Bill Quigley

20 Aug 2008

If Obama Loses

by Paul Street

"Obama appears to be a
natural and longtime neoliberal centrist."

"It Would Not Be Because of Race"

While seeking to distance himself from his former pastor
Jeremiah Wright last spring, Barack Obama told reporters that if he lost in his
quest for the presidency, "it would not be because of race. It would be because
of mistakes I made along the campaign trail"[1].

I have no idea what's going to happen in November. This
presidential election is even more difficult to call than the last two, thanks
in part to race.

Still, I can safely say that, like many of Obama's
formulations, his comment was partly true and largely false. Racial bloc voting
and the well-documented reluctance of many whites to vote for a black presidential
candidate - widely evident during the Democratic primaries - are obviously
going to be a relevant factor in the November elections [2]. If Obama loses to
the reactionary war-mongering nut-job John McCain despite a political context
that would normally strongly favor a Democrat this time around, the refusal of
a significant number of white voters to support a black candidate will be a
significant part of the explanation.

The Swift-(Wright-) Boating is Underway

"'Conservatives' continue to score points with the
‘patriotism' and military cards, absurdly tarring Obama as a ‘far left'
opponent of American interests and security."

But other factors besides "race" (racism), Obama mistakes
included, will contribute to an Obama defeat if he loses. The powerful
Republican right-wing attack machine is already effectively "Swift-boating"
him. The "war hero" (former bomber of Vietnamese civilians) and leading Iraq
"war" (imperial invasion) enthusiast John McCain and the FOX News crowd are
bludgeoning Obama with the charge of being "soft" (insufficiently militaristic
and imperial) on Iraq and now on Russia. With dominant U.S. media consistently
following the lead of the far right by framing electability around "toughness"
when it comes to "national security," situations like the current conflict
between Russia and Georgia work to leading Russia critic McCain's distinct
advantage.

Obama has done everything he can to reassure the nation's
ruling bipartisan political class that he is fully on board with the American
Empire Project, but it doesn't matter: "conservatives" continue to score points
with the "patriotism" and military cards, absurdly tarring him as a "far left"
opponent of American interests and security. That preposterous allegation
is the central theme in the far-right crackpot Jerome Corsi's current
best-selling book The Obama Nation - a monument to neo-McCarthyist smear
tactics in the post 9/11 era.

Corsi was the co-author of the ridiculous but important and
widely read 2004 volume Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out
Against John Kerry. His latest bestselling hatchet-job is loaded with lurid
innuendos and guilt-by-association narratives claiming to link the deeply
conservative Obama to African radicalism, "black rage," drugs, Reverend Wright
(of course), the Communist Party, the Weathermen, Islamic "anti-Americanism"
and the plot to open up Israel and the United States to nuclear attack.

"Any Democratic presidential candidate (no matter how
centrist and compromising) is going to be subjected to relentless charges of
‘leftist' weakness and questionable ‘Americanism.'"

Race is a critical sub-text throughout the narrative of
"Swift Boat 2.0," of course.

Corsi is making the dominant media rounds and is a featured
guest on right wing talk radio around the country.

This is not really Obama's fault, of course. The Fatherland
(FOX) "News" crowd would be doing the same thing in different ways if Hillary
Clinton or John Edwards (who we now know would have been dead in the water
thanks to his sordid dance with Rielle Hunter) had gotten the nomination. At
this stage in the corporate-totalitarian and imperial degradation of U.S.
political culture, any Democratic presidential candidate (no matter how
centrist and compromising) is going to be subjected to relentless charges of
"leftist" weakness and questionable "Americanism" - vicious accusations that
will be dutifully bounced across the dominant media's echo-chambers and hall of
mirrors.

Still, just as Edwards went into the primaries with the Rielle
Hunter affair waiting to explode, Obama (no dummy) certainly made his bid with
full knowledge that the "controversial" (sadly) Afro-Centric Reverend Wright
(his pastor of 20-plus years) would likely emerge as a potent symbol for the
Republicans' racist, right-wing noise machine.

Overreach and Fatigue

Hubris and overreach could play a role in a hypothetical
Obama defeat, with voters getting turned off by the quasi-millennial aspects of
the Obama ascendancy, replete with an oration before 200,000 Germans and an
acceptance speech to be delivered to 70,000 chanting Democrats in a Denver
football stadium that will have to do since Mount Sinai is
unavailable. You don't have to be a Republican to think it's more than a
little over the top.

Obama fatigue could factor into a possible Obama defeat as
millions of Americans get tired of seeing Obama's face and hearing his measured
baritone "eloquence" over and over and over again. We are now technically
into the fifth year of the Obama phenomenon, launched during the Democratic
National Convention in late July of 2004. Obama is over-exposed at this
point, even as most Americans (including many of his supporters) know amazingly
little about his actual public record and world view. A recent Pew poll finds
that nearly half (48 percent) U.S. voters say that they "have been hearing too
much about Obama lately." Just barely more than a quarter (26 percent) of Pew's
respondents said they had heard too much about McCain.

Alienating Media

Team Obama has recently demonstrated some remarkably
controlling and prickly behavior towards the press. This could be a big
mistake. If it isn't more careful about ruffling dominant media egos, the
Obama camp could do significant damage to the "Obama Love" proffered by a
corporate media that retains a soft spot for the supposed "maverick" McCain. As
Gabriel Sherman noted in The New Republic in late July, "Reporters are
grumbling more and more that the campaign is acting like the Prom Queen. They
gripe that it is ‘arrogant' and ‘control[ling],' and the campaign's own belief
that Obama is poised to make history isn't endearing, either. The press
certainly helped Obama get so far so fast; the question is, how far can he get
if his campaign alienates them?" (G. Sherman, "End of the Affair: Barack Obama
and the Press Break Up," TNR, July 24, 2008. read at www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=6e9f4a42-9540-4d99-aba2-25adc276c25d)

Why Obama Deserves to Lose Iraq

"His plans for ‘withdrawal' have long been nauseatingly
ambiguous and maddeningly deceptive."

The offensive notion that "the Surge" is "working" in Iraq
has hurt Obama and helped McCain. But while it is true that "the Surge's"
triumphs are grossly exaggerated and that claims of U.S. "success" in Iraq
ignore the fact that the Iraq War should have (as Obama says) "never been
launched in the first place," Obama deserves to lose Iraq as an issue working
in his favor. He has repeatedly voted funds for the criminal occupation
and distanced himself from antiwar activists and from more courageous
politicians (e.g. Jack Murtha and Russ Feingold) on Iraq . He backed pro-war
antiwar Democrats in the 2006 Congressional primaries. He has embraced the
preposterous Orwellian claim that the U.S. invaded Iraq out of its excessive
"good intentions" to export democracy. He has advanced the odious Orwellian
notion that the U.S. is involved in a selfless effort to "put Iraq back
together." Absurdly applauding America for its great "sacrifice" in the cause
of "freedom" within and beyond Iraq and enthusiastically embracing George W.
Bush's equally illegal invasion of Afghanistan, "antiwar" Obama has never come
close to acknowledging the extent of the monumental damage the U.S. has done to
Iraq (including more than a million Iraqi dead) during (and before) the
occupation. His plans for "withdrawal" have long been nauseatingly
ambiguous and maddeningly deceptive, hiding the strong likelihood that a President
Obama would maintain the Iraq occupation for an indefinite period.

Obama has never exhibited the elementary courage or decency
to oppose the occupation of Iraq on moral and legal grounds - as a monumental
imperial crime. He has only opposed it as a "strategic blunder" and
"mistake": as a "dumb war" that isn't "working." This has made him
vulnerable to losing the Iraq War as an issue working on his behalf once the
Bush administration and dominant U.S. war media succeeded in selling the notion
that the criminal invasion was finally being properly executed - the vile idea
that the unmentionably criminal invasion is "working."

Kicking Progressives in the Face

The ugly conceit with which Obama has been willing to risk
alienating progressive, left-leaning voters could come back to haunt him in
November. The militantly centrist corporate-sponsored Obama has irritated many
of his leftmost supporters with the lurches he has made further to the right
after securing the Democratic presidential nomination. Even I (a
consistent left critic of Obama since his highly conservative 2004 Keynote
Address) have been surprised at the speed and strength with which he has kicked
his more progressive supporters in the face (and other bodily regions) by:

* embracing the Supreme Court ruling that invalidated a
Washington D.C ban on personal handguns and claimed that the Second
Constitutional Amendment pertains to private citizens, not just organized state
"militias."

* declaring his belief in the state's right to kill certain
criminals, including child rapists.

* becoming the first major party presidential candidate to
bypass the public presidential financing system and to reject accompanying
spending limits (violating his earlier pledge to work through the public system
and accept those limits).

* supporting a refurbished spy bill that grants retroactive
immunity to telephone corporations who collaborated with the White House in
electronic surveillance of American citizens (violating Obama's earlier pledge
to filibuster any surveillance legislation containing such immunity).

* appointing the corporate-friendly Wal-Mart apologist
and Hamilton Project [3] economist Jason Furman as his economic policy director
- something that stood in curious relation to his criticism ("I won't shop
there") of Wal-Mart's low-wage anti-union practices when speaking to labor
audiences.

* increasing his declared support of "free trade,"
contradicting his campaign-trail criticism of the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA).

* "tweaking" his claim that he would meet with Iran 's
president (he added new and more restrictive conditions).

* embracing (in a speech to the powerful pro-Israel lobby
American Israel Public Affairs Committee - AIPAC) Bush-McCain rhetoric on the supposed
Iranian nuclear threat and promising to do "anything" to protect the nuclear
occupation and apartheid state of Israel from Iran (a nation previously
attacked by Israel ).

* calling (in his AIPAC speech) for an "undivided"
Israel-run Jerusalem despite the fact that no government on the planet (and not
even the Bush administration) supports Israeli's right to annex that
UN-designated international city.

* making bolder Iraq "withdrawal" statements indicating that
an Obama administration would not leave Iraq.

* vocally supporting a major part of the Republican agenda:
the granting of public money to private religious organizations to provide
social services.

* endorsing the conservative white male Blue Dog Democratic
Congressman John Barrow (D-GA) over the progressive black female challenger
Regina Thomas in a July 15 primary [4].

* flip-flopping on energy policy by calling for increased
domestic and offshore oil drilling after it became clear that McCain was
getting traction with voters by calling for such environmentally insensitive
drilling.

"Dropping the Class Language"

With a large part of the citizenry supporting serious
progressive change in the wake of the hard-right Cheney-Bush nightmare, Obama's
corporate-imperial centrism could end up costing him the White House. This is
standard operating procedure for the Democrats, who have long been unable
and/or unwilling to run in accord with the progressive and anti-imperial
sentiments of the American majority [5].

Last time out, John "I am Not a Redistribution Democrat"
Kerry made the usual surrender. Given the closeness of the 2004 race and
the unpopularity of the arch-plutocratic George W. Bush, Kerry could have won
if he'd run further to the populist left. With help from the "liberal" New
York Times (which agreed not to publish its findings on the Bush
administration's illegal wiretapping until well after the election), the
super-opulent windsurfing aristocrat Kerry ran to the corporate center and
thereby gave us four more years of the Worst President Ever.

This great failure followed in perfect accord with Thomas
Frank's widely mentioned but commonly misunderstood book on why so many white
working class Americans vote for regressive Republicans instead of following
their supposed natural "pocketbook" interests by backing Democrats. Released
just before Bush defeated Kerry with no small help from working class whites,
Frank's What's the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of
America (New York: 2004) has generally been taken to have argued that the
GOP distracts stupid "heartland" (white working-class) voters away from their
real economic interests with diversionary issues like abortion, guns, and gay
rights. Insofar as Democrats bear responsibility for the loss their
former working class constituency, Frank is often said to have argued that this
was due to their excessive liberalism on these and other "cultural issues."

"The corporate-sponsored, capitalism-praising Obama is
repeating the same old classist Democratic mistake."

But Frank's argument was more complex or perhaps more
simple. At the end of his book, in a passage that very few leading commentators
seem to have read (a shining exception is New York Times columnist Paul
Krugman), Frank clearly and (in my opinion) correctly blamed the long
corporatist shift of the Democratic Party to the business-friendly right and
away from honest discussion of - and opposition to - economic and class
inequality for much of whatever success the GOP achieved in winning over working-class
whites. As Frank noted in his final chapter:

"The Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), the organization
that produced such figures as Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Joe Lieberman, and Terry
McCauliffe, has long been pushing the party to forget blue-collar voters and
concentrate instead on recruiting affluent, white-collar professionals who are
liberal on social issues. The larger interests that the DLC wants desperately
to court are corporations, capable of generating campaign contributions far out-weighing
anything raised by organized labor. The way to collect the votes and --- more
important --- the money of these coveted constituencies, 'New Democrats' think,
is to stand rock-solid on, say, the pro-choice position while making endless
concessions on economic issues, on welfare, NAFTA, Social Security, labor law,
privatization, deregulation, and the rest of it. Such Democrats explicitly rule
out what they deride as 'class warfare' and take great pains to emphasize their
friendliness with business. Like the conservatives, they take economic issues
off the table. As for working-class voters who were until recently the party's
very backbone, the DLC figures they will have nowhere else to go; Democrats
will always be marginally better on economic issues than Republicans. Besides,
what politician in this success-worshipping country really wants to be the
voice of poor people?"

"...The problem is not that Democrats are monolithically
pro-choice or anti-school prayer; it's that by dropping the class language that
once distinguished them sharply from Republicans they have left themselves
vulnerable to cultural wedge issues like guns and abortion and the rest whose
hallucinatory appeal would ordinarily be overshadowed by material
concerns. We are in an environment where Republicans talks constantly
about class - in a coded way, to be sure - but where Democrats are afraid to
bring it up" (Frank, What's the Matter With Kansas?, pp. 242-245).

The corporate-sponsored, capitalism-praising Obama is
repeating the same old classist Democratic mistake. For all Obama's talk about
activating the popular base to bring about "change from the bottom up," Obama
is making his own ironic contribution to the de-mobilization of the progressive
electorate with a militantly centrist, neoliberal, and boring policy agenda
that is noticeably bereft of populist inspiration. It's more
Goldman Sachs and Hamilton Project than lunch pail and picket line, consistent
with his (actually) elitist comments to an affluent gathering of fundraisers in
San Francisco prior to the April 22nd Pennsylvania primary (won
decisively by Hillary Clinton with large support from white working-class
voters).

"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania," Obama
condescendingly said, "and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs
have been gone for 25 years and there's nothing's to replace them...And it's
not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or
antipathy toward people who aren't like them." Later, in clarifying his
comments, Obama said that poor white small town Americans simply "don't vote on
economic issues," turning instead to things like guns, gay marriage, abortion
and religion [6]. Sounding like he accepted the standard false version (the
self-serving upper-middle-class adaptation) of "the Tom Frank Kansas thesis,"
he failed to note that working class whites actually vote more on the basis of
economic concerns than do affluent whites [7] and that Democrats lose white
proletarian voters by taking the workers' material concerns "off the table" and
running (unlike John Edwards' ill-fated semi-progressive 2007-08 campaign) away
from the populist language and commitments that once made the Democratic Party
a relevant defender of working peoples' material interests. (He had
nothing to say about the source of the "bitterness" that leads him to cling so
strongly to the guns of American Empire and to his own self-serving notions of
God.)

I recently sat through a tiresome Obama " Town Hall " on
"Economic Security" before hundreds of relatively unenthused supporters in
Cedar Rapids , Iowa . Beyond some brief chest-pounding about
Exxon-Mobil's latest record profits and "big oil's" campaign contributions to
McCain, the content and tone of Obama's policy presentation was positively
Dukakisian. It was very University of Chicago , loaded with arcane neoliberal
policy wonkery that may have countered McCain's picture of him as an
empty-headed celebrity (ala Paris Hilton) but also left much of the audience
cold. It seemed almost calculated not to mobilize people for an epic
confrontation with the vicious arch-plutocratic and messianic-militarist
bastards behind the McCain campaign. A former John Edwards staffer who cringed
through the event with me asked "where's the red meat?" I imagined
millions of formerly engaged Obama supporters forsaking politics altogether -
their hopes for reform and "change" shattered and their desire to avoid
politics reinstated - when and if Obama's tepid, business- and Empire-friendly
campaign goes the way of Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry.

Snotty Know-it-All Middle-Class Obamaists Not Transcending
Race

Which brings me to another factor that could help cost Obama
the election - the elitism, ignorance, and occasional race-baiting of many of
his ostensibly progressive white middle and upper-middle class
supporters. So far this campaign season, I have been lectured by three
white Iowa City liberal-"progressive" Obamaists on how Tom Frank's book shows
the "idiocy" of the white lower and working classes - those misguided
proletarian dunderheads who foolishly "vote against their own pocketbook
interests" (against those supposedly wonderful and progressive Democrats)
because of childish vulnerability to "cultural issues" like "guns, God, gays,
and abortion."

"What's the matter with these clowns" one
university-affiliated forty-something white male Obamaist asked me the other
day, citing Frank's book. "Don't they get that the Democrats are the party of
the workers and the poor?"

The Obama fan who asked me this insulting question became
noticeably perturbed when I noted (A) the white working-class actually "votes
its pocketbook" more than the white middle and upper class and (B) that Frank's
book actually ends with the argument I quoted above, observing that the
corporate-captive and excessively bourgeois Democratic Party opens the door for
working class defection and apathy precisely by abandoning its commitment to
working-class people's moral-economic issues and needs. The Democrats have long
been the other business wing - the "inauthentic opposition" in - the
corporate-managed American "one-and-a-half party system" (Princeton political scientist Sheldon
Wolin's term) and Obama is not fundamentally challenging that terrible reality.

"'Race-neutral' Obama has exhibited a disturbing tendency
to eagerly join the white post-Civil Rights majority in blaming blacks for
their disproportionate presence at the bottom."

Affluent white Obamaist liberals display a related and
disturbing tendency to argue that any criticism of their hero's aristocratic
bearing and commitments actually betray the critic's underlying "racism."

"You know what people really mean when they say Obama is
bourgeois and elitist, don't you?" a patronizing white male
university-connected know-it-all Obamaist asked me a few weeks ago. Before I
could say anything, he answered his own question: "they mean they think he's
‘an uppity nigger.'"

Oh, okay. I'm sure there are plenty of white folks,
including a large number of Republicans, who are using the charge of elitism
and "haughtiness" as cover for racism. But I (the author of two books and
numerous project studies and hundreds of articles against white supremacy and
institutional racism) am not one of those racists. When many whites and (by the
way) blacks I know say that Obama is bourgeois and elitist, they simply mean
that (whatever his skin color) he's, well, bourgeois and elitist, which
(by the way) he is.

He's also very weak, from a progressive perspective, on
race, interestingly enough, part of why he has long been viewed as elitist by a
significant portion of the black community in Chicago and Illinois. Having run
to the right of Kucinich and even Hillary and Edwards on racial justice issues,
"race-neutral" Obama has exhibited a disturbing tendency (strongly approved by
arch-conservative white Republican commentators like William Bennett, Charles
Krauthammer, and George Will) to eagerly join the white post-Civil Rights
majority in blaming blacks for their disproportionate presence at the bottom of
American hierarchies.

It is interesting to hear university town white Obamaists
claim that that their candidate "transcends race" while hurling reckless
charges of racism at those who make the elementary observation that Obama is an
elite, Harvard-educated, and Wall Street-sponsored (and excessively
white-friendly) candidate running an openly (for those willing to do some
elementary research) corporate-imperial campaign. As the black and Left
political scientist Adolph Reed Jr. noted last April, the Obama campaign
repeatedly contradicted its own claim to "transcend race" during the primary
season. "Obama supporters have been disposed to cry foul and charge racism at
nearly any criticism of him," Reed observed, "in steadily more extravagant
rhetoric." They claimed, for example, that Hillary Clinton was expressing
racial bias when she dared to criticize Obama as "inexperienced." The attempt
to portray one's opponent as short on experience is "standard fare in political
campaigns" (Reed) and goes back to the beginning of electoral politics.

Along the way, the Obama campaign has called for voters to
support its candidate because of the opportunity to "make history" simply by
putting someone who happens to be half-black in the White House. That is
hardly going "beyond race" [8].

Obama recently made the false charge that the McCain
campaign has been telling voters to oppose the Democratic presidential
candidate because he "doesn't look like those other presidents on the dollar
bills." The McCain camp's opportunistic response was (naturally) over the top
but, sadly, McCain was right to note that Obama had played the race card in an
unfortunate way.

Obamaists should be careful with the racism charge if they
want to avoid over-alienating potential supporters, who don't generally deserve
to hear snotty know-it-all pseudo-progressives screeching "Your Whiteness is
Showing" (the title of an ill-advised letter from the progressive anti-racist
Obama supporter Tim Wise to certain already pissed-off white female Hillary
Clinton fans last June) because they happen to find the openly imperialist
capitalism and Afghan Invasion enthusiast and Israeli apartheid supporter Obama
hard to swallow. The Obama campaign is making a mistake by not doing more to actively
discourage some of its more irritating staff and supporters - an especially
good example is current "Progressive for Obama" Web site chief Carl
Davidson (who has absurdly leveled the accusation at me on at least two
occasions) - from recklessly charging racism.

Maybe It Isn't About Running for President

"Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, the Clintons, and Gore did not
need to be black in order to walk the same basic tiresome centrist line
trod by ‘the new black Clinton.'"

Speaking of race, it is common to hear white middle-class
Obama supporters excuse and explain their candidate's conservative centrism as
a result of the fact that's he's black and therefore "has to be especially
careful not to offend" white voters by seeming too strident or "angry." "John
Edwards can get away with talking class struggle," one academic Obamaist told
me last fall, "because he's white. Barack can't because he's black and
that's scary enough in and of itself for white voters."

There's a kernel of truth in this argument. Toxic white
racial fears and stereotypes of the "angry black man" (e.g. Jesse Jackson Sr.
and big bad Reverend Wright) are alive and well in U.S. political
culture. Sadly enough, white dread of (legitimate) black anger may well
help make it especially hard for a black male politician to fight for the poor
and working-class Many against the rich and powerful Few. I have long suspected
that Obama has felt the need to go an extra mile or three to prove his
fealty (in ways that are often quite unpleasant to behold) to
dominant domestic and imperial hierarchies and doctrines partly because he
senses that his racial identity raises red flags for the nation's predominantly
white political class and electoral gatekeepers and the white majority
electorate.

Still, Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, the Clintons, and Gore did
not need to be black in order to walk the same basic tiresome centrist
line trod by "the new black Clinton" (or perhaps "the new black Carter" -
see below), Barack Obama. Obama appears to be a natural and longtime
neoliberal centrist, consistent with his elite private prep school and Harvard
background, his "deeply conservative" temperament, his well-known personal
narcissism, and his impressive corporate sponsorship.

It should be understood that the main white folks who can't
deal with "populist" rhetoric are the rich and powerful Few. Angry "class
language" (Frank) works pretty well with much of the white working class
majority - a main reason that any potentially viable candidate who speaks it to
any significant degree (e.g. John Edwards in 2007) must be marginalized and
discredited by corporate media.

"Re-establishing Confidence in the Legitimacy of the Current
Political Order"

And insofar as it is true that Obama "can't be all that
progressive because he's black" (something that may NOT be true) wouldn't
that seem to indicate that it's, well... a mistake for progressives to advance
a black candidate for president?

This might seem like a terrible thing to say (I can just
see my nemesis Carl Davidson ready to pounce!), but there's a deeper point
here. Maybe the struggle against racism and other political and societal evils
isn't about running people (of any color) for the presidency - the top position
in the executive committee of the American ruling class - or any other high
elective office. Maybe it isn't about U.S. electoral politics.

"By the end of his life,
King had concluded that only revolutionary change could save the U.S. from an
ever-deepening descent into repressive authoritarianism."

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. turned down efforts to get him
to run for the White House and died for his determination to authentically
resist American capitalist, racist, and imperial power structures - what he
called "the triple evils that are interrelated." By the end of his life, King
had concluded - correctly in my view - that only revolutionary change could
save the U.S. from an ever-deepening descent into repressive authoritarianism.
As King noted in the spring of 1967, liberals have for too long "labored with
the idea of reforming the existing institutions of society, a little change
here, a little change there." What is really required, King knew, was "a
reconstruction of the entire society...a radical redistribution of political
and economic power."

That is exactly what Obama is NOT about. "Perhaps the
greatest misconception about Barack Obama," Ryan Lizza recently observed, "is
that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage
of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself
to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them."
Later in the same essay Lizza notes that Obama is "an
incrementalist."

As Greg Guma recently noted in a thoughtful reflection on
Obama as "The New Jimmy Carter": "the truth is that, in Obama, a worried
establishment has found the vessel through which they hope to restore
international and domestic stability." As Guma darkly but rightly
observes, "Obama, like Carter, can be useful [to the U.S. power elite] in
calming things down and re-establishing confidence in the legitimacy of the
current political order. In short, he can reinforce the argument that
‘the system' still works"[9].

Beyond Electoralism

Revolution (desperately required) aside, even the attainment
of basic reforms is about building and expanding grassroots social movements
beneath and beyond the false promises of political campaigns and mass media,
who market domesticated corporate candidates like they sell cars and candy.
It's about the real politics of popular organization and resistance beneath and
beyond the quadrennial narrow-spectrum corporate-crafted candidate-centered
election extravaganzas, whoever wins and whoever loses. As Dr. Reed noted last
November, "Elected officials are only as good or as bad as the forces they feel
they must respond to. It's a mistake to expect any more of them than to
be vectors of the political pressures they feel working on them" [10].

Given the harsh realities that make even avowedly "progressive"
politicians, policymakers, and candidates veer center and right, Reed argued,
correctly in my estimation, progressives should focus less on election dramas
and more on building movements for democratic change from the bottom up and
across and between elections:

"We need to think about politics in a different way, one
that doesn't assume that the task is to lobby the Democrats or give them good
ideas, and correct their misconceptions."

"It's a mistake to focus so much on the election cycle; we
didn't vote ourselves into this mess, and we're not going to vote ourselves out
of it. Electoral politics is an arena for consolidating majorities that have
been created on the plane of social movement organizing. It's not an
alternative or a shortcut to building those movements, and building them takes
time and concerted effort. Not only can that process not be compressed to fit
the election cycle; it also doesn't happen through mass actions. It happens
through cultivating one-on-one relationships with people who have standing and
influence in their neighborhoods, workplaces, schools, families, and
organizations. It happens through struggling with people over time for things
they're concerned about and linking those concerns to a broader political
vision and program. This is how the populist movement grew in the late
nineteenth century, the CIO in the 1930s and 1940s, and the civil rights
movement after World War II. It is how we've won all our victories. And it is
also how the right came to power" [11].

"We didn't vote ourselves into this mess, and we're not
going to vote ourselves out of it."

Reed's point on the need to concentrate first and foremost
on the building of movement capacities - NOT corporate-crafted elections that
answer mainly to elite interests - is echoed in Noam Chomsky's instructive
reflections on the 2004 presidential contest. By Chomsky's analysis on
the eve of the last election:

"The U.S. presidential race, impassioned almost to the point
of hysteria, hardly represents healthy democratic impulses."

"Americans are encouraged to vote, but not to participate
more meaningfully in the political arena. Essentially the election is yet
another method of marginalizing the population. A huge propaganda
campaign is mounted to get people to focus on these personalized quadrennial
extravaganzas and to think, ‘That's politics.' But it isn't. It's
only a small part of politics."

"The urgent task for those who want to shift policy in
progressive direction - often in close conformity to majority opinion - is to
grow and become strong enough so that that they can't be ignored by centers of
power. Forces for change that have come up from the grass roots and
shaken the society to its foundations include the labor movement, the civil rights
movement, the peace movement, the women's movement and others, cultivated by
steady, dedicated work at all levels, everyday, not just once every four
years..."

"So in the election, sensible choices have to be made.
But they are secondary to serious political action. The main task is to
create a genuinely responsive democratic culture, and that effort goes on
before and after electoral extravaganzas, whatever their outcome" [12].

How individual progressives define their version of the
"sensible choice" is of little interest to me at this point. People write me to
ask "should I vote for McKinney ?" "What about Nader?" "Should I vote
tactically for Obama to block Mad Bomber McCain since I live in a contested
state?" "I think I'm just going to sit the election out - what do you think?"

I don't know what people should do on Election Day. I'm not
sure I care (it changes from day to day, to be honest). What I'd really
like to know is when true progressive folks are interested in "struggling with
people over time for things they're concerned about and linking those concerns
to a broader political vision and program."

And I am frankly haunted by the likelihood that Greg Guma is
right: while McCain is obviously terrible and dangerous, Obama is attractive to
a large section of the U.S. power elite because he promises to "calm things
down and re-establish confidence in the legitimacy of the current
political order" by "reinforce[ing] the argument that ‘the system' still
works." Wouldn't that seem to suggest that the loathsome and dangerous
McCain is the lesser evil in the long run?

Our current corporate-totalitarian system and political
culture doesn't work. It is a grave threat to human survival and peace
and justice at home and abroad. Dr. King was right forty years ago about the
pressing need for "radical reconstruction" and the "radical distribution of
political and economic power." The path of that reconstruction is long and
leads well past my own time on this planet, but it is at least clear to me that
millions of people in the world's most powerful nation are being dangerously
hypnotized and repressively de-sublimated yet again by the false hopes and
colored lights of the narrow-spectrum corporate-crafted election
extravaganza.

If Obama loses, and he may, it will be important for
progressively inclined citizens and activists to understand that it was
corporate-imperial centrism, not the left and not the People, that got
defeated. If he wins, those citizens and activists need to understand the
severe limits of what triumphed and be prepared to fight and organize on a
daily basis beneath and beyond presidential elections.

Paul Street ([email protected]) is a veteran radical
historian and independent author, activist, researcher, and journalist in Iowa
City , IA. He is the author of Empire
and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Paradigm 2005);
Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid
in the Post-Civil Rights Era (Routledge 2005): and Racial Oppression in the
Global Metropolis (Rowman&Littlefied 2007). Street's new book Barack Obama and the Future of American
Politics can be ordered at http://www.paradigmpublishers.com/Books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=186987)

NOTES

My annotation for this piece could easily run to 100 notes -
something that would be impractical for reader and writer alike. Readers
who want sources for assertions without notes can feel free to write me at
[email protected].

1. Obama is quoted in Glen Ford's brilliant article, "Obama
Stumbles on His Own Contradictions," CounterPunch (April 30, 3008), read at http://www.counterpunch.org/ford04302008.html

2. Among many possible sources, see especially John Judis,
"The Big Race," The New Republic (May 28, 2008).

3. The Hamilton Group is a leading "conservative"
(business-friendly) economic think tank. Furman, 37, is linked closely to
Robert Rubin, the top Wall Street financial mogul and former Clinton economics
advisor and Treasury secretary. Rubin's regressive views on behalf of "free
trade" (including the North American Free Trade Agreement, investor's rights,
wages, welfare and "deficit reduction" gave the Clinton administration
"credibility" in the halls of corporate and financial power.

4. See Leutisha Stills, "Obama Charges Rightward," Black
Agenda Report (June 25, 2008), read at http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=674&Itemid=1

5. For an (I hope) useful summary of that progressive
majority opinion and some key sources, see Paul Street , "Americans'
Progressive Opinion vs. ‘the Shadow Cast on Society by Business," ZNet
Sustainer Commentary (May 15, 2008), read at http://www.zcommunications.org/zspace/commentaries/3491

6. Paul Krugman, "Clinging to a Stereotype," New York Times,
18 April, 2008, p. A23.

7. See Larry Bartels, "Inequalities," New York Times
Magazine (April 27, 2008), p. 22. As Bartels points out, Frank
exaggerated white working-class voters' susceptibility to cultural diversion:
"In recent presidential elections," he notes, "affluent voters, who tend to be
liberal on cultural matters, are about twice as likely as middle-class and poor
voters to make their decisions on the basis of their cultural concerns." In
other words, working class white voters don't especially privilege "cultural
issues" (God, guns, gays, gender, and abortion) over pocketbook concerns and
actually do that less than wealthier voters.

8. Adolph Reed Jr., "Obama No," The Progressive (May 2008).
For what its worth, I am told by a reliable source that Michelle Obama
dismissed concerns with experience as racism during a coffee with female
Democratic voters in eastern Iowa last fall.

9. Ryan Lizza, "Making It: How Chicago Shaped
Obama," The New Yorker, (July 21, 2008); Greg Guma, "Barack Obama: The New
Jimmy Carter," ZNet (July 28, 2008), read at http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/18288
See also Larrisa MacFarquhar's useful reflctions on Obama's "deeply
conservative" world view and commitments: see Larissa MacFarquhar,
"The Conciliator: Where is Barack Obama Coming From?," The New Yorker
(May 7, 2007). Near the end of his article, Lizza proclaims that "He
[Obama] is ideologically a man of the left" - a ridiculous indication of how
shockingly narrow the political and ideological spectrum is in the U.S. today.

10. Adolph J. Reed Jr., "Sitting This One Out," The
Progressive (November 2007)

11. Reed, "Sitting This One Out."

12. Noam Chomsky, "The Disconnect in American
Democracy" (October 27, 2004) in Chomsky, Interventions ( San Francisco : City
Lights, 2007) pp. 99-100. See also Howard Zinn's excellent reflections in
"Election Madness," The Progressive (March 2008).

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