FDL Book Salon Welcomes Paul Street: Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics

 [Welcome Paul Street and Glen Ford, Director, Black Agenda Report. Please stay on topic, or continue your discussion on the previous thread. Thanks, Bev]

Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics

 Radical writer, scholar and activist Paul Street illuminates the political landscape with a comprehensive and compelling examination of the two (or more) Barack Obamas: “the ‘revolutionary outsider’ and ‘entirely new breed of candidate’ he has been portrayed as in the dominant corporate media,” and the “shrewd politician who would not likely challenge the dominant sociopolitical order in any meaningful way unless compelled to do so by a significant social and political movement.”

Street has fashioned his indispensable deconstruction of the Obama phenomenon on the gallop, as it were, having spent six years racing alongside and projecting the future moves of a quintessentially market-shaped and driven candidacy. Completed in June, the volume confirms the predictive value of Street’s analysis: Obama’s near-instantaneous embrace of the core elements of Henry Paulson’s Wall Street bailout, punctuated with an astonishing offer to retain the Bush Treasury Secretary in an Obama administration, makes complete sense when one understands the Illinois Senator’s reflexive adherence to corporate parameters of thought and action, as Street amply documents.

A white guy who served for years as research director for the “corporate-dominated” Chicago Urban League, much of Street’s previous scholarly work examines the effects of entrenched, institutional racism in the same Chicago precincts that were the springboards for Obama’s astounding (and mightily assisted) leap to the national stage. No utopian, Street describes himself as “a real-time progressive, seeking substantive change – ‘reform’ – within the ‘really existing’ U.S. sociopolitical order.” Street’s book methodically and convincing argues that, on issues of race, war and peace, Obama’s candidacy represents “an almost perfect-storm epitome of a deeper capitalist political culture: the inherent conflict between the popular democratic promise and authoritarian, corporate-imperial reality.”

Appropriately, Street begins with a chapter titled “Obama’s Dollar Value,” detailing the would-be-president’s fealty to big business and bigger finance capital, in deed if not always in word. Of particular note in the current financial crisis is Obama’s initial response to the growing subprime mortgage debacle. Planting himself to the right of Senators John Edwards and Hillary Clinton, Obama rejected any form of freeze on interest rates or moratorium on foreclosures, endorsing only a meager tax credit for homeowners while pontificating on the “moral responsibility” of households caught in the corporate vise. “Obama staked out his usual position in the neoliberal middle,” writes Street, “embracing some increased federal regulation but seeking to create ‘incentives for leaders’ to restructure mortgages without giving that job to government.”

With a lock on the African American vote that grew rock-solid after his victory in pale Iowa in January assured Black voters Obama’s candidacy was actually “viable,” Obama moved decisively with an appeal to so-called Reagan Democrats. Speaking to editors of the Reno Gazette, he congratulated the deceased reactionary on “having changed the trajectory of America…. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excess of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating.”

Obama’s Reagan-friendly posture was nothing new. Street reports the candidate’s 2006 conversation with Time magazine’s Joe Klein, in which Obama declared, “this country is ready for a transformative politics of the sort that John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan and Franklin Roosevelt represented.” Obama’s definition of “transformational” politics, as Street writes, “made no distinction here between the sharp racial regression and backlash that Reagan represented and the relative racial liberalism of Roosevelt and Kennedy.”

Transcendence – as in “transcending race” – also goes by the wayside, as Street explicates Obama’s white-appeal:

“[Obama] has gone to considerable lengths to reassure whites that he will let them feel good about their willingness to vote for a black man and that he will not push defensive white buttons by meaningfully addressing the persistent powerful role white privilege continues to play in the United States. At the same time…ironically, the Obama phenomenon has the potential to do significant damage to the cause of black equality by helping advance the already widespread post-Civil Rights illusion that racism no longer poses significant barriers to black advancement and equality.”

Obama has been quite convincing in that regard. Arch-conservative and former Reagan drug czar Bill Bennett is a fan. “Obama has taught the black community you don’t have to act like Jesse Jackson, you don’t have to act like Al Sharpton,” Bennett told CNN. “He never plays the race card.”

Of course, one can argue that Obama, by running as the anti-Jackson and anti-Sharpton Black, is playing his own variety of race card from the deck of white fear and loathing. Pressed deep into a corner by the corporate media’s ritual villainization of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama delivered his own ritual denunciation of his former pastor:

“Rev. Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems – two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.”

Street judges the “Philadelphia Speech” to be “flawed in profoundly conservative ways, reflecting the narrow parameters of the dominant, superficially color-blind racial discourse of the post-Civil Rights era” and stands “well to the corporate right of any self-respecting progressive agenda.”

Street eviscerates Obama’s positions on every issue dear to progressives. On U.S. militarism: Obama’s determination to add 92,000 additional troops to the imperial Army and Marines; his belligerence on Afghanistan and early urging of incursions into Pakistan; his phony anti-war stance (“I am opposed to dumb wars”); his long-standing view that “we may have no choice but to slog it out” in Iraq; his warning that Venezuela and other emerging nations should not “follow their own path to development.”

On economic justice, Street skewers Obama’s 2007 “business friendly rightwing talking points” on Social Security, lending credence to Republican claims impending “fiscal calamity” for the New Deal program; his fundamental affinity for NAFTA; his corporatist campaign advisors; and his fantastical assertion to NASDAQ that corporations are unfairly criticized because “no one has asked you to play a part in the project of American renewal.”

Obama’s campaign, says Street, is “an especially potent lightning rod of popular excitement and progressive illusion.” Street’s book goes farther than any work to date in dispelling those illusions, point by point, issue by issue. In his final chapter, Street offers his own suggestions on “What is to be done” – a fairly comprehensive agenda around which most people who call themselves progressives can unite.

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