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Onward,
Alexander, Jeffrey, Becky and Deva
Weekend
Edition
November 4 / 5, 2006
The Democrats Rising Star
The
Obama Myth
By LEE SUSTAR
In Lati America, they've got a name
for the kind of politics that Sen. Barack Obama represents: neoliberalism
with a human face. It's an attempt to revive an unpopular free-market,
pro-business agenda behind the leadership of someone whose personal
history suggests an affinity with the exploited and oppressed.
Obama, who was elected senator
from Illinois in 2004 and is now perhaps the most prominent African
American politician in the U.S., is angling to play a similar
role in the U.S. as he weighs a possible run for the presidency
in 2008.
Early on, the reader learns
that Obama shrugged off his college radicalism during the Ronald
Reagan administration. "My friends and I stopped thinking
and slipped into cant: the point at which the denunciations of
capitalism or American imperialism came too easily," writes
the man who declared on the eve of the 2004 elections that he
would be willing to support the bombing of Iran.
Elsewhere, Obama offers a caricature
of the left's views in order to assert his own supposed realism.
"I would find myself in the curious position of defending
aspects of Reagan's worldview," he writes. "I couldn't
be persuaded that U.S. multinationals and international terms
of trade were single-handedly responsible for poverty around
the world; nobody forced corrupt leaders in Third World countries
to steal from their people."
While critical of Reagan's
wars in Central America and his support for apartheid South Africa,
Obama backed the Cold War: "Given the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan, staying ahead of the Soviets militarily seemed the
sensible thing to do."
The U.S. occupation of Iraq?
Obama offers criticism, but no alternative--other than increasing
the military budget.
"We need to maintain a
strategic force posture that allows us to manage threats posed
by rogue nations like North Korea and Iran, and to meet the challenges
presented by potential rivals like China," he writes. "Indeed,
given the depletion of our forces after the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan, we will probably need a somewhat higher budget in
the intermediate future just to restore readiness and replace
equipment."
* *
*
LIBERALS MAY excuse Obama's
national-security speak as a concession to political realities
in the post-9/11 era--and hope that the senator's contribution
will be the renovation of progressive domestic policy.
Obama's career, however, like
that of any successful mainstream politician, is characterized
by cold ambition and ruthless opportunism--qualities on full
display when Obama challenged incumbent U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush
in the 2000 election.
Rush, a former leading member
of the Black Panther Party, had once been a rising star in Democratic
politics and was a key operative in Bill Clinton's efforts to
turn out the Black vote in the 1992 elections. But after a disastrous
failed challenge to incumbent Richard M. Daley in the 1999 Chicago
mayoral elections, Rush was damaged goods.
Obama, by then a law professor
at the University of Chicago and an Illinois state senator, moved
in for the kill. While his campaign platform generally resembled
Rush's own liberal positions, Obama positioned himself as a can-do
pragmatist who could deliver more than Rush, the old radical.
"Part of what we are talking about is a transition from
a politics of protest to a politics of progress," Obama
said then.
Rush ultimately crushed Obama
by a 2-to-1 margin. But Obama had raised his political profile,
picking up several major endorsements, including that of the
Chicago Tribune.
Even in defeat, Obama was on
the rise. During his long U.S. Senate campaign, it was impossible
for grassroots activists in Chicago to miss him. The former community
organizer appeared at even the smallest picket lines and protests,
right hand permanently extended, repeating the same low-key introduction
to everyone: "Barack Obama"
Obama's efforts won him the
loyalty of unions and activists in neighborhoods across Chicago,
enabling him to do an end run around the Democratic machine's
system of "promotions," in which loyal operatives get
the nod for key offices after putting in their time.
A sex scandal sank Obama's
Republican rival, Jack Ryan, and the Republicans ultimately had
to resort to Black conservative Alan Keyes. Obama was promoted
by party powerbrokers to give the keynote speech at the Democratic
National Convention and, after taking office, landed a plum assignment
on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
* *
*
NOW COMES Obama's book, a well-executed
effort at political positioning for the 2008 election--a step
or two to the left of Hillary Rodham Clinton perhaps, but well
to the right of traditional Democratic liberal standard-bearers.
In fact, Obama's book explicitly
endorses Bill Clinton's "Third Way"--the attempt to
shed the Democrats' supposed leftist excesses and borrow pro-business
policies from the Republicans.
Obama does take Bill Clinton
to task for his overtures to the right--the denunciation of the
rapper Sister Souljah at Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Convention and
the execution of mentally disabled Black prisoner Ricky Ray Rector,
both in the midst of his 1992 campaign.
But Obama's book highlights
several "Sister Souljah moments" of his own--calculated
attacks on his own supporters to establish his mainstream credentials.
"I've proposed experimenting with merit pay for teachers,
for example," he writes, acknowledging that he's angered
the teachers' unions.
Obama takes the same approach
his chapter titled "Race," in which he blames right-wing
talk show hosts for race-baiting and opposition to affirmative
action, deplores the persistence of racial inequality, and calls
for job training for Black youth. But his focus on the alleged
breakdown of the Black family drifts into Bill Cosby territory,
although Obama avoids the rhetoric he used at a Chicago church
in 2005, when he declared that too many Black men are poor fathers.
"It's not clear to me that they're full-grown men,"
he said.
On immigration, Obama tries
to split the difference in the political debate, backing a guest-worker
program that he admits is a "sop to big business."
Recently, however, Obama joined other Senate Democrats in a sop
to the anti-immigrant right, backing the construction of a 700-mile
border wall that he had previously vowed to oppose without "comprehensive"
immigration reform.
As Obama makes clear in The
Audacity of Hope, we can expect more such moves to the right.
He may seek to revive liberalism, but only within the framework
of the rightward shift in U.S. politics over the past 30 years.
Obama's agenda is reheated
Clintonism: raising the minimum wage, an expansion the Earned
Income Tax Credit, and investment in education, alternative energy
and technology--positive steps, perhaps, but certainly no far-reaching
social programs. Workers at risk of job loss should have access
to wage insurance, he writes, but he doesn't call for an increase
in today's miserly unemployment benefits.
Although he voted against the
Central America Free Trade Area, Obama wants a "new approach"
to trade issues--one based on the recognition that "we can
try to slow globalization, but we can't stop it."
Obama does offer some major
policy proposals. The health care system should include affordable
state-based "model plans" in which insurers would participate--a
proposal that recalls the unworkable, corporate-dominated bureaucracy
envisioned in Hillary Clinton's failed 1994 health care proposal.
Obama also decries the inequality
exacerbated by Bush's tax cuts--presented, for political cover,
in a passage about his visit with billionaire Warren Buffet,
who opposed the cuts. Obama calls on the wealthy to bear their
tax burden, but offers no clear proposals to raise those taxes.
And while Obama's book is well-stocked
with anecdotes about workers and the poor, his voting record
reflects different priorities. Obama voted for the so-called
"tort reform" bill that caps jury awards in wrongful
injury lawsuits, one of the few means that working people have
to hold corporations accountable for faulty products and negligence.
* * *
LIKE ALL pre-campaign manifestos
of presidential hopefuls, The Audacity of Hope is a tedious
read. Even Obama's self-deprecating humor--rare among the oversized
egos in the U.S. Senate--comes off like so much market-researched
branding.
Indeed, Obama never strays
far from the well-worn path of similar books. There's Obama's
intellectual communion with inspiring figures of the past, a
la John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage; the let's-heal-America-together
motif of Jimmy Carter's post-Vietnam and Watergate book Why
Not the Best? and the Democratic Leadership Council pro-business
orthodoxy of Putting People First, the campaign manifesto
credited to Bill Clinton and Al Gore during the 1992 presidential
race.
What makes Obama's book different
is the speed at which he has been catapulted into the national--and
international--spotlight.
Obama milks this sudden rise
for full effect, portraying himself as an ordinary guy who unexpectedly
finds himself a member of the World's Greatest Deliberative Body--a
real-life version of the Jimmy Stewart character in the 1939
movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
In the film, Mr. Smith battles
the forces of corruption, restoring faith in the system and offering
hope that U.S. democracy can live up to its promise. Obama has
written a similar script for himself. The question now is whether
liberals desperate for a leader will believe the image--or face
the reality.
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