Today's Stories

May 11, 2009

Andrea Peacock
No Justice for Libby

May 8-10, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Dead Souls

Jeffrey St. Clair
Echoes of Amchitka: 40 Years After America's Biggest Nuclear Blast, the Damage Continues

Paul Wolf
Obama's Axis of Obedience

Steve Niva
Iraq: The Return of the Suicide Bombers

Neve Gordon
Jailed for Caring

Mike Whitney
Has Bernanke Pulled the Economy Back From the Brink?

Warren Hinckle
DiFi vs. Marilyn Chambers

Serge Halimi
In Praise of Revolutions

Gareth Porter
The Pakistan Conundrum

Sharon Smith
Something Stinks at Whole Foods

Andy Worthington
Obama's New Gitmo Policy: Back to the Bush Era?

Mark Weisbrot
Hillary and Latin America

Rosa Miriam Elizalde Cyber Command and Cyber Dissident: More of the Same?

David Macaray
Recessions and Labor Unions

Missy Beattie
The Real Housewives of War

Ron Jacobs
Mothers and War

Diane Farsetta
About Face on Pentagon Pundits?

Ramzy Baroud
War Without Context

Phelie Maguire
Living Next to Settlers

Robert Fantina
Party of Rush

Kevin Zeese
A Break From the Past in the Drug War?

Margaret Flowers, MD
The Baucus 8: Why We Risked Arrest for Single-Payer

Dave Lindorff
The Joke's on Us

Richard Rhames
Revenge of the Tundra

Ben Sonnenberg
Let the Right One In: A Vampire Visits a Welfare State

Kim Nicolini
Sin Nombre: Giving Faces to People Who Don't Have Names

Stephen Martin
The Riotous Action of the Complete Banker

Charles R. Larson
The Commencement Address You'll Never Hear

David Yearsley
Jean Ferrard, Organist Extraordinary

Lorenzo Wolff
Death Cab for Cutie: Surprisingly Familiar

Poets' Basement
G.S. Heiligschreib and David Farrelly

Website of the Weekend
Zombie Bank

May 7, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Criminalizing Criticism of Israel

Chris Floyd
A Full-Court Press for Pakistan War

Andy Worthington
Mixed Messages on Torture

Alan Farago
No Place Like Home: a Stress Test for Land Use, Not Just Banks

Ray McGovern
Deux ex Machina on Torture?

Dave Lindorff
Stain Removal: Impeaching the Torture Judge

Eric Toussaint /
Damien Millet
Why is There Rampant Famine in the 21st Century?

Ana M. Malinow, MD
Why We Need a Single-Payer Health Care System

Jeff Armstrong
Freeing Leonard Peltier: What Would Warren Harding Do?

Norman Solomon
A Green New Deal

Website of the Day
The End of Lake Mead?

May 6, 2009

Doug Peacock
The Fate of the Yellowstone Grizzly

Patrick Cockburn
Afghans to Obama: Get Out, Take Karzai With You

Richard Neville
The Torturer's Apprentice

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
To Power a Nation: Nuclear Bombs or Sunshine?

Winslow T. Wheeler
Of Pork and Baloney: Obama's Defense Budget

Deepak Tripathi
Pakistan in Crisis

Stephen Soldz
A "Natural Reaction": APA Ethics Policy-Maker Endorses Torture

Reuven Kaminer
Nice is Not Enough: Obama vs. Netanyahu and Lieberman

David Macaray
The Chrysler-UAW Deal

Kevin Zeese
Why We Were Arrested at the Senate Finance Committee Hearings

Marjorie Cohn
Stanford Antiwar Alums Call for War Crimes Investigation of Condoleezza Rice

Coalition for an Ethical Psychology
Investigate Psychologist and Health Provider Complicity in Torture

Website of the Day
Who's Behind the Financial Meltdown?

May 5, 2009

William Blum
Torture and Mr. Obama

Uri Avnery
Netanyahu's Plan

Steven Higgs
Autism and Toxic Pollution

Dean Baker
Why Economists Should Learn Arithmetic

Daniel Wolff
The Education of Rachel Carson

Sibel Edmonds
The Broken Congress

Carole King Klein
A New Chance to Save the Northern Rockies

Fidel Castro
Giving One's All

Belén Fernández
Oil and Aguardiente in the Ecuadoran Elections

Dan Bacher
Schwarzenegger's Big Lie About Fish vs. Jobs

Website of the Day
"I Married Isis on the Fifth Day of May"

May 4, 2009

James G. Abourezk
The AIPAC Spy Case

Jeff Leys
Obama's War Budget

Patrick Cockburn
Afghan Ayatollahs Press Marital Rape Law

Andy Worthington
A Start on Guantánamo, But Not Enough

Jaime Avilés
Mexico's Plague-Bringers

David Swanson
An Even Worse Bybee Memo

Paul Craig Roberts
Working with Jack Kemp

P. Sainath
Celeb Crusades and the Death of Politics

Eugenia Tsao
Canada's Obama and the Cult of the Prof

Benjamin Dangl
Protest and Rubber Bullets in Paraquay

Sami Al-Arian
Mourning William Moffitt

Website of the Day
"Soldiers Are Cutting Us Down": Kent State, May 4, 1970

May 1 - 3, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Game-Changers: Specter Jumps, Souter Quits

Gary Leupp
Dropping the AIPAC Spying Case

Peter Linebaugh
The Key to the Bastille

Jeffrey St. Clair /
Joshua Frank:
Half Life of a Toxic War: Iraq's Wrecked Environment

C. G. Estabrook
Minion of the Long War

Patrick Cockburn
Kabul's New Elite

Mike Whitney
Economy on the Ropes

Pierre Sprey /
Winslow Wheeler
What "Sweeping Overhaul" of the Pentagon?

Andy Worthington
Al-Marri's Plea Deal: Dictatorial Powers Unchallenged

Mairead Maguire
Stand Up to Israeli Apartheid: a Letter to Obama From a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

Nadia Hijab
The Israel Boycott is Biting

Diane Farsetta
Life, Death and Water Policy

Michael Calderón-Zaks
The Déjà Vu Flu: Why Much of the Discussion About Swine Flu is Racist

Richard Rhames
When Piggies Come Home to Roost: Swine Flu and the Industrial Meat Gulags

Russell Mokhiber
Inside the Beltway Baucus

Ramzy Baroud
Clinton's Unpromising Start

Rannie Amiri
Understanding Lebanon's June Elections

Deb Reich
No Talking, Dammit!

Steven Higgs
Indiana Criminalizes Dissent: Roadblocks on the NAFTA Highway

Brian Cloughley
Malice in Blunderland

David Michael Green
The Party's Over

Farzana Versey
Sex, Swat and Susan Boyle

Jim Goodman
Think Before You Eat: Agriculture and the Environment

Carl Finamore
New Prescription for a Healthy Union Movement

Christopher Brauchli
The Sounds of Silence: the Texas Option

Susie Day
The Real Cause of Unemployment: Employees!

David Yearsley
Nuts Over Beethoven

Lorenzo Wolff
Three Minutes of Perfection

Peter Stone Brown
Dancing with Dylan

Poets' Basement Dominguez, Orloski and Springate

Website of the Weekend
May Day Europe

April 30, 2009

Ellen Cantarow
Obama and "Two States": Seamless Continuity From Bush Time

Dana L. Cloud
The McCarthyism That Horowitz Built

Paul W. Lovinger /
Jeannette Hassberg
A Nation of Laws

Binoy Kampmark
Swine at the Trough: the Business of Pandemics

Brian Downing
The Perils of Modernization in Afghanistan

Frank Snepp
Tortured by the Past

David Swanson
The Wrong Torture Question

Conn Hallinan
The Coming Asian Storm

Ron Jacobs
Not Dead Yet: an Interview with Jerry Gordon on the State of the Antiwar Movement

John Goekler
The Only Path to a Middle East Picnic?

Jasmine L. Tyler /
Anthony Papa
An End to Crack/Powder Cocaine Sentencing Disparity?

Website of the Day
Emergency Petition: Stop Coal Industry Intimidation of Activists

April 29, 2009

Joann Wypijewski
Death at Work in America

Patrick Cockburn
The Taliban's Roads to Kabul

Andy Worthington
Cheney's Twisted World

Chris Floyd
The Specter Diversion

Dave Lindorff
No More Excuses: a Specter is Haunting the Democrats

Jeremy Scahill
The Nuremberg Truth and Reconciliation Commission?

Doug Henwood
Zionist Lobby Targets Another Tenured Professor: an Interview with William Robinson

Michael Hudson
Will Iceland be Handed Over to a New Gang of Kleptocrats?

Russell Mokhiber
My Ron Pollack Problem--And Yours

Eric Toussaint
Ecuador at the Crossroads

Website of the Day
An Interview with Leslie and Andrew Cockburn on "American Casino"

April 28, 2009

Uri Avnery
A Little Red Light: On Israeli Fascism

Jeremy Scahill
Obama's Iraq: the Picture of Dorian Gray

Dean Baker
The Perfect Gift for Wall Street: a Financial Transactions Tax

Michael D. Yates
At the Factory Gate

Conn Hallinan
Georgian Plots? Saakavili's "Order No. 2"

John Stauber
Beyond MoveOn

Tom Barry
The Failed Border Security Initiative

Harvey Wasserman
Who Pays for America's Chernobyl Roulette?

Jeff Nygaard
Pirates, Profits and Propaganda

Frederico Fuentes
Why the U.S. Still Hates Cuba

Website of the Day
The Man Behind the Hood

April 27, 2009

Pam Martens
The Far Right's Plot to Capture New Hampshire

Patrick Cockburn
Torture? It Probably Killed More Americans Than 9/11

Andrew J. Bacevich Guardian of the Status Quo: Obama's Sins of Omission

Mitu Sengupta
The Bloodbath in Sri Lanka

Franklin Lamb
Hillary Does Beirut: The 165-Minute Swoop-In

Firmin DeBrabander
Crimes of Economic Madness

Dave Lindorff
Wide Open to Pandemic?

Russell Mokhiber
How Corrupt is That?

Mike Whitney
Pinter's Message to Obama

Mark Weisbrot
Overhauling the IMF

Rev. José M. Tirado
Iceland's New Dawn: How the Right Got Trounced

Website of the Day
American Casino

April 24-26, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Putting the Bush Years on Trial

Marjorie Cohn
Torture Used to Try to Link Saddam with 9/11

Andy Worthington
Who Ordered the Torture of Abu Zubaydah?

Jeremy Scahill
Are Leading Democrats Afraid of a Special Prosecutor to Investigate Torture?

Chris Floyd
Top of the Heap: the Democrats' Teachable Moment on Torture

Mike Whitney
A Housing Crash Update

Anthony DiMaggio
Obama and the Housing Crisis

Chris Kromm
Democratic Lobbyists Key to Fight Against Employee Free Choice Act

Saul Landau
Seventeen Months in "the Hole:" an Interview with the Leader of the Cuban Five

Dave Lindorff
Free John Walker Lindh

Greg Moses
The Debt Looters

Joshua Frank
Calling for a Coal Moratorium: an Interview with Ted Nace

Fred Gardner
Collective Farming and the Lynch Case

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
Homework, Testing and Stealth Apartheid in Education

David Michael Green
Of Tea Parties and Teleprompters

Ramzy Baroud
Middle East Spies: a New Front in Gaza's Conflict

Rannie Amiri
Mubarak's Expanding Enemies List

Laura Carlsen
Mr. President, Calderon is Not Mexico

Richard Morse
The Haitian People Need a Lobbyist

Nikolas Kozloff
Protecting the Bald Eagle: a Task Now Falling to ... Hugo Chavez?

Kent Peterson
The Fight to Save Mexico's Mangroves

Robert Bryce
The Ethanol Scammers Rent a General

Niranjan Ramakrishnan The Financial Experts

Ron Jacobs
Torture is More Than Just "Harsh Tactics"

Richard Rhames
Roman Legends, Book Burning and History's Hunt

Stephen Martin
Wherefore Art Thou American Dream?

David Yearsley
Rodgers, Hammerstein, Michener and Nostalgia's Clammy Embrace

Poets' Basement
Khalil and Mankh

Website of the Weekend
Doug and Andrea Peacock on Grizzlies and Edward Abbey

April 23, 2009

Eamonn Fingleton
How the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times Buried the Madoff Scandal for at Least Four Years

Ray McGovern
Obama Plays Hamlet on Torture

Michael Ratner
The Torture Commission Trap

Alan Farago
The Quicksand Economy

Rob Larson
Business Gets Carded

Nadia Hijab
The Real Heroes of Durban

Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Deconstructing the Taliban

Dave Lindorff
Are Members of Congress Being Blackmailed?

Helen Redmond
Selling Out Single-Payer: the "Public Option" Con

Adam Federman
The Battle Over New York's Marcellus Shale

Website of the Day
An Interactive Map of Vanishing Employment Across the Country

April 22, 2009

Chris Floyd
The Fatal Thread: Torture, War and the Imperial Project

Joanne Mariner
Torture Evidence and Terror Blacklists

Vijay Prashad
Obama's Afghan Plan: Fracturing the Antiwar Movement

Gareth Porter
U.S. Lacks Capacity to Win Over Afghans

Dean Baker
The Tyranny of Bad Economics

Peter Morici
Housing Sales and Fixing the Economy

Winslow T. Wheeler
Eliminating Bad Pentagon Habits

Barucha Calamity Peller
The Battle to Take Back the New School

Harvey Wasserman
Chernobyl Could Happen Here

Aisha Brown /
Dedrick Muhammad
White Privilege in the Americas

Teo Ballvé
Obama's Feel Good Meeting with Colombia's Uribe

Website of the Day
Ahmedinejad's Durban Speech: What He Actually Said

April 21, 2009

Randy Rowland
Lindy Blake's Great Escape

Dave Lindorff
Jay Bybee's Conspiracy to Torture

Fidel Castro
The Secret Summit

George McGovern
Pull Out of Iraq This Year

Greg Moses
The Unemployment Channel

Benjamin Dangl
Argentina Remembers

Sonia Nettnin
Saving Lives in Gaza

Frank Barat
The Death of Bassem: a Shooting at the Wall in Bil'n

Binoy Kampmark
Legal Purgatory and John Demjanjuk

John V. Walsh
Code Red for Single Payer

David Macaray
SAG Should be Praised, Not Assailed

Website of the Day
Bonus Man: For Executive Assholes Everywhere

April 20, 2009

Mike Whitney
Housing Bust Comes Roaring Back, Worse Than Ever

Andrea Peacock
Histrionics and Legalisms in Missoula

Henry A. Giroux
Ten Years After Columbine: the Tragedy of Youth Deepens

Liaquat Ali Khan
Drone Attacks on Pakistan's Indigenous Tribes

Fred Gardner
Obama's DoJ Backs Prosecution of Medical Marijuana Providers

Stephen Soldz
Obama, Blair, Panetta and the Torture Memos: Praising Moral Cowards, Ignoring Real Heroes

Nadia Hijab
Obama's Multi-Polar Middle East

Dave Lindorff
The Meeting in Trinidad

P. Sainath
India's Press Nixes "R" Word

Nelson P Valdés
A Modest (Transition) Proposal to Obama

Mark Engler
American Empire Foreclosed?

Belén Fernández
The FARC Can't Dance

Website of the Day
Dear Mr. Buffett...

May 11, 2009

An Instinct for the Capillary

Get Obama

By DAVID MICHAEL GREEN

Hey, did you notice that Barack Obama completed his first hundred days in the White House last week?

Maybe you didn’t realize that.  And who could blame you?  With the near complete absence of media coverage, I’m sure most Americans didn’t realize that the magic date came and went.

But it did, and I thought I’d do something really unique and different out there in the media, and comment on it.

It’s worth doing, anyhow, because I think about enough time has gone by to allow us to begin to see the tendencies of this new White House.

And, because it’s probably not really what it looks like to a lot of people.

I use the terms “tendencies” and “probably” carefully, and not because I’m hedging my bets, ducking and weaving, but because, among other contingencies, so much of a presidency is determined by developments outside of the White House.  Therefore, a hundred days in, it would be an exercise in foolishness to attempt a full characterization of this presidency.  That said, however, I do think we have begun to get a sense of its nature, and of the reactive proclivities it will apply to any external developments heading in its direction.

Before describing those, it’s worthwhile to take a moment to consider why Obama is largely misunderstood.  There are three good reasons for this.

The first of these is that the new administration is truly multifarious in its endeavors, trotting around the world from Europe, to the Middle East, to Latin America, and messing about in domestic policy area after domestic policy domain here at home, ranging from environment to economy to civil liberties to healthcare.

The administration truly has its fingers in a plethora of pies.  No question about that.  But, of course, sticking your finger in a hundred pies is a wholly different proposition from baking them, or even one of them.  And the extended metaphor, I would argue, absolutely and unfortunately applies to the Obama administration.  I see a president acting across a panoply of policy domains, but acting boldly in none of them.

The second reason why one might misapprehend the Obama administration is because the foaming right, true to form, has gone so far out of its way seeking to make that happen.  Of course, their hysterical fulminations about the president’s disastrous transgressions – you know, like shaking hands with Hugo Chavez, or bowing to the Saudi King – have now been denounced by even perennially foolish middle America, who recognize a good bitch-slapping when they feel one, even if it took eight years for the signal from the one they got from the nice folks now skewering Obama to travel from cheek to cortex.

But those are only the smarter ones, and the less existentially terrified.  Beyond that scary horizon there still remains a no-man’s land where resides about a third of this country, and who believe that any cognitive activity above the level of the reptile brain is somehow suspicious and likely part of some kind of communist plot.  Who believe that George W. Bush was a real fine but misunderstood president.  And who believe that the Republican Party really does have their interests at heart.  These are the folks whom Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck get paid millions to further stupefy (which I always thought was kind of a dumb waste of money, since you could easily do it for a lot less cash).

Anyhow, in just the few short weeks that Obama’s been president I’ve seen these professional hucksters literally label him “socialist”, “communist” and “fascist”.  They probably realize all too well the impossibility of these labels applying to the same person simultaneously, but they also know that for people stupid enough to imbibe the elixir they’re peddling, it isn’t noticed and wouldn’t matter if it was.  When did contradictions ever get in the way of politico-theist dogma, anyhow?

Thus a second reason that one might think Barack Obama is reshaping America in some incredibly profound way is that fifteen minutes of listening to right-wing radio or television will overwhelm you with that very proposition.  On the right side of your radio dial, ladies and gentlemen, the guy is little short of the Anti-Christ, come to decimate Western Civilization.  Never mind, of course, that Jesus George left his successor very little remaining to wreck.  Why should that matter?

But the third and biggest explanation for the misapprehension of Obama is as simple as that very contrast between the president and his predecessor.

Draw a long arrow across a piece of paper.  Let’s call this, as Obama himself is fond of doing, “the arc of history”.  Not to be too grandiose or determinative about it, it’s fair to say that there are certain historical tendencies, pressures and imperatives which compel societies and even species to move in certain directions.  This is our arc of history.  Now take the last ten percent of the arrow’s length, and bend it back upon itself, pointing in the opposite direction.  This is the era of the Bush administration, which sought every imaginable opportunity to reverse history.  When it came to gay rights, it was a reversal of ten years.  When it came to civil rights and women’s rights, it was a reversal of three or four decades.  When it came to principles of good governance, it was a reversal of a century.  When it came to democracy, science and separation of church and state, it was a reversal of over two centuries.  And when it came to fundamental civil liberties, the Bush people turned the clock back nearly a millennium, to the era before Magna Carta.

And, thus, the third reason that Obama falsely appears to be some sort of great change agent is that he walks on stage a fraction of an inch beyond where history’s arrow pointed of its own accord, but the country he inherits was dropped off decades behind that point.  The gap between the retro-America George W.  Bush bequeathed his successor and the baby steps Obama has taken in the direction of historical development is indeed substantial.  However, it’s important not to misinterpret its meaning.  That gap has everything to do with the giant leaps Bush took backwards while history was chugging along forward, and little to do with the tiny tentative inchings of the Obama administration.  On issue after issue – from civil rights to relations with Cuba to global warming – the world and even American public opinion was progressing in a positive forward direction, while Bush and Cheney led public policy screaming the other way.

To get a sense of the true explanation for the apparent leaps in forward motion Obama seems to represent, imagine if he had come into office on the heels of, not eight years of regressive insanity, but instead eight years of Milquetoast moderation of the sort that Bill Clinton perfected to such a high degree.  You know.  The kinda thing where you inch a little forward on social issues, jump a lot backward on economic issues, throw around some cheap-but-plausible-sounding-to-the-narcoleptic ringing phrases that have zero content, go to the mat for important stuff like the V-Chip and school uniforms, and basically stand for nothing whatsoever but your own personal joy ride in the White House.  That stuff.  Imagine how small would Obama’s forward motion seem if he came from a starting point that took the Bush years of regression out of the equation.

If that Clinton style sounds harrowingly familiar, it’s because it is.  My sense is that Obama is a lot like a Clinton, though he can be – and is – mistaken for an FDR for the reasons given above.  There is in fact a difference between Barack and Bill, I’m pretty sure, but not necessarily such a significant one.  Where I think Clinton was in it exclusively for Clinton, as only a quintessential Baby Boomer could fully be, and thus given to precise calculations of exquisitely refined political safety at every turn, I think Obama is more public-spirited.  But, crucially, the nothing-burger tendencies he shares with Clinton seem nevertheless fully present.  I suspect they are driven by his “can’t we all just get along” personality, as opposed to Bill’s manic attention-craving disorder, but so what?  They still amount to a lot of nothing, delivered way too late.

Whatever the motivation, what I think is hard to deny is that, while Obama appears to be a real go-getter, he is in fact a mere incrementalist in a time of real crisis.  Despite the fact that George W. Bush’s disastrous and regressive presidency can make Obama look bold and progressive in contrast, he is in fact hurling Band-Aid after Band-Aid at national hemorrhage after gaping wound.  And that’s just his best stuff.  As soon as you get to what really matters to the predatory regressive right – the money, of course – Obama is almost indistinguishable from George “Enron” Bush, or Dick “This is our due” Cheney.

Discussing Obama’s three choices so far of sitting judges for appeals court nominations, law professor Tracey George might just as well have been commenting on his entire presidency in saying, “He could not have been more cautious”.

I’d have a problem with that under normal circumstances.  There is always plenty of work to be done in this very imperfect world, and the last thing we need is another Clinton who wasted eight years of a presidency avoiding risk at all costs and accomplishing nothing.  I’d also obviously have a problem with that under ‘normal’ post-Bush circumstances, where so much wreckage so desperately needs to be undone.  But I really object to this embarrassingly centrist, ultra-cautious pussyfooting when there are so many critical conditions in crisis mode, screaming out for attention.

I cannot believe I live in a world massively threatened by environmental catastrophe, and my government is barely even talking about half-measures, let alone moving heaven and earth with fierce urgency to save the planet.  And the oil guys aren’t even in the White House anymore.

I cannot believe I live in a world where the economy is imploding and the guy in charge of the country where the recession is rooted has hired agents of the very criminal crowd responsible for the problem to produce a solution, and that, shockingly, the ‘solution’ once again benefits wealthy elites while doing little for the rest of us.

I cannot believe that I live in a country with a crumbling healthcare system, and the solution being offered by the “change” candidate-now-president – to the extent we will see one at all – will forego the obvious model of universal coverage adopted by all other developed countries in the world, and will instead slap Scotch Tape on the train wreck of the existing for-profit healthcare disaster, in an attempt to hold it together a little longer.

I cannot believe that I live in a world where the Taliban is within spitting distance of capturing nuclear-armed Pakistan, and my government can’t even get serious enough about peace in the Middle East to show some real security guarantee carrots and foreign aid sticks to its client state in the region, forcing it to end an illegal and deeply antagonizing annexation masquerading as a forty year occupation.

I cannot believe I live in a country where individuals who knowingly broke the law and ruined the national reputation by torturing are exposed by the president, only for him to then turn around and deploy magical powers which supposedly allow him to exonerate them in advance.

This is Obama’s America?  This is Obama’s America.

Historians and pundits have long debated whether history makes the leader, or the leader makes history.  Bill Clinton obviously believed the former.  As if to prove what we already knew – that he was possibly the most narcissistic human on the planet – he lamented shortly after his presidency ended that he hadn’t been ‘lucky’ enough to have a major crisis on his watch, so that he could go down in the books as one of the greats, like Lincoln or Roosevelt.  Amazing.  Only someone so completely absorbed with himself could be so astonishingly lacking in concern for the mass victims of such a legacy-enhancing catastrophe as Clinton craved for his own benefit.

Meanwhile, he never seemed to understand that he had the capacity to lead, to legislate, to act, and to make history, himself, and that playing it safe and selling out the American public in the welfare bill or the Defense of Marriage Act or NAFTA or WTO treaties was not the way to do that.  Clinton got himself elected, then re-elected, but he never actually did anything with his presidency, because he viewed the two objectives as mutually-exclusive.  Maybe he was right, albeit once he won his second term he certainly had nothing left to lose (and he sure never cared about the fate of his party).  Regardless, if that’s your approach, you sure don’t get to bitch about being ripped off by history because the 300 million people of your country were relatively safe and prosperous during your watch.  Great leaders take great risks for great purposes.  Small presidents watch out for themselves and work tirelessly to fulfill their own personal aspirations.

For a year now I’ve wondered what Obama would turn out to be – a Bill Clinton or an FDR.  I think we have a pretty good answer at this point.  Indeed, ironically, Obama now seems to be out-Clintoning Clinton.  He not only has the very national crisis that Wild Bill craved, he’s got about six of them.  But always the response seems to be incredibly tepid and conventional and, well, conservative – as the above examples show.

Even when it’s a slam-dunk policy choice, he is still the Cautious Kid to a fault.  This week he made a big announcement about how he will be shutting down the rip-offs of the American treasury (and therefore of the American taxpayers, who have to make-up the difference) by closing loopholes that allow US corporate pirates to off-shore their profits and thus protect them from taxation.  Pretty safe bet, right?  I mean, who besides kleptocrats and conservatives (and what’s the difference, after all?) could oppose that?  And yet it turns out that, on closer inspection, Obama left out of the plan a technique known as ‘transfer pricing’, the tax-avoidance tactic that actually accounts for most of the scamming.

This is classic Barackoism:  Let’s move real slow.  Let’s not offend anyone.  Let’s find the most half-way possible measure, and then cut it in half again, just to be sure.  Maybe we can bring the Republicans along, even though we don’t need to.  Is Wall Street okay with this?

Even in crisis, he’s all incremental, all the time.

It is true, of course, that a bold leader risks getting in serious trouble if he or she gets too far out ahead of the public.  I don’t think that’s such a great problem here, as the public is really in the mood for – what did he call it, during the campaign? – oh yeah, “change”.

More importantly, even when that is not the case, presidents have a remedy for this conundrum.  It’s called selling your policy.  Sometimes you have to create the demand for the product you’re offering.  Sometimes you have to educate people about problems and threats they’re not seeing, before you can get them to subscribe to your solution.

Obama has all the conditions necessary to be a bold and historic president.  He came to office at a time of great and multiple crises.  He promised change and the people gave him a mandate for precisely that purpose.  The opposition is in complete disarray, and is rightly blamed by the public for the mess Obama has inherited.  People are frightened and hurting, and looking for relief.  And, for the first time in a long time, they’re overtly looking to government for that relief.

To be honest, he really doesn’t have to market bold changes on the environment or healthcare or foreign policy in order to win the support of the public, but he could surely increase that support significantly if he did.  Ironically, it seems to me that this president, who has the most effective potential bully pulpit skills in a generation if not a century, has been largely AWOL from the stage.  He is much more popular with the public than his policies are, and that’s because he really doesn’t advocate for his policies much.

The biggest irony, however, is that the fate of his presidency is tied to the fate of those policies.  If half-measures produce half-solutiuons or non-solutions, it’s Barack Obama himself who will be punished by voters.  I mean, how hard is it to imagine that by 2012 not much has changed in America besides the size of the national debt?  The economy is still anemic, the military is still stuck in Iraq, the Israeli-Palestine conflict is still stagnated, there is no national healthcare system, nothing has been done about global warming, etc., etc.?  Does that seem so completely implausible at the rate this administration is going?  Indeed, does it even seem improbable?

And what would be the outcome of such a scenario?  Most likely it would be a presidential election pitting a vicious Republican candidate against a mealy-mouthed incumbent self-saddled with a lousy performance record to defend before a dissatisfied electorate.  Even if Obama only cares about winning re-election for himself, he should really consider turning his boldness quotient up to eleven (or at least three, for chrissakes), before it’s too late.

Because, I take it back, after all.  The biggest irony may just be this:  That Barack Obama’s instinct for the capillary could be the one thing that has the capability of reaching deep down into the toilet bowl, down through the pipes and into the sewer system, and dragging the shit-encrusted Republican Party back to the surface, miraculously offering it a magical elixir of renewed viability despite its own immensely successful attempt at party suicide.

And, come to thing of it, given where the GOP is today, an accomplishment that huge would represent a historic and monumental achievement for this or any other presidency, after all.

David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York.  He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles (dmg@regressiveantidote.net), but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond.  More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.

Now Available from CounterPunch Books!

Spell Albuquerque:
Memoir of a
"Difficult Student"
By Tennessee Reed

Waiting for Lightning
to Strike:
The Fundamentals
of Black Politics
Kevin Alexander Gray

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Buy!

The Inside Story of the Shannon Five's Smashing Victory Over the
Bush War Machine
By Harry Browne

Born Under a Bad Sky:
Notes from the Dark Side
of the Earth
By Jeffrey St. Clair

Buy End Times Now!

Click Here to Buy!

Click Here to Order!

Humanitarian Imperialism
By Jean Bricmont