RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events Barack Hussein Obama in '08?

Obama's Rightward Lurch

By GREGORY KAFOURY

Barack Obama arrived on the political scene with a smile as beautiful as salvation itself, like a visitor from an idealized future, one where the races have combined to a golden hue, sent here to show us the way. Of course people fell in love with him. Yet now we see Obama drawn into the great room where the Democratic/Corporate establishment dwells, and the door is slowly closing behind him. This is not how it was supposed to be.

Obama has just opted out of public financing, the first presidential candidate to do so since 1972. NewsHour’s Mark Shields, keeper of the flame for all that is good in the Democratic Party, called it "a flip-flop of epic proportions,” noting that Obama’s argument about a GOP financial advantage was "bogus." Shields even said it raised issues of Obama's "character." The New York Times editorialized that 2008 may now be "the year public financing died." In seizing a tactical advantage, Obama has handed an enormous strategic victory to corporate power.

Many progressives will argue that Obama, having raised huge amounts from small contributors, is akin to getting public financing, which liberates the candidate from dependence on corporate support. Yet just the opposite is happening. In the three weeks since Hillary Clinton fell upon her sword, Obama has lurched far to the right. Consider:

- Obama announced a new financial team of supply-side economists led by Jason Furman, famous for declaring that it would be "damaging to working people" if Wal-Mart were to raise its wages and benefits. Obama had recently criticized Clinton for serving on the Wal-Mart board, declaring, "I won't shop there." In the Audacity of Hope, he sympathized with “Wal-Mart associates who hold their breath every single month in the hope they’ll have enough money to support their children.”

-When questioned in a Fortune interview about his promise to renegotiate NAFTA to protect workers and the environment, Obama replied, "Sometimes during campaigns the rhetoric gets overheated and amplified."

- In a close congressional primary race in Georgia, Obama endorsed a troglodyte incumbent – a “Bush enabler” – over an exemplary progressive insurgent.

- In a speech to the Israeli lobby, he moved to the right of Israel’s government by ruling out negotiations with Hamas. A day earlier, Obama had told Cuban exile groups that he would only sit down with Raul Castro if the exiles had a seat at the table, a precondition that Cuba will never agree to.

- Obama refused to criticize recent Israeli war maneuvers and accompanying threats to launch massive air attacks on Iran. He failed to even urge restraint.

- Just as a move was growing in the Senate to strip the House-passed Telecom bill of its immunity provisions, Obama declared his support for the House version. Obama's opposition to immunity had been our best hope to learn whose phones and emails had been wiretapped by the Bush administration, and to punish those Telecom companies that assisted this massive criminal enterprise.

Is he lost to us? Was he ever ours to lose?

Progressives were all too eager to overlook the warning signs in Obama's brief career, his support for the Patriot Act, for nuclear power, his vote against limiting credit card interest to 30%, his calls for increased defense spending, and his equivocation on full withdrawal from Iraq. These decisions were mere matters of political expediency, we were assured, not to be taken seriously.

Yet how can political expediency explain Obama's retreat on NAFTA? Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania are all in play - how many of those voters have been broken on the wheel of NAFTA? Those who contend that the real Obama will suddenly emerge after the election to overturn an imperial foreign policy and to bring justice to the home front, might be advised not to hold their breath.

Obama desperately needs pressure from the left, and he is amenable to pressure. Once we on the left agree that this analysis is correct, then we must choose the correct strategy.

So far, blind support of Obama has yielded the same kind of benefits that we got from John Kerry. With the united left in his pocket, Kerry went from a declared "anti-war" candidate to a thoroughly hawkish one, berating Bush for wimping out in the face of massive civilian casualties in Falluja, and promising to win the Iraq war. Unconditional support for the Democratic nominee is unconditional surrender, with all the utter powerlessness that the terms imply.

As one alternative, we can complain, write and blog, for all these have their place. But we are all too good at talking to ourselves, and disparate efforts without a focus are all too easily dismissed.

We must consider support for Ralph Nader's campaign. Nader has been as high as six percent in recent national polls, something he has achieved with only modest support from left intellectuals, and virtually no recognition by corporate media.

Yet Google has announced its intent to hold at least one presidential debate, and has set the bar at 10% support. It is hard to imagine Obama or McCain snubbing Google, and the prospect of such a debate carries more promise than anything the left has seen in recent memory.

For those who claim that Nader can only hurt Obama, I suggest the opposite is true. Gore and Kerry were both doomed by the accurate perception that they were corporate to the core. People knew in their gut that these guys were not on their side. (In 2004, Kerry fled from a living wage initiative in Florida; it passed nearly three to one.) It must also be remembered that in 2000, when Nader was at 5%, a full 15% believed he was the best candidate. More importantly, Nader's positions are not just majoritarian ones, most enjoy overwhelming public support. Full military and corporate withdrawal from Iraq, major reductions in the defense budget, a crackdown on corporate crime, single-payer health care, massive investment in renewable energy and conservation, a living wage - these would provide a platform that would send Obama to a historic victory, and all are available for the taking.

Those who insist we must work only within the Democratic Party have clearly failed to hold Obama to his promise. We must get outside the box. Obama needs a great big push, and we are the only ones who can give it to him.

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

Obama's (and America's) slow and steady swing towards fascism....

[text]

I think I would have been a lot angrier if I hadn't understood the trends leading everything this direction. The transformation into an imperialist, authoritarian police state has been long and steady and is far from over.

Stock up on your lighter fluid and matches, my friends; we'll be burning draft cards before the end of Obama's first term....

I'm afraid I do not understand that article fully. Political specifics are still alien. For example, I didn't "get" those bullet points.

So the report is indicating hypocritical behavior, yes? That he seems to have questionable intent regarding the information provided on the early campaign trail?

On one hand, that irritates me. I just want to throw up my hands and say, "Now what?" On the other hand, I've known for years that no politician is ever the right person for any political office. They're all trained manipulators, not an honest soul in the lot.

What the hell are we supposed to do here? What actions are viable? How the hell are we as non-politician Americans supposed to affect the ruling Weeble People? What are real steps that could lead us toward a government that actually represents and respects the will and good of the people living under it?

I found this both hard to fully grasp (I suppose like Physics is to people that aren't so inclined as I) and rather frustrating to read.

Taken from http://www.counterpunch.org....

I'm afraid I do not understand that article fully. Political specifics are still alien. For example, I didn't "get" those bullet points.

So the report is indicating hypocritical behavior, yes? ...

no politician is ever the right person for any political office. They're all trained manipulators, not an honest soul in the lot.

...it's all gibberish to me, so I rarely read it.

yeah, but I have a job, you know?

Nothing like an 'informed electorate.'

"To be clear: Barack will support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies." -- Obama spokesman Bill Burton, Oct. 24, 2007

WASHINGTON -- That was then: Democratic primaries to be won, netroot lefties to be seduced. With all that (and Hillary Clinton) out of the way, Obama now says he'll vote in favor of the new FISA bill that gives the telecom companies blanket immunity for post-9/11 eavesdropping.

Back then, in the yesteryear of primary season, he thoroughly trashed the North American Free Trade Agreement, pledging to force a renegotiation, take "the hammer" to Canada and Mexico, and threaten unilateral abrogation.

Today, the hammer is holstered. Obama calls his previous NAFTA rhetoric "overheated" and essentially endorses what one of his senior economic advisers privately told the Canadians: The anti-trade stuff was nothing more than populist posturing.

Nor is there much left of his primary season pledge to meet "without preconditions" with Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. There will be "preparations," you see, which are being spun by his aides into the functional equivalent of preconditions.

Obama's long march to the center has begun.

And why not? What's the downside? He won't lose the left, or even mainstream Democrats. They won't stay home on Nov. 4. The anti-Bush, anti-Republican sentiment is simply too strong. Election Day is their day of revenge -- for the Florida recount, for Swift-boating, for all the injuries, real and imagined, dealt out by Republicans over the last eight years.

Normally, flip-flopping presidential candidates have to worry about the press. Not Obama. After all, this is a press corps that heard his grandiloquent Philadelphia speech -- designed to rationalize why "I can no more disown (Jeremiah Wright) than I can disown my white grandmother" -- then wiped away a tear and hailed him as the second coming of Abraham Lincoln. Three months later, with Wright disowned, grandma embraced and the great "race speech" now inoperative, not a word of reconsideration is heard from his media acolytes.

Worry about the press? His FISA flip-flop elicited a few grumbles from lefty bloggers, but hardly a murmur from the mainstream press. Remember his pledge to stick to public financing? Now flush with cash, he is the first general-election candidate since Watergate to opt out. Some goo-goo clean-government types chided him, but the mainstream editorialists who for years had been railing against private financing as hopelessly corrupt and corrupting, evinced only the mildest of disappointment.

Indeed, The New York Times expressed a sympathetic understanding of Obama's about-face by buying his preposterous claim that it was a pre-emptive attack on McCain's 527 independent expenditure groups -- notwithstanding the fact that (a) as Politico's Jonathan Martin notes, "there are no serious anti-Obama 527s in existence nor are there any immediate plans to create such a group" and (b) the only independent ad of any consequence now running in the entire country is an AFSCME-MoveOn.org co-production savaging McCain.

True, Obama's U-turn on public financing was not done for ideological reasons, it was done for Willie Sutton reasons: That's where the money is. It nonetheless betrayed a principle that so many in the press claimed to hold dear.

As public financing is not a principle dear to me, I am hardly dismayed by Obama's abandonment of it. Nor am I disappointed in the least by his other calculated and cynical repositionings. I have never had any illusions about Obama. I merely note with amazement that his media swooners seem to accept his every policy reversal with an equanimity unseen since the Daily Worker would change the party line overnight -- switching sides in World War II, for example -- whenever the wind from Moscow changed direction.

The truth about Obama is uncomplicated. He is just a politician (though of unusual skill and ambition). The man who dared say it plainly is the man who knows Obama all too well. "He does what politicians do," explained Jeremiah Wright.

When it's time to throw campaign finance reform, telecom accountability, NAFTA renegotiation or Jeremiah Wright overboard, Obama is not sentimental. He does not hesitate. He tosses lustily.

Why, the man even tossed his own grandmother overboard back in Philadelphia -- only to haul her back on deck now that her services are needed. Yesterday, granny was the moral equivalent of the raving Reverend Wright. Today, she is a featured prop in Obama's fuzzy-wuzzy get-to-know-me national TV ad.

Not a flinch. Not a flicker. Not a hint of shame. By the time he's finished, Obama will have made the Clintons look scrupulous.

Gallup Poll: McCain and Obama are tied at 45%

I'm victimizing myself and the republican party because I'm a stupid douchebag.

I've never had much cop for Bill Clinton's opinions.

Say what you will about the man's politics and morality, but Bill's a pretty astute political observer.

More importantly, however, this story, if true, tends to prove (albeit not conclusively) what some of us have predicted for a while now: that the Clintons would pay lip service to supporting Obama, while not actually supporting him behind the scenes.

Vandals have spray-painted 60 city vehicles in Orlando, Fla., some with messages against Sen. Barack Obama.

The cars were parked across from city hall late Saturday night. Investigators say the culprits tagged notes such as "Obama smokes crack" and a racial epithet. They even left business cards on each vehicle.

Mike Lowe, a videographer working for The Associated Press, first told police about the damage. He saw three cars with anti-Obama messages, while the others were just heavily painted.

The business cards disparage both Obama and Sen. John McCain but have messages of support for Sen. Hillary Clinton.

Mr. Elder,

I am shocked that you oppose Barack Obama and belong to the Republican Party. We must get over ourselves and realize there is room at the top for everyone and we must get there by helping each other — instead of agreeing with policies and old politics that are proven not to work.

To endorse John McCain, a person who will not make it easier for the underprivileged, is just too much. How can a fellow black American feel this way?

Your Former Supporter



Dear Former Supporter,

Do you have any Republican friends, let alone black ones? If so, how many of them want to make it harder "for the underprivileged"?

You also might want to familiarize yourself with the history of the Democratic and Republican parties, and see which party has stood up longer for the rights of people of color. Do you know that Democrats opposed the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution — abolishing slavery, granting citizenship rights to newly freed slaves, and guaranteeing the right to vote (at least on paper) to blacks, respectively? Do you know that most of the politicians who stood for segregation were Southern Democrats? Do you know that the Ku Klux Klan was founded by Democrats, one of whose goals was to stop the spread of the Republican Party? Do you know that, as a percentage of the party, more Republicans than Democrats voted for the Civil Rights Act of 1964?

Do you know that inner-city parents want vouchers — the right to determine where their children go to school? Do you know most Democrats, including Barack Obama, oppose this? Republicans, for the most part, support vouchers. Where vouchers have been tried, kids appear to perform better, with higher parental satisfaction. You tell me, how many things are more important than a child's education?

Do you know that 36 percent of babies aborted are black, while blacks make up 17 percent of live births? Do you know that polls show blacks are more pro-life than are whites? Yet the Democratic Party — to which over 90 percent of blacks belong — is the party of Roe v. Wade, requiring states to legalize abortion on demand. Do you know that Margaret Sanger, the founder of the organization that became Planned Parenthood, believed that poor blacks were inferior and that aborting their babies made our society better? Look it up.

Do you know that blacks stand to benefit more than whites through Social Security privatization, a position opposed by Obama but supported by McCain? Are you even familiar with the issue and what a powerful income-generating vehicle it would be for blacks? If not, take a look at the research done by the libertarian think tank Cato Institute and the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation.

Porous borders enable illegal aliens to enter our country and threaten the jobs and lower the wages of Americans, many of whom are unskilled people of color. Which party is more determined to deal with this — Republicans or Democrats? Obama called the foes of the House anti-illegal immigration bill "ugly and racist." I did not support the bill, but vehemently object to characterizing those who did as "ugly and racist."

You speak of policies that have "proven not to work." What about the "war on poverty" that began in the '60s, the policies that Obama and his party want to continue and expand? Do you know that today 70 percent of black children and over 50 percent of Hispanics are born outside of wedlock? The welfare state — which Democrats want to expand — has played a huge role in discouraging marriage and destabilizing families.

Speaking of helping the "underprivileged," I'd suggest you read a book called "Who Really Cares," by Arthur C. Brooks. A non-Republican professor raised by Democrats, he examined the charitable spending habits of Democrats and Republicans. The results surprised him. Brooks found that Republicans give far more of their money and time for charitable purposes than do Democrats. And the giving is not confined to their churches or other houses of worship. This, by the way, has nothing to do with income. Poor Republicans give more than poor Democrats.

Compassion is not about making people dependent on government. Compassion is about encouraging personal responsibility, and getting people to understand that life is about making choices. Poverty does not cause crime. Crime causes poverty. Poverty does not cause a child to have a child. A child having a child causes poverty. Finishing high school is a choice. Not joining a gang is a choice. Not having a child until you have the maturity and the means to raise that child is a choice.

You ask how can a "fellow black American feel this way"? Quite a statement. You may disagree, but it doesn't make me less caring and compassionate than you are. I'm sure you truly consider yourself open-minded and tolerant. But based on your letter, tolerance ends — especially with "fellow black Americans" — if someone has an opposing point of view.

Larry

By Senator Barack Obama

As with most Americans, patriotism starts for me as a gut instinct, a loyalty and love for my country that's rooted in my earliest memories. It's not just the recitations of the Pledge of Allegiance, the Thanksgiving pageants at school, or the fireworks on the Fourth of July, but how the American ideal wove its way throughout the lessons my family taught me.

One of those memories is sitting on my grandfather's shoulders and watching the Apollo astronauts come ashore in Hawaii. People cheered and waved small flags, and my grandfather explained with pride and assurance how we Americans could accomplish anything we set our minds to do. I lived overseas for a time as a child, and I remember listening to my mother reading me the first lines of the Declaration of Independence and explaining how its ideas applied to every American, black and white and brown alike. She told me that those words, and the words of the United States Constitution, protected us from the brutal injustices we witnessed other people suffering during those years abroad.

And I remember my grandfather's funeral at Punchbowl National Cemetery in Hawaii. As I listened to the rifles fire in salute and the long, solemn notes of taps, as I watched the honor guard fold the flag and tenderly present it to my grandmother, I thought about the country that my grandfather was so proud to serve — a country where we have the unparalleled freedom to pursue our dreams.

That is the true genius of America. A faith in simple dreams, an insistence on small miracles. We can tuck in our children at night and know that they are fed and clothed and safe from harm. We can say and write what we think, without hearing a sudden knock on the door. We can have an idea and start our own businesses without paying a bribe. In America, anything is possible.

For a young man of mixed race, without firm anchor in any community, without even a father's steadying hand, the essential American ideal — that our destinies are not written before we are born, that in America we can travel as far as our energy and talents will take us — has defined my life. With a mother from Kansas and a father from Kenya, I know that stories like mine can happen only in the United States of America.

But each generation must understand that the blessings of freedom require our constant vigilance, and that true patriotism also means a willingness to sacrifice for our common good. For those who have fought on the battlefield under the Stars and Stripes — for the young veterans I meet at Walter Reed Army Medical Center or those like John McCain who endured physical torment while serving our nation — no further proof of such sacrifice is necessary. Those who have signed up to fight for our country in distant lands inspire me, just as I am inspired by those fighting for a better America here at home by teaching in underserved schools, caring for the sick in understaffed hospitals, or promoting more sustainable energy policies in their communities.

In the end, it may be this quality that best describes patriotism in my mind — not just a love of America in the abstract, but a very particular love for, and faith in, one another as Americans. The greatness of our country — its victories in war, its enormous wealth, its scientific and cultural achievements — have resulted from the toil, drive, struggle, restlessness, humor, and quiet heroism of the American people. That is the liberty we defend — the liberty of each of us to follow our dreams. That is the equality we seek — not an equality of results but the chance of every single one of us to make it if we try. That is the community we strive to build — one in which we recognize we share common hopes and dreams, one in which we continue to insist that there is nothing we cannot do when we put our minds to it, and one in which we see ourselves as part of a larger story, our own fates wrapped up in the fates of all who share allegiance to America's singular creed.