Obama: A Machine-Made Politician
Source: Obama Is a Neoliberal ConservativeIn his view of history, in his respect for tradition, in his skepticism that the world can be changed any way but very, very slowly, Obama is deeply conservative.
He values continuity and stability even more than he values change for the good.
I have four interrelated questions for the editors of The New York Times. First, when will you finally get it or admit that Barack Obama is a committed, ideologically conservative man of the political center (which you identify with non-ideological "pragmatism") and always has been? Second, how exactly do you define the words "vehement" and "opposition?" Third, are you concerned that any of your more candid reporting might get into the hands of people who aren't committed to the corporate-imperial "capitalist democracy" (an oxymoron) you are (secretly) sworn (under the cover of journalistic "objectivity") to uphold? Fourth, do you really consider any political actor left of Rahm Emmanuel, Timothy Geithner, and Hillary Clinton to be "an ideologue?" I ask these questions after reading a revealing report from The Times' leading political analyst David Sanger on the paper's front page last Saturday. In an article titled "Obama Tilts to Center, Inviting a Clash of Ideas," Sanger wrote the following: "President-elect Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination with the enthusiastic support of the left wing of his party, fueled by his vehement opposition to the decision to invade Iraq and by one of the most liberal voting records in the Senate." "Now, his reported selections for two of the major positions in his cabinet - Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state and Timothy J. Geithner as secretary of the Treasury - suggest that Mr. Obama is planning to govern from the center-right of his party, surrounding himself with pragmatists rather than ideologues. " ..."He is widely reported to be considering asking Mr. Bush's defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, to stay on for a year; and he is thinking about Gen. James L. Jones, the former NATO commander and Marine Corps commandant, for national security adviser, and placing Lawrence H. Summers, the former Treasury secretary whom Mr. Obama considered putting back in his old post, inside the White House as a senior economic adviser." "'This is the violin model: Hold power with the left hand, and play the music with your right,' David J. Rothkopf, a former Clinton official who wrote a history of the National Security Council, said on Friday, as news of Mrs. Clinton's and Mr. Geithner's appointments leaked. 'It's teaching us something about Obama: while he wants to bring new ideas to the game, he is working from the center space of American foreign policy'" A LONGSTANDING "EAGERNESS TO ACCOMMODATE EXISTING INSTITUTIONS" My first question arises from the fact that Obama's "tilt to the center" is less than surprising to anyone who has seriously investigated Obama's career prior to through the 2008 election.
The Times has been talking about Obama' supposed shift from "the left" to "the center" for some time now (see Powell 2008, for example).
For what it's worth (not much in our narrow-spectrum political culture, to be brutally honest), I've recently published a book showing (among other things) that Obama has been a man of the (corporate neoliberal) center from the beginning of his political career (Street 2008).
My carefully researched portrait of the President Elect is richly consistent with the following judgment from New Yorker writer Ryan Lizza last July: "Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary.
Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them". Lizza's elementary observation fits well with the conclusions of Larissa MacFarquhar.
As MacFarquhar noted in a carefully researched piece in The New Yorker last year, "In his view of history, in his respect for tradition, in his skepticism that the world can be changed any way but very, very slowly, Obama is deeply conservative...It's not just that he thinks revolutions are unlikely," MacFarquhar added.
It's also, she wrote, that "He values continuity and stability for their own sake, sometimes even more than he values change for the good" (MacFarquhar 2007). Obama was never left in the first place. More...