archived: 29 Jun - 5 Jul, 2008         Back                 Next

UPDATED:  JUL 2, 2008 

“NO OBAMALLUSIONS, I” 

   Since he secured the Democratic nomination for President and secured Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s withdrawal from the campaign, Sen. Obama has been moving rapidly to organize, re-organize, and expand both his policy and operational staffs.  One feature at both levels has been the increasing presence of “Clinton people,” both from the William Jefferson Clinton Administration and the HRC campaign, in the Obama orbit. 

   For example, Patti Solis Doyle (who happens to be a long-time associate of Obama chief campaign strategist David Axelrod) was HRC’s former campaign director.  Fired several months ago from that job, she has been brought on by the Obama campaign to be the chief-of-staff-designate for the Vice-Presidential candidate (whoever that might be).  (Since the blood between Doyle and HRC and her remaining staff is not exactly warm, I do think that this designation is a very good indication that HRC will not be offered the VP slot on the Obama ticket.  There are some other observers who do think the opposite.  I must say that for the sake both of his chances of winning the general election and of the governmental and political effectiveness of an Obama Administration, I fervently hope that I am right and they are wrong.)  On the policy side, Clintonistas from Robert Rubin to Madeleine Albright have been brought into active roles.

   The response to all of this from an increasing number of progressives and leftists (and yes, Virginia, there is a difference) has been ranging from raising caution flags to expressing outright horror: “what’s he doing on Israel?” “what’s he doing on FISA?”  “what’s he doing on ethanol?” “what’s he doing on campaign finance reform?”  “what’s he doing on ‘free trade’?” “what’s he doing on the US Muslim population?” And so on and so forth.  There are three principal issues to consider here.  First, do these appointments indicate any major changes in Sen. Obama’s principal campaign theme of “Change We Can Believe In?”  Second, whether yes or no, were they predictable?  Third, what should the progressive/leftist response be?

   In my view, there was a huge amount of “reading in” done with Obama during the primary campaign.  (Full disclosure: I fell into that trap too.)  He is very, very smart.  (When he was at Harvard Law School, a tenured professor there pronounced him the “smartest student we have ever had.”)  He is literally African-American.  He is the child of a teen-age mother who became a single Mom not too long after his birth, and was primarily brought up by her mother.  He somehow made it to Columbia College (and as a Columbia College graduate myself, 1958, I wish that that fact were mentioned more frequently, by his campaign as well as others!) 

   Graduating from Harvard Law School, where he was President of the Law Review (a very prestigious and much sought-after position), he decided against taking a high-paying corporate law firm job, very possibly with an eye towards a career in politics from the very beginning.  And who knows?  Maybe he really did set his sights on the Presidency in Kindergarten.  Hillary apparently set her sights on it only when she was working as a young adult in the McGovern campaign.  However, he has never been a radical in any sense of the word, no matter how hard O’RHannibaugh and the Fox”News”Channel and their new Pundit-in-Chief Karl Rove (obviously moon-lighting from his real job as [still] master Republican election strategist) try to convince their viewers/listeners that he is or at least was.  And using guilt-by-association they are trying ever-so-hard to do that.

   Contrary to both Republican and Clintonian propaganda during the primaries, he offered tons of detailed positions on a variety of issues, from early on, on his website and more recently in his speeches.  In fact for several months now, he has been giving Hillary Clinton-like speeches with laundry lists of proposals.  (Admittedly his sound so much better than hers because he reads so much better than she does.)  Radical?  Hardly.  His health care proposal does as much to maintain the role of the profit-makers in the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries as does Clinton’s.  (Of course McCain’s would make both industries even more profitable.)  He calls for a relatively swift withdrawal from Iraq, that is, just what was called for by the Jim Baker-lead Iraq Study Group which was so studiously ignored by CheneyBush.   

   One of Obama’s major foreign policy advisors from the beginning has been Mika’s (MSNBC) Dad, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s relatively right-wing National Security Advisor.  One of his major “accomplishments” was to convince Carter to organize a strong response to the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan which was designed to bolster a new anti-monarchical, anti-Islamist, Communist government there.  (No.  Hollywood to the contrary notwithstanding, it wasn’t “Charlie Wilson’s War,” except in public.)  Brzezinski correctly predicted if the US were able to arrange for the Soviet Union to get bogged down there, it could become their “Vietnam,” and speed the long-impending collapse of the pseudo-Communist Soviet government.  That it did.  Another outcome of that intervention was the subsequent training, under the CIA of Ronald Reagan and William Casey, of a scion of a wealthy Saudi family with close, long-time connections to the Bush family, of a future ultra-right Islamist leader named Osama bin Laden. 

   Obama has advocated talking with Syria and Iran about arranging an overall Middle East settlement which could, with suitable guarantees of non-aggression from the US/Israeli side, include the permanent end of the Iranian drive towards developing nuclear weapons (viz. the agreements with North Korea, even under the Georgites).  (Over three years ago in this space, March 3, 2005 "Iranian Nukes", I said that if I were Iran, facing the Georgite/Israeli-Right alliance, I would surely want to have nuclear weapons).  Obama has also advocated taking Saudi Arabia up on its offer, which dates back to 2002, to formally recognize Israel in the context of an overall two-state Israel/Palestine solution based on the relevant UN resolutions.  Both of these positions were taken by the Iraq Study Group.  As for economic policy, Obama does advocate a return to pre-Clintonian caution on globalization and the free export of capital.  He also advocates a recognition that the WJ Clinton declaration that “the days of big government are over” in terms of economic, regulatory and infra-structure policy are in urgent need of revision.  Nothing radical here in either of those positions, if one takes seriously the Preamble to the Constitution. 

   Were these changes predictable?  In my view, for the most part yes, even though in the midst of the primaries, listening to his speeches, I didn’t think so.  With the appointment of Robert Rubin and one or more of his protégés to high positions on economic policy, Obama seems to be veering more towards DLC positions than in recent months I recently had thought he would.  However, last November, on these pages I did say that I thought that Senator Obama and Sen. Clinton comprised a DLC “entry” in the race for the nomination.  As I put it then (TPJ, Dec. 5, 2007, “The Presidential Election, 2008: Democratic Considerations”): 

“As they have done in the past, the center-right Democratic Leadership Council is this time around running what in Standard-Breed (trotters and pacers) horse racing terminology is known as an ‘entry.’  In these races, one owner can enter two horses and bettors can bet on the ‘entry,’ so that if either one of the horses wins, places, or shows, the bettor collects.  In 2004 the DLC “entry” was John Edwards and Richard Gephardt.  The latter was one of the founders of the DLC (although in the 2004 primaries he did wander off the reservation on the so-called “free trade” [otherwise known as the free export of capital] issue).  John Edwards was a rather different person and politician back then than he is now.  I remember back in 2002 or so when he got a Sunday New York Times Magazine cover story, and was hailed as the fair-haired boy of the Democratic “middle” (really center-right).  Neither won, of course, but the DLC was able to project the perennial loser Bob Shrum into the Kerry Campaign and we all know what happened.

 

“This time the DLC has an entry as well, but Edwards ain’t part of it.  [Full disclosure: this time around I supported Edwards for the nomination until he dropped out.]  He has grown as a person and a politician and is now much more of an old-style Democrat in the Roosevelt-Truman-Johnson (before Vietnam) tradition.  The DLC entry is ---- yes, indeed, Clinton and Obama.  They don’t like each other much, and each does indeed want to be President.  But their central philosophy is much the same and many of their policies are rather similar too.  The philosophy is better articulated by Obama.  But functionally, even though her rhetoric may be a bit harsher, Clinton is woven from the same fabric.” 

So let us not be surprised.  Next week, we shall look further at the likely causes of the apparent coming together of the Clinton and Obama campaigns (which would have been in the cards all along if my earlier supposition about their being an “entry” is correct).  We shall also look at why it is in any case absolutely essential that all anti-Georgite forces of whatever stripe rally behind Obama.

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