An archives of articles by Sam Smith, editor of the Progressive Review. More can be found at prorevflotsam.blogspot.com
November 24, 2008
November 21, 2008
STUDYING THE SECRETS OF THE SHORE
For many years, your editor has been involved with Wolfe's Neck Farm, a
The newest addition to the farm is Coastal Studies for Girls, a program which is leasing some of the buildings for the first residential science and leadership semester school just for girls. Even while construction is underway, CSG hasn't missed the chance for some education, as reported in the Falmouth Forecaster:
||| Coastal Studies for Girls is joining with Women Unlimited and Wright-Ryan Construction to offer seminars throughout the fall and early winter to help the public prepare for cold weather and to help residents learn how to reduce home energy and heating costs. . . Lib Jamison, executive director of the nonprofit Women Unlimited, taught a group of participants to build a toolbox after the tour. Jamison said the organization helps to train and support women, minorities and disadvantaged workers by providing the training necessary to obtain a job with livable wages in the construction, technical and transportation industries. . . The school will be open for its first 10th-grade class of students in the fall of 2009 and applications are available on its Web site |||
There are no present plans for rehabilitation programs for people like Larry Summers, but the program does cite a recent Science article which reports that a new study, led by psychologist Janet Hyde of the University of Wisconsin, shows that there is no difference between girls' and boys' test scores on common standardized math tests. Among students with the highest test scores, white boys outnumbered white girls by about two to one. But among Asians, that number was reversed. Obviously, cultural values have a lot to do with the scores, which is why things like the coastal studies program are important.
Wending our way through the state and local legal hurdles to help create the program, one of the issues was whether education was compatible with agriculture. This question astounded me because it was something I just took for granted.
For example, the 19th century Morrill Acts funded land grant institutions - with actual grants of land - to teach agriculture, military tactics, mechanic arts and home economics - as well as classical studies. Politicians of the era understood that, given
Schools have been central to the life and landscape of rural families in
You could not have had American agriculture without rural schools. They were inseparable. One study reports, "During the 1930s about one-half of all children went to school in rural areas, where the proportion of children to adults was higher than in the cities."
Today, only about two percent of Americans have had any direct contact with farms. And I needed only to watch the hesitancy with which my Bronx granddaughter made her first acquaintance with a Maine beach to be reminded of how many in this country have little contact not just with the study of nature, but contact with its scope and variety.
In the 19th century, the problem was to bring education to the natural areas of
November 20, 2008
POLITICAL DEFICIT DISORDER
Sam Smith
This is a problem that requires a whole new perspective and not merely a new administration. We have, as a culture, created a class of leaders who are so far removed from the realities of what they are managing that they have little idea of what to do when something goes wrong.
It's a problem that has been creeping up on us for a long time as trades were replaced by professions, boot straps by MBAs, lowly experience by higher education, empiricism by theory, and social intelligence by a form of high functioning autism.
Sixteen years ago, I ascribed this to a form of entropy that I dubbed global dumbing:
||| In physics, entropy is a measure of unavailable energy. In the natural world, entropy is reflected in the pollution from your car and radioactive tailings. If the world were perfect, energy would do just what it was supposed to do and not go wandering off like some groupie of that cosmic band, The Second Law of Thermodynamics. As it is, much of it is wasted and thus when you bake something, your kitchen as well as your oven gets warm. Such phenomena led the German physicist Ruldolf Clausius to propose in 1865 that we were losing energy everywhere and that we call this sorry state of affairs entropy. It's been downhill ever since.
Cultures lose energy, too. Which is why the Egyptians don't build pyramids any more, and why Guatemalans have to import digital watches rather than just checking their Mayan calendars. The creation of a great civilization or a great world power wastes a enormous amount of energy. As Barry Commoner put it, in nature there is no free lunch. . .
The global human mind faces a similar problem, thanks to such factors as the ubiquity of American film and television, excessively frequent summits of world leaders, international conferences on every conceivable subject, multinational corporations and other well meaning efforts that bring the world closer together but in so doing leaves no corner of it immune from human energy loss. If there is, in fact, a entropic collapse of the earth, the last sound may well be that of Larry King telling a caller from
Nor is this entropy limited to the more public pursuits. Indeed, a cursory examination of American business suggests that its major product is wasted energy. Compute all the energy loss created by corporate lawyers,
While there is much talk about the inefficiency of the auto industry, no one seems to notice the inefficiency of those trying to correct it, symbolized by word that at least one government agency is holding planning meetings in preparation for transition planning meetings. If these people were in
One of the blessed teachings of journalism is that you don't have to know anything; you just have to know who does. But even the press seems to have forgotten this as they regurgitate the stalls, sideshows, and superfluities that pass for a serious discussion.
Is there any way out? In the spirit of the hope we have been so frequently promised of late, here are a few things that might help:
- Bring in people who are good at things to baby sit those in the auto industry who aren't. A few examples would be the best from
- Figure out how many and what sort of cars we are actually going to need if we really do go green. The answer to this will help us figure out what sort of auto industry we need.
- Take one third of the Defense Department's research and development budget and use it for research & development of new forms of transportation and transit. Why one third of the Pentagon's R&D budget? It turns out to be about $25 billion, a figure that's being thrown around a lot these days as too much to spend to save the industry that built modern
- Go through all the patents that the auto industry bought up in the past in order to prevent competition with a strategy that has resulted in so much trouble. We may even find one for a car that runs on a USB connection.
- Start converting the auto industry into a mass transit industry. There is a precedent for this in the Budd Company that started building steel car bodies for Dodge in 1916 and ended up making modern Amtrak cars. It died in the 1980s because we thought cars were better than trains. Using billions to make equipment for the huge new rail system that we badly need would not be a bailout but a startup. And we could do it with government printed money - and not more debt - because it will be public works that creates wealth and employment rather than inflation.
- Bearing in mind that
If you don't like any or all of the above, come up with your own damn ideas. But note, in character and substance, how different these proposals are compared to the ones one more typically hears discussed in Washington, many of which involve little more than financial or legal manipulations of one sort or another. They are not unnecessary, but because of the inability of
This is a town which primarily likes to deal with law and numbers, policies and procedures. Making a car is not in its job description. Yet - as the housing foreclosure mess indicates - we can not retrieve
November 19, 2008
THE MELANIN OBSESSION
It's hard to remember, but not so long ago white liberals and blacks thought judging someone by their skin color was racist. Barack Obama has changed all that. Skin color is not only being used to judge him but the prospective future of the whole country as well.
Yet, if race doesn't matter, if we're purportedly moving into a post-racial society, then it cuts both ways. People can't, on the one hand, criticize those who blame blacks for crime while they place their own faith in one black for salvation. The latter is just a more benign use of the same faulty assumptions.
To keep this all straight, it helps to remember a few things:
- Race is a unscientific concept that was developed to promote prejudice. To even use the term caters to this dismal history.
- The far better terms are ethnicity or culture. Each of those groups popularly described as races reflect a large variety of cultures. The 9th Ward of New Orleans is not Dakar. And the west side of Manhattan is not the west side of Iowa.
- There is more physical (including DNA) difference between different cultures of the "black race" than there is between the average white or black. Our infatuation with skin color blinds us to this
- Barack Obama's black father left him when he was two. His mother was a white Kansan. He was raised from the age of ten by white grandparents in Hawaii.
A few days ago, a black friend said to me that now that Obama had been elected I was going to have to show him more respect. I replied that since Obama was half white we were even on that score and, since Obama and I both went to Harvard, it was I who came out ahead on the mutual identity scale.
Silly, but no more so than the highly successful effort to turn Obama into a racial icon despite his multicultural background, done by the very people who claim that race shouldn't be important.
It is wonderful that a presidential glass ceiling has been broken, but it is also worth remembering that Jack Kennedy also did it - and we haven't have a Catholic president since. Nor are we making the slightest progress in integrating the Senate. When I make the lonely argument for increasing the number of urban states, I sometimes note that if the Senate were a school system it would be under court ordered bussing, if it were a private firm it couldn't get business from the federal government and if it were a private club you'd want to resign from it before seeking public office.
But because of our American Idol approach to politics and change, the texture of the Senate doesn't even get mentioned while that of our new president becomes an obsessive symbol.
Living in DC, I have mostly voted for black candidates most of my life and know they range from virtuous to despicable as much as any bunch of white pols. I also know that the color of their skin is the worst possible predictor of how they will treat others less fortunate but of the same melanin density.
There is another problem with making such a big deal of ethnicity: it encourages others to do the same, others who may have been taught that those who do not look like themselves are lesser beings. White liberals tend to regard these people with contempt, but multicultural sophistication is nowhere near as widespread as some would like to believe and priggish disapproval is no more effective in such cases as it would be in teaching a child math. In fact, it helps to keep racial myths on the table by adding to the resentment.
It would be wiser if Obama's supporters could see themselves more as guides towards a successful multiculturalism than as triumphant members of one of America's many cultures. A good start would be to stop calling Obama black and celebrate the fact that he represents an ethnic complexity that increasingly will define our country. It's not as much fun and self-satisfying but it would better help America get on the right track.
November 17, 2008
SACRED TEXTS AND PROFANED HISTORY
When the political media isn't finding new ways to express its infatuation with our first half-black president-elect (while ignoring the total absence of blacks in the Senate), its most obsessive activity these days is quoting from Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals."
This is a familiar phenomenon: a press corps showing off its intellectual abilities by citing some newly discovered sacred text. The book itself may be - as with Goodwin's - worthy or it may be - as with the Rise of the Creative Class or the World is Flat - just airport bookstore blather, but in each case such works are given a journalistic priority beyond all reasonable justification.
To put it as simply as possible, Obama is not Lincoln. What we are living through is not the Civil War and, as Steven Teles points out in Same Facts, there is no parallel between today's Democratic Party and the nascent Republican Party of Lincoln's day: "The Republican party was still not a completely institutionalized entity, and to keep it together in its first shot at power Lincoln needed all the major figures in the party to be represented."
Further, what is required at present is not unity but recovery from the most evil and corrupt administration in our history. What is being proposed instead is that we find peace and common ground with the international criminals and domestic crooks who have been running the place. There is nothing but disaster in such unity.
To be fair, the media has gotten considerable help in propelling the faux Lincoln-Obama parallel from its living beneficiary. (The dead victim of the parallel, I suspect, would be polite but bored by his assigned partner).
After all, Obama began his presidential campaign in Springfield, Illinois, and in his book, The Audacity of Hope, he writes, "In Lincoln's rise from poverty, his ultimate mastery of language and law, his capacity to overcome personal loss and remain determined in the face of repeated defeat-in all this, he reminded me not just of my own struggles. . . "
But it didn't take long for the media to get the message, which is now so out of hand that Newsweek recently pontificated, "Two thin men from rude beginnings, relatively new to Washington but wise to the world, bring the nation together to face a crisis. Both are superb rhetoricians, both geniuses at stagecraft and timing."
In fact, the press, in Obama's case, has been unable to come up with a single example of that rhetoric other than some trite cliches. It is reflective of the sad state of writing in this country that the press can't distinguish the difference or even be as perceptive as Advertising Age which named Obama the marketer of the year. The Association of National Advertisers, according to PR Watch, "voted for Obama's campaign over ad campaigns by major companies like Apple, Zappos, Nike and Coors. Ad Age called Obama's historic November 4 win the 'biggest day in the history of marketing,' saying marketers have a lot to learn from his campaign."
When a British friend was enthusing over the first election of Tony Blair, I told him that I thought I had once bought a used car from Blair on Arlington Boulevard. I feel much the same way about Obama. Where others see a black Jesus I see a highly sophisticated salesman whose main product is himself. And the carefully constructed Lincoln parallel is part of the con.
Obama is in some ways a cleaned up version of Bill Clinton, the last great self salesman we had to confront. Both were deprived of their fathers; Obama at age 2 and Clinton a few months before his birth. Clinton's stepfather was an alcoholic who would lose his Buick franchise through mismanagement and his own pilfering. Young Bill turned to his Uncle Raymond who was a colorful car dealer, slot machine owner and gambling operator, who thrived (except when his house is firebombed) on the fault line of criminality. Add in George W's difficulties living in the shadow of his father and our last three presidencies have been assigned to men working out deep paternal problems.
The difference, however, is that in Obama there is none of that Buick dealer crudeness. We still have a salesman but we've moved up to Fifth Avenue. Which is why a lot of people don't see it.
And why they can't understand the con behind the Team of Rivals talk. Throughout his campaign, Obama promised change. Now, with his election secured, he is openly plotting how to continue the status quo, complete with Hillary Clinton and Republicans as cabinet members.
Yet, thanks to the media obsession with the Lincoln parallel, instead of debating this dubious and deceptive approach, a cynical con has been elevated to historical honor and the change we can count on slowly fades and, in its place, arises potentially the most conservative Democratic president since Woodrow Wilson.
One comfort is that these sacred texts tend to fade as rapidly as they rise. Weles even suggests that if Obama loses in 2012, we may find this headline: "Unfortunate Reading of Goodwin Seen By Observers as Cause of Obama's Downfall. Obama Agrees, Claims, 'I Should Have Read Cod: The Fish That Changed The World Instead'"
November 13, 2008
WHEN THE POND IS PURIFIED
Looking over the seven page questionnaire that the Obama organization has for prospective appointees, several thoughts occurred:
- I couldn't get a job there. Just assembling everything I had ever written or said would take me more than four years.
- Barack Obama couldn't get a job there, thanks to some of his less than elegant past connections.
- I wouldn't want to belong to an administration staffed with people who had passed this test. What a boring, unimaginative and probably ineffective crowd.
This may surprise some readers accustomed to my criticism of public officials. But as a student of political corruption going back to my 12th year when I helped Philadelphia, by stuffing envelopes, to end 69 years of GOP rule, I have come to understand important differences in corruption. Basically it comes down to this: what does the public get in return?
Today, very little. The typical corrupt politician doesn't even tithe to the voters. Instead, like so much of successful American life, politicians - instead of being favored members of a community - have become primarily manipulators of communities - narcissistic, insatiable strivers after personal wealth and power.
Compare them with Richard Daley pere or James Michael Curley, who continued to live in their communities and in the same dwellings for much of their careers. While plenty of people got rich off of them; they would seem pathetically inefficient at the personal abuse of power compared to the pols of today.
As I wrote at the beginning of the Clinton years:
||||| Reform breeds its own hubris and so few noticed that as we destroyed the evils of machine politics we also were breaking the links between politics and the individual, politics and community, politics and social life. We were beginning to segregate politics from ourselves.
As the Chicago alderman Vito Marzullo put it, "My home is open 24 hours a day. I want people to come in. As long as I have a breathing spell, I’ll go to a wake, a wedding, whatever. I never ask for anything in return. On election day, I tell my people, “Let your conscience be your guide."
In the world Marzullo politics was not something handed down to the people through such intermediaries as Larry King It was not the product of spin doctors, campaign hired guns or phony town meetings. It welled up from the bottom, starting with one loyal follower, one ambitious ballplayer, twelve unhappy pushcart peddlers. What defined politics was an unbroken chain of human experience, memory and gratitude.
Sure, it was corrupt. But we don't have much to be priggish about. The corruption of Watergate, Iran-Contra or the S&Ls fed no widows, found no jobs for the needy or, in the words of one Tammany leader, "grafted to the Republic" no newly arrived immigrants. At least Tammny's brand of corruption got down to the streets. Manipulation of the voter and corruption describe both Tammany and contemporary politics. The big difference is that in the former the voter could with greater regularity count on something in return. |||||
Key to the movements that replaced the old machines was not the elimination of corruption but its rebranding as acceptable "reform" or, in today's terms, "economic development" and "globalization." I can guarantee you that any developer will do better under DC's supposedly clean local government than under the old, corrupt Barry machine. The same would be true of corporations dealing with the Bush administration compared to the Eisenhower years. We have learned, at both the local and national level, how to legalize and sanitize corruption.
The other problem with squeaky cleanness is that it doesn't produce particularly good government. With a few exceptions - a long line of capable and honest New England politicians come to mind - the best government has often been the product of a maddening confluence of the good and the bad, the noble and the seedy. Thus, two of the biggest scoundrels of modern politics - LBJ and Adam Clayton Powell - got more good legislation passed in less time than anyone in American history and when asked to name the best mayor of Washington in my lifetime I shock people by saying Marion Barry in his first two terms - before he became a personal wreck.
When Barry began to fall apart, I wrote this:
||||| With Earl [Long] and Willie Stark (aka Huey Long) the mechanics of their politics was even more corrupt than that of our mayor; yet in some mystical way they managed to immunize the philosophy that the politics served from its corruption. Jack Burden, the journalist-turned-Stark henchman who narrates 'All the King's Men,' says at one point, "Process as process is neither morally good nor morally bad. We may judge results but not process. The morally bad agent may perform the deed which is good. The morally good agent may perform the deed which is bad. Maybe a man has to sell his soul to get the power to do good."
Thus you look at Huey Long's platform of the 1930s and wish the current national Democratic Party could do as well. But those were days when you could see and feel political virtue. A new road, a new hospital, tax relief that made a difference. Today politics has become a giant Nintendo game, exciting and convincing while you're playing, but nothing there when you turn off the set. If we drive around Washington we would be hard pressed to find places where we could point and say, "Look, at least Marion Barry did this." There are no Barry monuments, no Barry unfulfilled dreams, no Barry proverbs to mitigate his memory. Yet before we become too moralistic about it, we should remember that Barry was doing no more than playing by the current rules, which state that social programs only need be promised, wars on social ills need only be waged, and virtue only need be declared. Nothing in politics anymore need be brought to fruition. Marion Barry said he never used drugs; George Bush said he would eliminate them. And perhaps Barry learned from the Bushes of America that it really didn't matter what you said. No one would bother with the final truth. . . |||
In the eighteen years since that was written, it's only gotten worse. And that's one of the reasons I look as skeptically and carefully at the "reformers" - most recently Obama - as I do the corrupt. The potential for evil exist with both, the major difference being that with the reformer you don't get enough warning except from a few cynics like myself.
So I won't be filling out that questionnaire and I'm not too optimistic about those who do so successfully. It's like the poet William Stafford said, "When the pond is purified, the lilies die."
November 11, 2008
GETTING READY FOR ANOTHER ADMINISTRATION
If there is one consistency in media coverage of new administrations, whether Republican or Democrat, it is that the new crowd is brilliant, dramatic, unprecedented, world shaking and historic.
In other words, the coverage is almost always wrong.
The reason nobody cares or notices is that the point is not to demonstrate the sharpness of reporters' brains and eyes but the availability of their butts.
Even with the worst president in history on their docket, it wasn't until both the GOP and Democratic pretenders to the throne led the way that the media was finally willing to describe George Bush as a failure.
And so, less than a week after the polls have closed, we find Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic opening a Facebook group for journalists working on the presidential transition, which promises, "We'll use the space to exchange ideas and stories, and organize social events with members of the transition team." Just what objective journalism needs: more buddy drinking with your sources.
As I described it once: "Official Washington -- including government, media and the lobbies -- functions in many ways like America's largest and most prestigious club, a sort of indoor, east coast Bohemian Grove in which members engage in endless rites of mutual affirmation combined with an intense but genteel competition that determines the city's tennis ladder of political and social power. What appears to the stranger as a major struggle is often only an intramural game between members of the same club, lending an aura of dynamism to what is in truth deeply stable."
Among the victims of this culture - aside from the American people, of course - are those Washington figures who fail to play the game. Howard Dean, in the first post election week, has not only announced his departure from the Democratic National Committee but two hundred staffers of his 50 state strategy - which incidentally helped to put Obama and a Democratic Congress in power - have already been fired.
In another example, John Kerrry - whose only original (albeit inaccurate) thought was that he might be a good president - is among those being mentioned for Secretary of State. That would probably result in a promotion for one of the capital's outsiders and most honorable officials, Russ Feingold. But note how the Washington Post's Al Kamin handles it:
Speaking of secretary of state, it's looking increasingly like Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) may get the nod for that post, a possibility that is driving some Senate Democrats to distraction. No, not that they oppose Kerry. Not at all.
The problem is that the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Sen. Joe Biden (D-Del.), has picked up a new job. The second-ranking Democrat, Sen. Christopher Dodd (Conn.), has announced that he's staying on as head of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, what with all the troubles in the industry these days. . .
That means, yes indeed, next in line to chair the committee is Sen. Russ Feingold (Wis.), who tends to approach foreign policy and related matters from, let's say, a leftward direction. Feingold was the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act and is the leading advocate of cutting and running out of Iraq. That means the Obama administration, in addition to getting smacked around from the right on foreign policy matters, could find itself hammered from the left as well.
A town that sucks up to John Kerry and Rahm Emannuel and snubs Russ Feingold and Howard Dean needs some professional help. As things now, Jesus couldn't have his second coming in the capital unless it was on the new president's agenda.
November 05, 2008
CAN WE TALK ABOUT THE REAL OBAMA NOW?
Over the past few weeks I've been a good boy. I've placed everything having to do with the real Barack Obama into a futures file and spent my time on the far grimmer matter of the real John McCain and Sarah Palin.
Now the party is over and it's time for people to put away their Barack and Michelle dolls and start dealing with what has truly happened.
This, I admit, is difficult because the real Obama doesn't exist yet. He follows in the footsteps of our first postmodern president, Bill Clinton, who observed the principles outlined by scholar Pauline Marie Rosenau:
Post-modernists recognize an infinite number of interpretations . . . of any text are possible because, for the skeptical post-modernists, one can never say what one intends with language, [thus] ultimately all textual meaning, all interpretation is undecipherable.. . . Many diverse meanings are possible for any symbol, gesture, word . . . Language has no direct relationship to the real world; it is, rather, only symbolic.
As James Krichick wrote in the New Republic, "Obama is, in his own words, something of a Rorschach test. In his latest book, The Audacity of Hope, he writes, 'I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.' "
This is remarkably similar to Ted Koppel's description of Vanna White of TV's Wheel of Fortune: "Vanna leaves an intellectual vacuum, which can be filled by whatever the predisposition of the viewer happens to be."
Obama has left the same kind of vacuum. His magic, or con, was that voters could imagine whatever they wanted and he would do nothing to spoil their reverie. He was a handsome actor playing the part of the first black president-to-be and, as in films, he was careful not to muck up the role with real facts or issues that might harm the fantasy. Hence the enormous emphasis on meaningless phrases like hope and change.
Of course, in Obama's postmodern society -- one that rises above the purported false teachings of partisanship -- we find ourselves with little to steer us save the opinions of whatever non-ideologue happens to be in power. In this case, we may really only have progressed from the ideology of the many to the ideology of the one or, some might say, from democracy to authoritarianism.
The Obama campaign was driven in no small part by a younger generation trained to accept brands as a substitute for policies. If the 1960s had happened like this, the activists would have spent all their time trying to get Martin Luther King or Joan Baez elected president rather than pursing ancillary issues like ending segregation and the war in Vietnam.
Obama himself took his vaunted experience in community organizing and turned its principles on its head. Instead of empowering the many at the bottom, he used the techniques to empower one at the top: himself.
It is historic that a black has been elected president, but we should remember that Obama was not running against Bull Connor, George Wallace or Strom Thurmond. Putting Obama in the same class as earlier black activists discredits the honor of those who died, suffered physical harm or were repeatedly jailed to achieve equality. Obama is not a catalyst of change, but rather its belated beneficiary. The delay, to be sure, is striking; after all, the two white elite sports of tennis and golf were integrated long before presidential politics, but Washington - as Phil Hart said of the Senate - has always been a place that always does things twenty years after it should have.
There is an informative precedent to Obama's rise. Forty-two years ago Edward Brooke became the first black senator to be elected with a majority of white votes. Brooke was chosen from Massachusetts as a Republican in a state that was 97% white.
Jason Sokol, who teaches history at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in History News Network:
|||| On Election Day, Brooke triumphed with nearly 60 percent of the vote. Newspapers and magazines hummed with approval. The Boston Globe invoked a legacy that included the Pilgrims, Daniel Webster, and Charles Sumner, offering the Bay State as the nation's racial and political pioneer.
Journalist Carl Rowan was among the unconvinced. For whites, voting for Brooke became "a much easier way to wipe out guilt feelings about race than letting a Negro family into the neighborhood or shaking up a Jim Crow school setup." Polling numbers lent credence to Rowan's unease. They showed that only 23 percent of Massachusetts residents approved of a statewide school integration law; just 17 percent supported open housing. ||||
That's the problem with change coming from the top, as Obama might have heard when he was involved in real community organizing. It also helps to explain why there have been no more Catholic presidents since John Kennedy. Symbolism is not the change we need.
Getting at the reality of Obama is difficult. He performs as the great black liberal, but since he is one half white and one half conservative, that doesn't leave him a lot of wiggle room.
To be sure, in the Senate he got good ratings from various liberal groups, but two things need to be remembered:
First, liberals aren't that liberal any more. Thus getting a 90% score merely means that you went along with the best that an extremely conservative Democratic Party was willing to risk. This is not a party that would, in these times, have passed Social Security, Medicare or minimum wage. In fact, many liberals aren't much interested in economic issues at all - especially that portion of the constituency that controls the money, the media and the message.
Second, politicians reflect their constituency. Obama's constituency is no longer Illinois. He has a whole new set of folks to pander to.
There is one story from Chicago, however, that remains relevant. A citizen walks into his alderman's office looking for a job. "Who sent you?" he asks. "Nobody," he replies. Says the staffer: "We don't want nobody nobody sent."
Who sent Barack Obama remains a mystery. He has risen from an unknown state senator to president in exactly four years and that only happens when somebody sends for you.
The black liberal image falters on a number of other scores including Obama's affection for extreme right wingers like Chuck Hagel and an obvious indifference to anybody who votes like, say, a state senator from Hyde Park. Think back over the campaign and try to recall a single instance when Obama reached out to the progressive wing of the Democratic Party or to the better angels of the Congressional Black Caucus. Instead his ads attacked as 'extreme' the single payer health insurance backed by many of his own supporters, he dissed ACORN and Colin Powell was as radical a black as he wanted to be seen palling around with.
The key issue that has driven Obama throughout his career has been Obama. He has achieved virtually nothing for any other cause. His politics reflects whatever elite consensus he gathers around himself. This is why his "post partisanship" needs to be watched so carefully. If Bernie Sanders and John Conyers don't get to White House meetings as often as Chuck Hagel, Obama will glide easily to the right, as every president has done over the past thirty years. If liberals, as they did with Clinton, watch without a murmur as their president redesigns their party to fit his personal ambitions, then the whole country will continue to move to the right as well.
Since the real Obama doesn't exist yet, it is impossible to predict with any precision what he will do. But here is some of the evidence gathered over the past months that should serve both as a warning and as a prod to progressives not to take today's dreams as a reasonable facsimile of reality:
Business interests
Advisor Cass Sunstein told Jeffrey Rosen of the NY Times: "I would be stunned to find an anti-business [Supreme Court] appointee from either [Clinton or Obama]. There's not a strong interest on the part of Obama or Clinton in demonizing business, and you wouldn't expect to see that in their Supreme Court nominees."
Obama supported making it harder to file class action suits in state courts. David Sirota in the Nation wrote, "Opposed by most major civil rights and consumer watchdog groups, this big business-backed legislation was sold to the public as a way to stop 'frivolous' lawsuits. But everyone in Washington knew the bill's real objective was to protect corporate abusers."
He voted for a business-friendly "tort reform" bill
He voted against a 30% interest rate cap on credit cards
He had the most number of foreign lobbyist contributors in the primaries
He was even more popular with Pentagon contractors than McCain
He was most popular of the candidates with K Street lobbyists
In 2003, rightwing Democratic Leadership Council named Obama as one of its "100 to Watch." After he was criticized in the black media, Obama disassociated himself with the DLC. But his major economic advisor, Austan Goolsbee, is also chief economist of the conservative organization. Writes Doug Henwood of the Left Business Observer, "Goolsbee has written gushingly about Milton Friedman and denounced the idea of a moratorium on mortgage foreclosures."
Added Henwood, "Top hedge fund honcho Paul Tudor Jones threw a fundraiser for him at his Greenwich house last spring, 'The whole of Greenwich is backing Obama,' one source said of the posh headquarters of the hedge fund industry. They like him because they're socially liberal, up to a point, and probably eager for a little less war, and think he's the man to do their work. They're also confident he wouldn't undertake any renovations to the distribution of wealth."
Civil liberties
He supports the war on drugs
He supports the crack-cocaine sentence disparity
He supports Real ID
He supports the PATRIOT Act
He supports the death penalty
He opposes lowering the drinking age to 18
He supported amnesty for telecoms engaged in illegal spying on Americans
Conservatives
He went to Connecticut to support Joe Lieberman in the primary against Ned Lamont
Wrote Paul Street in Z Magazine, "Obama has lent his support to the aptly named Hamilton Project, formed by corporate-neo-liberal Citigroup chair Robert Rubin and other Wall Street Democrats to counter populist rebellion against corporatist tendencies within the Democratic Party. . . Obama was recently hailed as a Hamiltonian believer in limited government and free trade by Republican New York Times columnist David Brooks, who praises Obama for having "a mentality formed by globalization, not the SDS."
Writes the London Times, "Obama is hoping to appoint cross-party figures to his cabinet such as Chuck Hagel, the Republican senator for Nebraska and an opponent of the Iraq war, and Richard Lugar, leader of the Republicans on the Senate foreign relations committee. Senior advisers confirmed that Hagel, a highly decorated Vietnam war veteran and one of McCain's closest friends in the Senate, was considered an ideal candidate for defense secretary.
Richard Lugar was rated 0% by SANE. . . rated 0% by AFL-CIO. . . rated 0% BY NARAL. . . rated 12% by American Public Health Association. . . rated 0% by Alliance for Retired Americans. . . rated 27% by the National Education Association. . . rated 5% by League of Conservation Voters. . . He voted no on implementing the 9/11 Commission report. . . Vote against providing habeas corpus for Gitmo prisoners. . .voted no on comprehensive test ban treaty. . .voted against same sex marriage. . . strongly anti-abortion. . . opposed to more federal funding for healthcare. . .voted for unconstitutional wiretapping. . .voted to increase penalties for drug violations
Chuck Hagel was rated 0% by NARAL. . . rated 11% by NAACP. . . rated 0% by Human Rights Coalition. . . rated 100% by Christian Coalition. . . rated 12% by American Public Health Association. . . rated 22% by Alliance for Retired Americans. . . rated 36% by the National Education Association. . . rated 0% by League of Conservation Voters. . . rated 8% by AFL-CIO. . . He is strongly anti-abortion. . .voted for anti-flag desecration amendment. . .voted to increase penalties for drug violations. . . favors privatizing Social Security
Ecology
Obama voted for a nuclear energy bill that included money for bunker buster bombs and full funding for Yucca Mountain.
He supports federally funded ethanol and is unusually close to the ethanol industry.
He led his party's reversal of a 25-year ban on off-shore oil drilling
Education
Obama has promised to double funding for private charter schools, part of a national effort undermining public education.
He supports the No Child Left Behind Act albeit expressing reservations about its emphasis on testing. Writes Cory Mattson, "Despite NCLB''s loss of credibility among educators and the deadlock surrounding its attempted reauthorization in 2007, Barack Obama still offers his support. Even the two unions representing teachers, both which for years supported reform of the policy to avoid embarrassing their Democratic Party 'friends,' declared in 2008 that the policy is too fundamentally flawed to be reformed and should be eliminated."
Fiscal policy
Obama rejected moratoriums on foreclosures and a freeze on rates, measures supported by his primary opponents John Edwards and Hillary Clinton
He was a strong supporter of the $700 billion cash-for-trash banker bailout plan.
Two of his top advisors are former Goldman Sachs chair Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers. Noted Glen Ford of black Agenda Report, "In February 1999, Rubin and Summers flanked Fed Chief Alan Greenspan on the cover of Time magazine, heralded as, 'The Committee to Save the World.' Summers was then Secretary of the Treasury for Bill Clinton, having succeeded his mentor, Rubin, in that office. Together with Greenspan, the trio had in the previous year labored successfully to safeguard derivatives, the exotic 'ticking time bomb' financial instruments, from federal regulation."
Robert Scheer notes that "Rubin, who pocketed tens of millions running Goldman Sachs before becoming treasury secretary, is the man who got President Clinton to back legislation by then-Sen. Phil Gramm, R-Texas, to unleash banking greed on an unprecedented scale."
Obama's fund-raising machine has been headed by Penny Prtizker former chair of the Superior Bank, one of the first to get into subprime mortgages. While she resigned as chair of the family business in 1994, as late as 2001 she was still on the board and wrote a letter saying that her family was recapitalizing the bank and pledging to "once again restore Superior's leadership position in subprime lending." The bank shut down two months later and the Pritzker family would pay $460 million in a settlement with the government.
Foreign policy
Obama endorsed US involvement in the failed drug war in Colombia: "When I am president, we will continue the Andean Counter-Drug Program."
He has expressed a willingness to bomb Iran and won't rule out a first strike nuclear attack.
He has endorsed bombing or invading Pakistan to go after Al Qaeda in violation of international law. He has called Pakistan "the right battlefield ... in the war on terrorism."
He supports Israeli aggression and apartheid. Obama has deserted previous support for two-state solution to Mid East situation and refuses to negotiate with Hamas.
He has supported Jerusalem as the capitol of Israel, saying "it must remain undivided."
He favors expanding the war in Afghanistan.
Although he claims to want to get out of Iraq, his top Iraq advisor wrote that America should keep between 60,000 and 80,000 troops in Iraq. Obama, in his appearances, blurred the difference between combat soldiers and other troops.
He indicated to Amy Goodman that he would leave 140,000 private contractors and mercenaries in Iraq because "we don't have the troops to replace them."
He has called Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez an enemy of the United States and urged sanctions against him.
He claimed "one of the things that I think George H.W. Bush doesn't get enough credit for was his foreign policy team and the way that he helped negotiate the end of the Cold War and prosecuted the Gulf War. That cost us $20 billion dollars. That's all it cost. It was extremely successful. I think there were a lot of very wise people."
He has hawkish foreign policy advisors who have been involved in past US misdeeds and failures. These include Zbigniew Brzezinski, Anthony Lake, General Merrill McPeak, and Dennis Ross.
It has been reported that he might well retain as secretary of defense Robert Gates who supports actions in violation of international law against countries merely suspected of being unwilling or unable to halt threats by militant groups.
Gays
Obama opposes gay marriage. He wouldn't have photo taken with San Francisco mayor because he was afraid it would seem that he supported gay marriage
Health
Obama opposes single payer healthcare or Medicare for all.
Military
Obama would expand the size of the military.
National Service
Obama favors a national service plan that appears to be in sync with one being promoted by a new coalition that would make national service mandatory by 2020, and with a bill requiring such mandatory national service introduced by Rep. Charles Rangel.
He announced in Colorado Springs last July, "We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we've set. We've got to have a civilian national security force that's just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded."
On another occasion he said, "It's also important that a president speaks to military service as an obligation not just of some, but of many. You know, I traveled, obviously, a lot over the last 19 months. And if you go to small towns, throughout the Midwest or the Southwest or the South, every town has tons of young people who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. That's not always the case in other parts of the country, in more urban centers. And I think it's important for the president to say, this is an important obligation. If we are going into war, then all of us go, not just some." Some have seen this as a call for reviving the draft.
He has attacked the exclusion of ROTC on some college campuses
Presidential crimes
Obama aggressively opposed impeachment actions against Bush. One of his key advisors, Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago Law School, said prosecuting government officials risks a "cycle" of criminalizing public service.
Progressives
Unlike his deferential treatment of right wing conservatives, Obama's treatment of the left has been dismissive to insulting. He dissed Nader for daring to run for president again. And he called the late Paul Wellstone "something of a gadfly"
Public Campaign Financing
Obama's retreat from public campaign financing has endangered the whole concept.
Social welfare
Obama wrote that conservatives and Bill Clinton were right to destroy social welfare,
Social Security
Early in the campaign, Obama said, "everything is on the table" with Social Security.
As things now stand, the election primarily represents the extremist center seizing power back from the extremist right. We have moved from the prospect of disasters to the relative comfort of mere crises.
Using the word 'extreme' alongside the term 'center' is no exaggeration. Nearly all major damage to the United States in recent years - a rare exception being 9/11 - has been the result of decisions made not by right or left but by the post partisan middle: Vietnam, Iraq, the assault on constitutional liberties, the huge damage to the environment, and the collapse of the economy - to name a few. Go back further in history and you'll find, for example, the KKK riddled with members of the establishment including - in Colorado - a future governor, senator and mayor after whom Denver's airport is named. The center, to which Obama pays such homage, has always been where most of the trouble lies.
The only thing that will make Obama the president pictured in the campaign fantasy is unapologetic, unswerving and unendingly pressure on him in a progressive and moral direction, for he will not go there on his own. But what, say, gave the New Deal its progressive nature was pressure from the left of a sort that simply doesn't exist today.
Above are listed nearly three dozen things that Obama supports or opposes with which no good liberal or progressive would agree. Unfortunately, what's out there now, however, looks more like a rock concert crowd or evangelical tent meeting than a determined and directed political constituency. Which isn't so surprising given how successful our system have been at getting people to accept sights, sounds, symbols and semiotics as substitutes for reality. Once again, it looks like we'll have to learn the hard way.