Not a single, solitary, actual dyed-in-the-wool progressive has, as far as I can tell, even been mentioned for a position in the new administration. Not one. Remember this is the movement that was right about Iraq, right about wage stagnation and inequality, right about financial deregulation, right about global warming and right about health care...
And yet, no one who comes from the part of American political and intellectual life that has given birth to all of these ideas is anywhere to be found within miles of the Obama cabinet thus far. WTF?As Socrates might have put it: Like, duh.
There were no real progressives (as Hayes defines the term) on Team Obama during the campaign. Everyone on the left just sort of imagined that Obi had surrounded himself with the all of sorts of come-comrades-come-rally types. This hallucination was also fed by the right-leaning PUMA sites, such as No Quarter. Only a very few voices (he said with a cough while tapping his chest) dared to argue that Obama inhabits a political space located further to the right than most people believe.
To be frank, I'm pleasantly surprised to see all of those old Clinton hands. I thought Obi was going to go much "righter" than that. I mean, where's Austan? Has he been sent back to his cage in MiltonFreidmanLand?
If you'll scan the response to Hayes' piece, you'll see the usual Tourettes-like outbursts of Clinton-hate:
Yugoslavia was bombed and dismantled as part of what Noam Chomsky described as the "New Military Humanism." Sudan and Afghanistan were attacked, Haiti was destabilized and "free trade" deals like the North America Free Trade Agreement and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade radically escalated the spread of corporate-dominated globalization...Yada yada, mix through to an old Irish priest sermonizing on British atrocities: "And the English bastards came here and they bahrned the houses and mahrdahred the babies in their cribs..."
This display of CDS rewrites history, of course. For example: Clinton had troops deployed with the intention of restoring Aristide to power, not to depose him. And correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't it just a few years ago when everyone in this country was assailing Clinton for not having done enough to attack Al Qaeda in Sudan and Afghanistan...? As for NAFTA: It was Obama, not Hillary, who covertly assured the Canadians that he didn't really mean all that anti-NAFTA rhetoric.
Ah, but once you get past the knee-jerk CDS, you'll see this:
Anyone who expected Obama to embrace the progressive movement was kidding themselves. Obama was quite clear on many issues, e.g., "Out of Iraq" in one breath, and then promised to escalate the war in Afghanistan in the next. That's what MoveOn wanted? That's what progressives wanted? That's what the anti-war movement wanted?This response is close to spot on (although Obama was never clear on Iraq), until the last sentence.
Indeed, when Obama held his big meeting after the election with his economic team, there was *not a single person representing labor or working people*, except maybe Robert Reich, but you know what I mean. This is going to be pro-business Clintonism wrapped in better rhetoric.
Younger folk must keep in mind that Clinton held office during a very conservative period. On a daily basis, the media assailed him as the biggest Socialist since Lenin. If you could travel back to 1994 and tell Mr. and Mrs. Average that Clinton was "pro-business," they would look at you as if you had come from Mars. Yes, the Clinton-the-Red meme was unfair and downright ridiculous -- but it also ruled the day. That meme led to the loss of Congress in 1994. No president outranks the Zeitgeist; Clinton was a grudging centrist, but he was also as far to the left as the times permitted.
The Zeitgeist is very different now that we stand enmeshed in an unpopular war and looming economic catastrophe. Dubya's epic failure allows for a changed game. Obama has opportunites unavailable to Bill Clinton. He has far greater freedom for bold action.
But he will not be bold. The old Clinton hands in his cabinet may provide some boldness -- "cautious boldness," if you will. But Obi will keep tapping the brakes.
By the way: Do you really think that ObamUh can provide "better rhetoric" than Bill Clinton did? I uh I uh um I don't uh think so.
This is one aspect of Obama-worship that really fries me. Everyone seems to think that he possesses King-like powers of erudition, and he just doesn't.
A few days ago, I saw a video clip of Obama speaking at a campaign rally, spouting boilerplate: "We must not stay stuck in the past. We must look forward to the future!" Politicians have been spewing those exact same words since Pericles. And yet, upon hearing this line, a woman sitting behind Obi spontaneously orgasmed. I'm not kidding: She was coming in her chair, right there on camera. I know an O-face when I see one, and this one was in Giada and Ray-Ray territory. "We must look forward to the future!" It was as if she had never heard such words before: At last, someone is saying what I've always thought! And then she segues into her impression of Bernini's statue of St. Theresa....
How does he manage it?
7 comments:
He's not even that great a writer. He writes pretty well but when I looked at Dreams again recently, I found myself a bit surprised. Precisely because, despite all the raves about Dreams, there's nothing surprising. Nothing of great depth. The kind of staying power (upon rereading) that real literature has - it's missing. Doesn't wear well. Remember when everyone was comparing his Philly speech on race with the Gettysburg address? Saying that it would go down through the ages? What happened?
No staying power.
I was trying to find some really beautiful poems recently, and happened across a heavily trafficked poetry Internet site. I was struck when looking at their selection of top poems based on the number of reader hits. Most of them were kind of pretty – but none were exceptional or truly beautiful. Something like Ars Poetica by Archibald MacLeish (or anything by Sylvia Plath, or even e.e. cummings) would never make it onto a list like this. Obama's writing reminds me of the list of reader's favorite poems. No depth. Not real (despite lots of seemingly 'passionate' emotion in Dreams).
My own read of the 'O-face' phenomenon alluded to in your entry – it's his NPD. I've seen this same phenomenon before (it's not novel or mysterious to me). It's the sense of fusion that occurs with narcissists (because of their f*cked up boundaries). People crave communion. That's what great sex is all about. And that's what's happening between Obama and some of his acolytes. Folks from messed up families – especially with a narcissistic parent – are often the most susceptible. It really is the equivalent of sex.
Projection explained brilliantly...by Joseph and also the insightful G.
There were a few sites, J, which pointed out the Precious was no progressive.
"How does he manage it?"
You confuse content with rhetorical ability.
Has nothing really to do with what they are saying. Just their charisma. Bill's charisma is rooted in the feeling that Bill understands you. Obama's charisma is rooted in the idea that he's the fulfillment of your hopes and dreams.
or to put it a different way:
Bill is your long lost best friend.
Obama is your savior. It helps that he's black because it makes him redemption for America's gravest sin.
Bill doesn't have the moral authority to be what Obama is, and Obama doesn't have the down home charm (part of that being due to his exotic background, so it's a double edged sword) to be what Bill is.
Obama could make a place in history as a great president if the "leading members" of the team around him were to feed him his lines and he were to behave well. Unlikely from many perspectives, I know; this is my wishful thinking.
I assume here must be great battles going on behind-the-scenes, as they say, over who gets what post. I've been suspecting for some days now that Clinton's acceptance or not of the Sec. of State job hinges on a few of the who-gets-what-else negotiations.
Barring another well-timed throw-everything-into-a-state-of-chaos 9/11 event that gets most citizens begging for just anything that will make them feel "normal" again, it does look like we are stuck with the Obama we've come to know and love. And given the state of journalism these days, I'm expecting that (at best) we'll be left guessing what is actually going on throughout the whole administration. Great grist for bloggers.
A worse scenario is that it will be much more clear what's going on -- that would be the rapid flushing of the USA down the toilet with horrifically worsening wars and continuing slow-motion (measured in blog-time) disintegration of the real economy that stocks the shelves, disintegration of public health infrastructure, and an increasingly obvious corporatist-fascist boot on our necks.
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Something I've been wondering for some time now... Can anyone come up with a guesstimate as to how many hard core Obama-worshipers there are, in numbers? My wag is 400K. I'm supposing others would put it at more than that.
The funny thing is that most of the waffles were right there, on the campaign trail - and in the primaries too. had they stopped the chanting and listened a bit, they would not have been surprised: Obama loved Reagan in January and Poppy in March and told Billo that the surge succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.
He praised the GOP free market "ideas" and defended Blackwater.
He came to the Iraqi PM as identical to McCain.
"Can anyone come up with a guesstimate as to how many hard core Obama-worshipers there are, in numbers? My wag is 400K. I'm supposing others would put it at more than that."
There's more than that, but they are too busy carving B in the face of the millions and millions of PUMAs that Obama couldn't win without.
"My wag is 400K. I'm supposing others would put it at more than that."
he has 3 million campaign volunteers alone
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