[Marxism] 2 items on Obama from Counterpunch

[Louis Proyect]

Counterpunch Weekend Edition
July 12 / 13, 2008

Will Progressives Go Gently Into Another Political Night?
After the Obama Betrayal

By GREGORY KAFOURY

 From The New York Times to The Huffington Post, from 
Counterpunch.org to The Nation, the outcry is the same:  Obama is not 
the man he presented himself to be.

As he now panders to seemingly any right-wing group that can fill a 
room, his staff is arranging fundraisers where the cover charge is 
$30,000.  Bob Herbert of the NYT echos the "disillusion" of "many of 
Obama's strongest supporters who are uneasy, upset, dismayed and even angry."

Across the progressive spectrum, the consensus is that Obama has 
abandoned any prospect for a transformational presidency, breathed 
life into a moribund and discredited right-wing, and incomprehensibly 
placed his very election at risk.

Most crucially, Obama has made the utterly cynical calculation that 
there is no price to be paid for abandoning his base, that the mantra 
of Anybody But Bush seamlessly melds into Anybody But McCain, that 
progressives will simply surrender.

So sure is Obama that progressives will bear any insult that he has 
taken to channeling the odious Jeanne Kirkpatrick of the Reagan era, 
denouncing those "counter-culturalists" who opposed the imperial wars 
from Vietnam to El Salvador and Nicaragua as the "blame America" crowd.

If Obama's analysis of progressives is correct, we can expect another 
depressing campaign, what Herbert calls "the terminal emptiness of 
politics as usual," followed by a presidency that honors right-wing 
ideology while serving corporate power.

But what if Obama is wrong?  What if progressives have a breaking 
point?  We have seen a revolt against Obama's FISA/Telecom betrayal 
play out on Obama's website, but the candidate has already responded 
to those dismayed supporters by essentially blowing them off.  Is 
this a "deal-breaker," he asks, as if to say, "What are you going to 
do about it?"

There are some who suggest doing something.  John Nichols of The 
Nation suggests a coordinated push to get Ralph Nader into a debate 
with Obama and McCain.  Google and YouTube are sponsoring a debate in 
New Orleans this fall, and the bar is set at 10% support.  Nader is 
at 6% according to CNN, and those who would vote for him if he were 
competitive was 14% in a recent Fox poll.  It is vastly easier to go 
from 14% to 30% than to go from nothing to 14%.

Nader would be -- to say the least -- a formidable presence in any 
debate.  Once one gets beyond the caricature of Nader promoted by the 
political establishment, one sees a candidate who has intimate 
knowledge of every aspect of our corporate government, because we 
learn about an institution not by yielding to it, but by opposing it, 
something Nader alone has done for decades.  Further, he is a man who 
has never flattered us, never pandered to our baser instincts and 
never lied to us.

The prospect of such a debate would get Obama's attention; the 
reality of it might shift the center of our politics as nothing else 
holds the promise of doing.

For those who do not wish to go gently, there is an alternative.

Gregory Kafoury is a trial lawyer and political activist in Portland, 
Oregon.  He can be reached at kafoury at kafourymcdougal.com.

----

Counterpunch Weekend Edition
July 12 / 13, 2008

Obama and the Future of an Illusion
The Audacity of Hype

By FRAN SHOR

In the aftermath of Senator Barack Obama's capitulation to the Bush 
Administration's new FISA bill and in the face of continuing evidence 
that Obama is more of a triangulating than transformative politician, 
many of his "progressive" defenders are doing their own triangulating 
tango in order to remain loyal followers.  More than mere loyal 
legions, a number of these progressive pundits remain active 
advocates for the Obama campaign.  In the process, they have 
articulated arguments that cry out for rebuttal, especially from 
those of us who still have some glimmer of a hope that real, if not 
radical, change is possible in the near future.

Among the most crude rationalizations for Obama's recent political 
posturing is BuzzFlash's P.M. Carpenter.  Writing from the implicit 
perspective that the "ends justify the means," Carpenter insists that 
electoral reality requires any candidate to first get elected.  From 
this simple-minded proposition, Carpenter makes an incredible leap to 
asserting that "Barack Obama
could go goose-stepping down 
Constitution Avenue while whistling "White House uber Alles" – if 
that's what it takes to secure even one more purple-state 
vote."  Since his vote to eviscerate the 4th Amendment in the Bush 
FISA bill, Obama may have certainly helped some goose-step over the 
Constitution itself.

Beyond Carpenter's gross instrumentalism, we find the more subtle, 
but no less questionable, opinions of Norman Solomon.  In a piece 
published recently on CommonDreams called "Obama and the Progressive 
Base," Solomon correctly identifies Obama as a centrist 
chameleon.  Urging that the "best way to avoid being disillusioned is 
to not have illusions in the first place," he, nonetheless, 
postulates a number of fundamental illusions about the Obama 
candidacy.  Maintaining that progressives "can help the Obama for 
President effort where we hold him to his good positions and move to 
buck him up when he wavers," Solomon completely neglects the massive 
and failing effort to get Obama to hold to his original intention to 
support Feingold and others in protecting against any further erosion 
of habeas corpus in the FISA legislation.  When Solomon isn't 
overlooking grassroot attempts to pull Obama in a progressive 
direction, he creates a mythical progressive movement attached to and 
valued by the Obama campaign.  Talk about illusions!

On the other hand, there were a number of us (Dave Lindorf, Dan 
LaBotz, myself, and others) who did argue, and may still believe with 
Solomon, that "putting Obama in the White House would not by any 
means ensure progressive change, but under his presidency the 
grassroots would have an opportunity to create it."  I now have 
profound doubts that what will emerge from an Obama presidency, which 
I believe has become more problematic because of his triangulations, 
is any social space to create progressive change.  While I would not 
foreclose the possibility of the coalescing of new social movements, 
especially given what followed from FDR's timid 1932 campaign and 
JFK's mach cold war run in 1960, I think all of us must confront 
certain other illusions about change in this historical era and this 
political culture.

One of the most far-reaching critiques of our political situation is 
found in Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of 
War.  The authors contend that the "modern state
has come to need 
weak citizenship.  It depends more and more on maintaining an 
impoverished and hygienized public realm, in which only the ghosts of 
an older more idiosyncratic civil society live on" (21).  The fact 
that the electoral arena dominates this impoverished public realm 
during an election year only reinforces the desperate activities of 
weak citizens.  Touting the invigorated role of young people and 
African-Americans (maybe less invigorated now as a consequence of 
disillusionment with Obama) assumes that their electoral mobilization 
will easily translate into on-going movements for social 
change.  Given the difficulty of translating any mobilization into a 
dedicated movement, investing hopes in any electoral campaign, let 
alone one with the deficiencies of the Obama candidacy, seems 
extremely illusory.

Some time ago the historian Gabriel Kolko posited the persistence in 
US political culture of what he called "mechanistic optimism," a 
belief that things would always change for the better.  Hence, 
invoking "change we can believe in," becomes an empty slogan for the 
perpetuation of that mechanistic optimism.  Perhaps, we need to 
assert a more realistic pessimism of the intelligence, particularly 
in the face of the end of US hegemony and increasing environmental 
catastrophe.  While not wanting to perpetuate the worst instincts of 
the reactionary ravages of the right, perfectly still embodied, if 
not embalmed, in the candidacy of John McCain, we can certainly agree 
with Robert Savio, founder of the left Inter Press Service, when he 
claims that he doubts whether "as President Barack Obama would be 
able to motivate the formation of an opposition as vast" as that 
unleashed by George W. Bush.  Such an argument should not be seen, 
however, as an endorsement of putting McCain in the White House.  It 
should, however, be kept in mind when assessing the fulcrum of 
fundamental change in our world, both local and global.

If fundamental change can no longer emanate from within the US, it 
does not follow that there are no opportunities to provide some 
relief for those suffering from the worst predations of the Bush 
years and the continuing, if even more desperate, policies of 
neo-conservatism.  Perhaps Obama in the White House will be more than 
a color cover-up for the perpetuation of empire and the failed 
Beltway politics of the past or the revised politics of 
neo-liberalism.  Yet, there is no evidence that Obama, his entourage, 
or his loyal legions are the repository of real change, or even 
"change that we can believe in."

The sooner we confront the pervasive failings of electoralism and our 
present predicaments, the better positioned we may be to aid in the 
transformative politics we see beyond our borders, both mental and physical.

Fran Shor teaches in the History Department at Wayne State 
University. He is an activist with numerous groups for peace and 
social justice.