Obama No

From the Progressive, an essay by University of Pennsylvania political scientist Adolph Reed, Jr.:

Obama’s style of being all things to all people threatens to melt under the inescapable spotlight of a national campaign against a Republican. It’s like what brings on the downfall of really successful con artists: They get themselves onto a stage that’s so big that they can’t hide their contradictions anymore, and everyone finds out about the different stories they’ve told different people. And Obama’s belonging to Wright’s church in the first place was quite likely part of establishing a South Side bourgeois nationalist street cred because his political base was with Hyde Park/University of Chicago liberals and the foundation world.

For now, the Jeremiah Wright connection probably won’t hurt him too much, partly because the Republicans at this point mainly may want to keep him and Clinton bleeding each other as long as possible. And his Philadelphia compromise speech—a string of well-crafted and coordinated platitudes and hollow images worthy of an SUV commercial, grounded with the reassuring “acknowledgment” of blacks’ behavioral inadequacies—has gained him breathing room by holding out a vague promise of racial “reconciliation” that has appealed to centrist liberals ever since Booker T. Washington’s comparably eloquent 1895 accommodation to Southern white supremacy. Obama gets credit for “opening a conversation” on race, for “taking the matter on squarely.” But he doesn’t really speak to what we ought to be doing to address the injustices, past and present, that he mentions. Despite all the babble about Obama’s transcendence, Obama persists in portraying black Americans as a stereotypical monolith: blacks feel x; whites feel y. And the trope of black “anger” is a tired chestnut that neither explains nor characterizes political grievances or aspirations. (By the way, Obama’s casting Wright’s alleged “anger” as generational is entirely consistent with his earlier praise of Ronald Reagan for sensing Americans’ desire to undo the “excesses” of the 1960s and 1970s.)

Because he’s tried carefully to say enough of whatever the audiences he’s been speaking to at the time want to hear while leaving himself enough space later on to deny his intentions to leave that impression, his record represents precisely the “character” weakness the Republicans have exploited in every Democratic candidate since Dukakis: Another Dem trying to put things over on the American people.

Click here for the rest.

Reed expands on that last paragraph during a debate on Wednesday morning's Democracy Now:

But the answer to the question is that Obama opened himself to this by leaning to—on the premise that he can appeal to Republicans and to conservatives and by parading his personal faith around. And frankly—this is, I guess, the crux of my argument in The Progressive column—that this is precisely the tact that has been the undoing of every Democratic candidate since Dukakis, and I would frankly even include Clinton in that, were it not for the fact that Ross Perot siphoned votes away from the Republicans each time. I mean, this is what happened with Gore in 2000, it’s what happened with Kerry in 2004. You present yourself as electable because you can appeal to conservative voters, and then the Republicans attack you for not being a true conservative and can characterize you as someone who’s trying to put something over on the American people.

In some ways he's saying exactly what I've been saying for a while now, that Obama cannot be the unifying force he is perceived as, but Reed takes it several steps further, and articulates it much better. That is, I've been imagining, hoping really, as recently as yesterday, that Obama is much more liberal than he's letting on. Reed will have none of that, calling Obama a "neoliberal" in the first paragraph of his essay. In other words, to Reed, Obama is a right-leaning, Clinton-styled, pro-corporate Democrat pretending to be a liberal when addressing liberal audiences, pretending to be more conservative when he addresses more conservative audiences.

Indeed, on the same day Reed was debating on Democracy Now, AlterNet was running a new essay by Chris Hedges called "Corporate America Hearts Obama." Hedges paints a compelling picture, drawing from Obama's book The Audacity of Hope and scrutinizing his voting record to find unmistakable messages of reassurance to the corporate elite who own and run the country. The huge amount of money Obama's gotten from corporations show that they have definitely been reassured.

Without any clear evidence that Obama is actually the liberal that I want him to be, I am now very inclined to see his potential presidency as being very much like Bill Clinton's, possessing a feel-good liberal vibe, but with an oppressive pro-wealthy right-wing substance. Barack Obama is apparently running, like each and every Democrat after Mondale, a Republican Lite campaign, but this time he's trying to head off progressive insurgency by pretending to be a liberal.

If what Reed and Hedges are saying is true, this is the same old bullshit that has me refusing to vote for Democrats until they get their shit together. Obama isn't the unifier. Obama isn't forging a new post-racial, post-partisan America. He's John Kerry, Al Gore, and Bill Clinton. He's Hillary Clinton. He's business as usual.

He's bad for the country.

Nader in '08!

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