Jan. 20, 2009, will be a historic day.

Barack Obama (Columbia, Harvard Law) will take the oath of office as his wife, Michelle (Princeton, Harvard Law), looks on proudly.

Nearby, his foreign policy advisers will stand beaming, including perhaps Hillary Clinton (Wellesley, Yale Law), Jim Steinberg (Harvard, Yale Law) and Susan Rice (Stanford, Oxford D. Phil.).

The domestic policy team will be there, too, including Jason Furman (Harvard, Harvard Ph.D.), Austan Goolsbee (Yale, M.I.T. Ph.D.), Blair Levin (Yale, Yale Law), Peter Orszag (Princeton, London School of Economics Ph.D.) and, of course, the White House Counsel Greg Craig (Harvard, Yale Law).

This truly will be an administration that looks like America, or at least that slice of America that got double 800s on their SATs.

Even more than past administrations, this will be a valedictocracy — rule by those who graduate first in their high school classes.

If a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game any time over the next four years, we’re screwed.

Already the culture of the Obama administration is coming into focus. Its members are twice as smart as the poor reporters who have to cover them, three times if you include the columnists.

They typically served in the Clinton administration and then, like Cincinnatus, retreated to the comforts of private life — like working at Goldman Sachs, Williams & Connolly or the Brookings Institution.

So many of them send their kids to Georgetown Day School, the posh leftish private school in D.C., that they’ll be able to hold White House staff meetings in the carpool line.

Who wouldn't hate these overeducated Achievatrons?

They're not an official category of voters whose tally is measured in exit polls, like whites or blacks, women or men, old or young. And since they're not an official category, we may never really have the evidence.

Call them "high-information Democrats." So-called middle-class 'progressives', both white and black, who turned out to vote for their new-found hero.

It is important to remember that western democracy is, essentially bourgeois democracy. It is the bourgeoisie who vote in large numbers. "Democracy' is run for the benefit ot the middle classes.

One of the questionable benefits of the civil rights movement in the 1960s and 70s was the emergence of a well-defined black bourgeoisie.

Needless to say, bourgeois and reactionary go hand-in-hand. Obama is the 'shining' example of an African-American, middle-class, conservative, high-information Democrat. A member of the chattering class - privileged and self-important.

These are the people who follow all the ins and outs of the contest. They read The New York Times.

They watch cable television, probably Keith Olbermann first and foremost. They read blogs. They know every twist and turn, every thrust and parry.

"Obama", the brand, is a way for liberal and moderate whites to “pat themselves on the back for not being too prejudiced.”

Obama’s candidature has encouraged a lot of “progressives” not to do their homework on him or on the U.S. political culture he reflects.

Of course, it’s all premised on Obama being a "good bourgeois and right-acting black" – one who promises not to actually confront white supremacy in any meaningful way.

Like the white-friendly media mogul and mass Obama marketer and ally Oprah Winfrey, Obama expresses and capitalizes on whites’ partial transcendence of “level-one” state-of-mind racism.

At the same time, he reassures them he will honor their refusal acknowledge and confront the continuing power of deeper, “level two” state-of-being” - societal and institutional – racism in American life.

Barack Obama is a Great White Hope. He is perfectly suited and crafted to wrap establishment corporate politics and the related American Empire Project in rebel’s clothing.

He advances the use of race (albeit in a new and “post-Civil Rights” kind of way) to advance the top-down business-class agenda.

A radical correspondent of mine sent the following message after Obama finally won the presidency:

“That’s a shame about Obama. The media-manipulated kids and the misinformed and deluded ‘progressives’ were persuaded by his vague banalities and his corporate-crafted Telescreen imagery.”

Sure, but it’s more complicated. There is a remarkable amount of false progressive consciousness, misinformation, and laziness (failure to do basic homework) about the Obama phenomenon.

Many of his supporters falsely believe that he is some sort of left or populist and antiwar candidate.

Such ignorance is naturally encouraged by the well-funded Obama campaign and is especially widespread among younger voters, who turned out in record numbers for the Iowa caucus.

And some of the college kids in my precinct and town liked Obama pretty much for the same reasons they like a Michael Jordan or a Jamie Fox: because “he’s cool” and it strikes them as vaguely transgressive to like a technically black personality.

Still, a significant amount of support came from people who sense rather well that Obama is a faux-progressive preserver of race and class privilege.

And they love that about him. They’re not deluded at all. He helps them feel good about being white and well-off. His promise of illusory change and pretend transformation is exactly what they are about.

They have big houses, nice careers, and creeping concerns about all the poor black people that are starting to show up on the east side of Iowa city.

Many of those truly disadvantaged blacks are refugees from the urban corporate-neoliberal racism of “global Chicago,” whose ruling (Richard M.] Daley regime has pushed poor African-Americans out of “global Chicago” and propelled Obama onto the national stage.

tags: obama  class interest  haute bourgeoisie  privilege  elite  

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