The Obama Illusion: Presidential ambitions from the start

Long before any formal announcement, it was obvious that overnight sensation Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) wanted to be the US's next chief executive. The "charismatic" Obama was campaigning by at least November 2005, less than a year out of the Illinois state legislature. During 2006, Obama gave grave and "realistic" foreign policy speeches and made appearances on the "Tonight Show," "Meet the Press," "Late Night With Conan O'Brien," the covers and/or pages of Time, Men's Vogue, Marie Claire, Vanity Fair and Washington Life. He appeared at the early political proving grounds of Iowa and New Hampshire. He reached across political and cultural lines–making a special point of talking to the religious right. He released a self-promotional book (deceptively titled The Audacity of Hope) that screamed presidential ambition beneath false humility and ponderous, power-worshipping prose. He received the praise, money, positive media attention and public recognition that a serious presidential run requires. His campaign fundraising Midas touch became a factor in the mid-term Congressional elections. The significance of his ambition and ever-rising stature is enhanced by the fact that the Democrats' presumed front-runner, Hillary Clinton, is seen by many election experts and brokers as unelectable. If the Democrats' candidate in 2008 is Obama, we can be sure that the right-wing Republican noise machine will denounce the nation's potential first non-white male president as a dangerous "leftist." The charge will be absurd, something that will hardly stop numerous people on the portside of the narrow US political spectrum from claiming Obama as a fellow "progressive." Certain to be encouraged by Obama and his handlers, this confusion will reflect the desperation and myopia that shaky thinking and the limited choices of the US electoral system regularly instill in liberals and some squishy near-leftists. So what sorts of policies and values could one expect from an imagined Obama presidency? There is quite a bit already in Obama's short national career that has to be placed in the "nevermind" category if one is to seriously believe his claim (cautiously advanced in The Audacity of Hope) to be a "progressive" concerned with "social and economic justice" and global peace. Never mind, for example, that 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." Nevermind that Obama (consistent with Brooks's description of him) has lent his support to the aptly named Hamilton Project, formed by corporate-neoliberal Citigroup chair Robert Rubin and "other Wall Street Democrats" to counter populist rebellion against corporatist tendencies within the Democratic Party (David Sirota, "Mr. Obama Goes to Washington," The Nation, June 26, 2006). Or that he lent his politically influential and financially rewarding assistance to neoconservative pro-war Senator Joe Lieberman's ("D"-CT) struggle against the Democratic antiwar insurgent Ned Lamont. Or that he chose Lieberman to be his "assigned" mentor in the US Senate. Or that he criticized efforts to enact filibuster proceedings against reactionary Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. Or that "he posted a long article on the liberal blog Daily Kos criticizing attacks against lawmakers who voted for right-wing Supreme Court nominee John Roberts." Or that he opposed an amendment to the Bankruptcy Act that would have capped credit card interest rates at 30 percent. Or that he told Time magazine's Joe Klein last year that he'd never given any thought to Al Gore's widely discussed proposal to link a "carbon tax" on fossil fuels to targeted tax relief for the nation's millions of working poor (Joe Klein, "The Fresh Face," Time, Oct. 17, 2006). Nevermind that Obama voted for a business-friendly "tort reform" bill that rolls back working peoples' ability to obtain reasonable redress and compensation from misbehaving corporations (Sirota). Or that Obama claims to oppose the introduction of single-payer national health insurance on the grounds that such a widely supported social-democratic change would lead to employment difficulties for workers in the private insurance industry–at places like Kaiser and Blue Cross Blue Shield (Sirota). In an interview with Klein, Obama expressed reservations about a universal health insurance plan recently enacted in Massachusetts, stating his preference for "voluntary" solutions over "government mandates." The former, he said, is "more consonant with" what he called "the American character"–a position contradicted by regular polling data showing that most Americans support Canadian-style single-payer health insurance. Nevermind that Obama voted to reauthorize the repressive PATRIOT Act. Or that he opposed Senator Russ Feingold's (D-WI) move to censure the Bush administration after the president was found to have illegally wiretapped US citizens. Or that he shamefully distanced himself from fellow Illinois Democratic Senator Dick Durbin's forthright criticism of US torture practices at Guantánamo. Or that he refuses to foreswear the use of first-strike nuclear weapons against Iran. Nevermind that Obama's famous 2004 Democratic Convention Keynote Address–widely credited for catapulting him to national prominence–expressed numerous reactionary and incorrect notions that make the praise it received from the far-right National Review (who called Obama's oration "simple and powerful") less than mysterious on close examination. This speech claimed that the US is the ultimate "beacon for freedom and opportunity," the "only country on earth" where his supposedly "rags to riches" is "even possible." Nevermind Obama's "mush-mouthed" (Glen Ford and Peter Gamble, "Obama Mouths Mush on War," Black Commentator, Dec. 1, 2005) pronouncements on the illegal, racist and imperialist invasion and occupation of Iraq. Obama's handlers and supporters place considerable emphasis on the claim that the junior senator from Illinois has voiced a "consistent position against the war" and (by extension) the Middle East. The assertion has some technical accuracy; Obama has publicly questioned the Bush administration's case for war since the fall of 2002. But serious scrutiny of his "antiwar position" shows that the supposedly "pragmatic" and "non-ideological" Obama speaks in deferential accord with the doctrine of empire. In Obama's carefully crafted rhetoric, Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL) has been a "strategic blunder" on the part of an essentially benevolent nation state. Given his presidential ambitions, it is unthinkable for him to acknowledge the invasion's status as a great international transgression that is consistent with the United States' long record of imperial criminality. It is equally unimaginable for him to acknowledge that the war expressed Washington's drive to deepen its control of strategic petroleum resources–an ambition in direct opposition to the alleged US goals of encouraging Iraqi freedom and exporting democracy. Obama's November speech to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs (CCGA) advocates a vaguely timed Iraq "scenario" in which "US forces" might remain in the occupied state for an "extended period of time." Obama advances a "reduced but active [US military] presence" that "protect[s] logistical supply points" and "American enclaves like the Green Zone" (site of one of the largest and most heavily militarized imperial "embassies" in history) while "send[ing] a clear message to hostile countries like Iran and Syria that we intend to remain a key player in the region." US troops "remaining in Iraq" will "act as rapid reaction forces to respond to emergencies and go after terrorists." This is part of what Obama meant when he told a fawning David Brooks that (in Brooks's approving language) "the US may have no choice but to slog it out in Iraq" (David Brooks, "Run, Barack, Run," New York Times, Oct. 19, 2006). Nevermind that the mid-term elections and a mountain of polling data show that the majority of Americans support rapid US withdrawal, as do the vast majority of the Iraqi people–the purported beneficiaries of Cheney's "dreams of democracy." The only polling data that Obama referenced in his CCGA speech and in the foreign policy chapter of his recent book is meant to illustrate what he considers to be the real danger in the wake of the OIL fiasco: that Americans are leaning dangerously towards "isolationism" and thus turning their backs on the noble superpower's global "responsibilities." Liberal bloggers and writers at places like Daily Kos and the leftmost sections of the corporate-neoliberal punditocracy (e.g., Frank Rich at The New York Times) can speak and write all they wish about the "progressive" potential of a Barockstar presidency. As David Sirota rightly observed last summer, Obama is "interested in fighting only for those changes that fit within the existing boundaries of what's considered mainstream in Washington, instead of using his platform to redefine those boundaries. This posture," Sirota notes, "comes even as polls consistently show that Washington's definition of mainstream is divorced from the rest of the country's (for example, politicians' refusal to debate the war even as polls show that Americans want the troops home)." It is because of Obama's "rare ability to mix charisma and deference to the establishment," Sirota finds (in an overly respectful assessment), that "Beltway publications and think tanks have heaped praise on Obama and want him to run for president." But then, Obama would never have risen so quickly and remarkably to his current position of dominant media favor and national prominence if he was anything like the egalitarian and democratic "progressive" that some liberals and leftists imagine. In the corporate-crafted and money-dominated swamp that passes for "representative democracy" in the US, concentrated economic and imperial power open and close doors in ways that preemptively suffocate populist potential. Big money is not in the business of promoting genuine social justice or democracy activists. Viewing public policy as a mechanism for the upward distribution of wealth, it promotes empire and inequality by underwriting what Ken Silverstein calls "the smothering K Street culture and the revolving door that feeds it–not just lobbyists themselves but the entire interconnected world of campaign consultants, public relations agencies, pollsters and media strategists"–without whose favor and assistance serious presidential bids are next to unthinkable. "All of this," Silverstein notes, "has forged a political culture that is intrinsically hostile to reform" (Ken Silverstein, "Barack Obama Inc.: The Birth of a Washington Machine," Harpers' Magazine, November 2006). Obama (a former editor of the Harvard Law Review) knows this very well. He's been "trimming his sails," as he likes to say when he's telling more genuinely progressive interviewers (e.g. Sirota and Silverstein) why he had to support one corporate or militarism-friendly policy or position after another. He's been expressing his deep deference for the national and global politico-economic establishment in accord with harsh plutocratic realities. He has had to make his "charismatic" way through Mammon's polyarchic vetting rounds, impressing the critical gate-keeping powers-that-be with his "reasonable" commitment to working within the existing dominant domestic and imperial hierarchies. He wouldn't be where he is, practically overnight, if he hadn't made his "Hamiltonian" (corporate-imperial) safety clear to the masters of national policy and doctrine, who hold the keys to the kingdom. As a Washington lobbyist recently told Silverstein, "Big donors would not be helping out Obama if they didn't see him as a 'player'.... What's the dollar value of a starry-eyed idealist?"