Obama appeared before AIPAC. Can you imagine what the headlines would be if he did not? Obviously, you have not thought that far ahead, and that does not surprise me.
He made a modest and entirely unsurprising promise, that he would continue to support Israel. Again, what is the problem here?
You are clearly a young person, wet behind the ears, if not in other places. Politics is Kabuki theatre. You need to say certain things. He said them, and no more. No problems, dude.
It doesn’t look like you read Uri Avnery’s post very carefully. (He’s a pretty old guy, btw.)
I take your saying I’m a young person as a compliment. I do listen to music that people 25 years younger than I listen to, so maybe it’s the same when it comes to politics.
I’ve got to hit the road now, so I won’t be able to continue our pleasant little chat.
It appears that for many on the left, there is no ability for anyone to do anything without a lot of feckless, mindless moaning without form, content, sense or reason.
Some people just like to bitch, and bitch they will.
I get a hell of a laugh outta you sometimes, …guy.
Thanks
Great post.
Another argument I’ve seen Booman and others make is that Obama’s style will be progressive. In other words, even though Obama may not be entirely progressive on policy he will encourage a different style of politics that is more hospitable to liberals–the better Democrats part of the more and better Democrats. We were told that Obama would not fall into the trap of undermining those on his left. The same trap that has bedeviled us liberals for what seems like forever. And I began to think that Obama was better at supporting his left flank than the other Democrats that preceded him.
But that has all changed now. He has lurched, rather abruptly, to the right, in his style as well as his policies. He has disowned his preacher and his church. He’s wearing the flag pin again and otherwise making every symbolic statement he can to appear patriotic. He’s appearing on Fox. He’s giving speeches about deadbeat dads. He’s backing Blue Dogs.
He’s basically starting to play the perennial favorite game of loser Democrats– appeasing the mushy-minded middle of the Washington, D.C. set, the Joe Liebermans and the David Brooks of the world.
It is indeed the same old play.