Obamania Is Driving Me Crazy
I'm going to start a new blog called "Not My Barack Obama"
after watching the 'Emperor' in his new clothes,
touring American colonies in the Middle East and Europe
How much more of this blind adulation can I take
before cracking under the strain? 
The Obamistas
These precocious young, mainly middle class enthusiasts, who believe that the world began when they started paying attention, have not had the experience of being sold out by Dem after Dem.
They didn't live through their parents' versions of the exact same overblown and unfulfilled enthusiasms for Jesse Jackson, who also supposedly energized youth and was historic, and/or Bill Clinton.
They haven't seen the Dems run a slightly different version of the same candidate and campaign as their Magic Negro every four years since Dukakis, or maybe even Mondale or Carter, with almost always the same result.
Many of them don't understand the difference between a political movement and a protest march, chat room or ad campaign.
And, most of all, they by and large don't feel adult anxieties about health care, working conditions, pensions and the like.
Therefore, they are the ideal propagandists for the fantasy that Obama can transform the political environment through his person, as well as his bullshit about "community organizing" and the real progressivism being that which transcends, even obviates, conflict.
There's his arsenal of student government platitudes like the notion that "hope" has a self-evident, concrete meaning or that partisanship is a bad thing or that "politics of gridlock" is something more than important sounding filler for use by the male and female news bunny corps and their stable of talking head guest commentators.
Emperor Obama: the Progressive Conservative [Source]
I'm going to start a new blog called "Not My Barack Obama" after watching the 'Emperor' in his new clothes, touring American colonies in the Middle East and Europe. How much more of this blind adulation can I take before cracking under the strain?
I'd also been thinking about doing a "See, I told you so" column about Obama.
Then, especially given the torrent of vituperation and self-righteous insults I got after arguing that he's not what far too many nominal leftists were trying to make him out to be, I was tempted instead to do a "To hell with you, you deserve what you get" column.
But the smug yuppies to whom I'd address that message -- the fan club we encounter in foundation offices, faculty meetings, soccer games and dinner parties and on MSNBC and in the Nation -- are neither the only people who've listened to Obama's siren song nor the ones who'll pay the price for their self-indulgent idiocy.
Mainstream Media Worship Obama
Watching what has become ObamaTV, 24/7 alphabet network coverage of every Obama “er – ah – uh – hm – uh – huh – er” uttered, it’s clear that the mainstream American media are desperate to demonstrate Obama’s readiness to be the big cheese by showing the fantastic rock-star welcome he is receiving abroad.
To the average American onlooker, the term “Obamessiah” looks more and more appropriate as the news networks work around the clock to show how Europe and the Middle East react to his arrival as if he were indeed the second coming. The propaganda has boosted Obama to a 4 point lead over McCain this week.
But how real are those rock-star images being beamed around the globe via satellite for American voter consumption back home?
In an MSNBC interview with Chris Matthews, who was busy doing his usual stumping for Obama, respected field reporter Andrea Mitchell reported:
“Let me just say something about the ‘message management’.Matthews completely ignored what Mitchell said and tried to return to stumping for Obama.He [Obama] didn’t have reporters with him, he didn’t have a press pool, he didn’t do a press conference while he was on the ground in either Afghanistan or Iraq.
What you’re seeing is not reporters brought in. You’re seeing selected pictures taken by the military, questions by the military, and what some would call “fake interviews” ‘cause they’re not interviews from a journalist.
So, there’s a real press issue here. Politically it’s smart as can be, but we have not seen a presidential candidate do this in my recollection ever before.
Matthews tried to get Mitchell to confirm his rock-star interpretation of the Obama visit, but Mitchell again responded, “I can’t really say that. I just can’t report on what was edited out...that’s my issue. We don’t know what we are seeing.”
Mitchell, who is by no means a right-leaning reporter, is pointing out that everything Americans are seeing beamed from abroad is manufactured for voter consumption under the cover of a complete media blackout during the Obama trip. They are “staged” photo ops. The 'Liberal' Bourgeoisie
All of the above salves the consciences of our professional-managerial class peers and coworkers who want to think of themselves as more tolerant and enlightened than their Republican relatives and neighbors.
Even as they insulate themselves and their families as much as possible from undesired contact with the dangerous classes and define the latter in quotidian practice through precisely the same racialized and victim-blaming stereotypes as the conservatives to whom they imagine themselves superior.
This hypocrisy, of course, is understood within the stratum as unavoidable accommodation to social realities, and likely to be acknowledged as an unfortunate and lamentable necessity.
Yet those lamenting at the same time reject out of hand as impractical any politics that would challenge the conditions that reproduce the inequalities underlying those putative realities.
Obama, in the many ways that Glen Ford, Margaret Kimberley and others have catalogued here, is an ideal avatar for this stratum.
He has condensed, in what political dilettantes of all stripes rush to call a "movement," the reactionary quintessence that Walter Benn Michaels in The Trouble With Diversity identifies in a politics of identity or multiculturalism that substitutes difference for inequality as the crucial metric of political criticism.
It's apt in this connection that even elites in the Mississippi Delta, down to the level of the Cotton Museum in Lake Providence, LA, and the blues museums that dot every hamlet on US 61 in Mississippi between Greenville and Memphis, have come to appreciate the political and commercial benefits of multicultural celebration and even civil rights heritage tourism, without destabilizing the underlying relations of racialized subordination.
Progressives for Capitalism
Indeed, Obama represents a class politics, one that promises to cement an alliance anchored in the professional-managerial class (including, perhaps especially, the interchangeable elements of which now increasingly set the policy agendas for what remains of the women's, environmentalist, public interest, civil rights and even labor movements) and the "progressive" wing of the investor class.
From this perspective, it is ironic in the short term -- i.e., considering that he pushed HRC out of the way -- that Obama would be the one to complete Clintonism's redefinition of liberalism as conservatism.
So there's no way ! I'm going to ratify this bullshit with my participation, and I'm ready to tell all those liberals who will hector me about the importance of voting that it's the weakest, most passive and least consequential form of political participation.
I'm no longer going to pretend it's any more than that, or that the differences between the Dem and GOP candidates are greater than they are, just to help them feel good about not doing anything more demanding and perhaps more consequential.
Sorry, Children. There Is No Fairy Godfather Called Obama
To be clear, I'm not arguing that it's wrong to vote for Obama, though I do say it's wrong-headed to vote for him with any lofty expectations.
I would also suggest that it's not an open and shut case that - all things considered - he's that much better than McCain.
In some ways Obama would be better for us in the short run, just as Clinton was better than the elder Bush. In some ways his presidency could be much worse in the longer term, again like Clinton.
For one thing, the recent outpouring of enthusiastic support from all quarters - including on black academic and professional list serves and blogs and on op-ed pages - for his attacks on black poor people underscores the likelihood that Obama will be even more successful than Clinton at selling punitive, regressive and frankly racist social policies as humane anti-poverty initiatives.
In a way, I suppose, there could be ! something useful about having a large strain of the black petite bourgeoisie come out as a militant racial class for itself.
Maybe that could be a prelude to a good fight, but unfortunately there's no counterweight. And the black professional-managerial strata, despite their ever more blatant expressions of contempt for black poor people, continue to insist on speaking for the race as a whole.
Same Old Imperialism in a Brand New Suit
In no way will Obama be a break from the military interventionism - old school imperialism - that's defined our foreign policy increasingly since Reagan.
Obama is on record as being prepared to expand the war into Pakistan and maybe Iran, now apparently even generically anywhere in "Mesopotamia", after he does the Randolph Scott move and "talks" to his targets a couple of times.
He's also made pretty clear that AIPAC has his ear, which does it for the Middle East, and I wouldn't be shocked if his administration were to continue, or even step up, underwriting covert operations against Venezuela, Cuba (he's already several times linked each of those two governments with North Korea and Iran) and maybe Ecuador or Bolivia.
In the New York Times on 14 July, in an article spun to appear as if he is ending the war in Iraq, Obama demanded more war in Afghanistan and, in effect, an invasion of Pakistan.
He wants more combat troops, more helicopters, more bombs. Bush may be on his way out, but the Republicans have built an ideological machine that transcends the loss of electoral power – because their collaborators are "bait-and-switch" Democrats, of whom Obama is the prince.
Those who write of Obama that "when it comes to international affairs, he will be a huge improvement on Bush" demonstrate the same wilful naivety that backed the bait-and-switch of Bill Clinton – and Tony Blair.
Of Blair, wrote the late Hugo Young in 1997, "ideology has surrendered entirely to 'values'... there are no sacred cows [and] no fossilised limits to the ground over which the mind might range in search of a better Britain..."
Eleven years and five wars later, at least a million people lie dead. Barack Obama is the American Blair. That he is a smooth operator and a black man is irrelevant.
He is of an enduring, rampant system whose drum majors and cheer squads never see, or want to see, the consequences of 500lb bombs dropped unerringly on mud, stone and straw houses.
This is where I don't give two shits for the liberals' criticism of Bush's foreign policy: they don't mind imperialism; they just want a more efficiently and rationally managed one.
As Paul Street argues in BAR, as well as in his forthcoming book Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics, an Obama presidency would further legitimize the imperialist orientation of US foreign policy by inscribing it as liberalism or the "new kind" of progressivism.
You know, the black is white, night is day kind. And, as he has shown most recently in his June 30 speech he will similarly sanitize the galloping militarization of the society that proceeds under the guise of "supporting the troops."
By Jingo! It's Obama!
How many of you have noticed being called on by flight attendants to give a round of applause to the military personnel on board a flight - it may be only a matter of time before pretending to be absorbed in reading will no longer work?
Those who don't cheer them on will be handcuffed - or the scores of other little, and not so little, everyday gestures that give soldiers priority over the rest of us, in the mode of returners from the Eastern Front.
Actually, befitting neoliberalism, these gestures are for the image of soldiers, what they get instead of medical care and income support for the maimed.
There's No Left Left
The point is that we need to approach this presidential election stuff, and not just this time around, with no illusions about the trade-offs involved and recognize that it's not even as simple a matter as Obama being better than McCain in the here-and-now on a select menu of issues.
I could understand the impulse to rally the troops to produce the outcome that's better on immediate tactical grounds, if we had some troops to rally.
If we had such a base, it might even make sense to consider an organized boycott of the election, which may be the only way to keep from being treated like a 2 am booty-call for triangulating Dems. However, we don't have it, and it can't be built during an election season.
Perhaps the one luxury of the left's weakness now is that we're absolved of the need to hew so closely to such tactical considerations because we can't influence the outcome of the election anyway.
Pretending that we can is a convenient excuse for laziness and opportunism, on both intellectual and political fronts.
This, by the way, is yet another area where we've been failed by much of the left media that too easily succumb to simple cheerleading, counting up outrages, and engaging in wish fulfillment, indulging the fantasy that there is a coherent political movement out there somewhere that can assert its electoral will.
Fantasy Obama
Here are two sobering thoughts for the "yes, but" left. First, despite all breathless claims about how the Obama campaign "energized" young voters who could remain mobilized to become the cornerstone of the base that will push him to be more like the fantasy Obama, when all was said and done, 18-29 year old voters were 14% of those voting in the primaries.
True, that was up a few points from the last several elections, but it is exactly the average of the "youth" turnout over the past thirty years.
Second, the escrow account established by progressive Obama supporters to hold him accountable has, according to the New York Times, raised $101,375 from 675 people in nearly a month.
By contrast, the campaign's chief fundraiser, Penny Pritzker of the Chicago real estate magnate and philanthropic family, a week earlier scheduled "more than a dozen big-ticket events over the next few weeks at which the target price for quality time with the candidate is more than $30,000 per person".
I guess our side had better get cracking with those bake sales on Democracy Now!"
Here's the Catch-22
The left version of the lesser evilist argument stresses that it's unrealistic and maybe unfair to expect anything of the Dems in the absence of a movement that could push them, and no such movement exists.
True enough, but where is such a movement to come from if we accept the premise that the horizon of our political expectation has to be whatever the Dems are willing to do because demanding more will only put/keep the other guys in power, and they're worse?
I remember Paul Wellstone saying already in the early ‘90s that they'd gotten into a horrible situation in Congress, where the Republicans would propose a really, really hideous bill, and the Dems would respond with a slightly less hideous one and mobilize feverishly around it.
If it passed, they and all their interest-group allies would hold press conferences to celebrate the victory, when wha! t had passed actually made things worse than they were before.
That's also an element of the logic we've been trapped in for 30 years, and it's one reason that things have gotten progressively worse, and that the bar of liberal expectations has been progressively lowered.
It's also one of the especially dangerous things about Obama, that he threatens to go beyond any of his Dem predecessors in redefining their all-too-familiar capitulation as the boundary of the politically thinkable, as the substance of "progressivism."
He can manage this partly because of the way that he and his image-makers manipulate the rhetoric and imagery of energizing "youth," whose righteous fervor is routinely adduced to demonstrate the power and Truth of Obamaism, rather than evidence that they just don't know any better.
The Obamistas
Obama's Management Team have exploited the opportunism and bankruptcy of adults whose lack of will and direction, and maybe their hyper-investment as parents, lead them to look to precocious young people as sources of wisdom and purpose.
But "youth," first of all, is an actuarial and advertising category, not a coherent social group, and one of its defining features is lack of experience.
Another, lest we forget, is its transience. Youth, by definition, is a status that disappears with time, and rapidly.
The many organizational debates over the decades about where to set the upper age limit of the "youth" section should have been a signal of how arbitrary and concocted the category is.
And these precocious young, mainly middle class enthusiasts, who believe that the world began when they started paying attention, have not had the experience of being sold out by Dem after Dem.
They didn't live through their parents' versions of the exact same overblown and unfulfilled enthusiasms for Jesse Jackson, who also supposedly energized youth and was historic, and/or Bill Clinton.
They haven't seen the Dems run a slightly different version of the same candidate and campaign as their Magic Negro every four years since Dukakis, or maybe even Mondale or Carter, with almost always the same result.
Many of them don't understand the difference between a political movement and a protest march, chat room or ad campaign.
And, most of all, they by and large don't feel adult anxieties about health care, working conditions, pensions and the like.
Therefore, they are the ideal propagandists for the fantasy that Obama can transform the political environment through his person, as well as his bullshit about "community organizing" and the real progressivism being that which transcends, even obviates, conflict.
There's his arsenal of student government platitudes like the notion that "hope" has a self-evident, concrete meaning or that partisanship is a bad thing or that "politics of gridlock" is something more than important sounding filler for use by the male and female news bunny corps and their stable of talking head guest commentators.
