Articles with the Tag Barack Obama

Farewell to the thief…

US politics
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crowds of hope

And so it comes to an end, eight years too late, not with a bang but with a whimper. George Bush is no longer president, Dick Cheney is out of power and America finally has a president again we can be disappointed in, but also have hopes for. Things won’t get perfect, but there now is a chance they will get better. Goodbye Bush. You won’t be missed. So long Cheney, Rumsfeld, Condi, Rove and the rest of the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. If only that chopper could fly all the way to Den Haag and the International Court of Justice. It’s been a long eight years of anger and despair but they’re finally over.

“We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.”

Now we’re at the beginning of a new era, perhaps “the early days of a better nation”. With the election of Obama Americans rejected not just everything Bush stood for, they first rejected the old school centrist Democratic Party politics of his rival, Hillary Clinton. Barack Obama, though he himself may not be, is the president of the left and with his inauguration a space is created for those of us on the left to help built an America that adheres to the ideals and spirit of the broad left, as Bush created a space for all the worst in America. This is our chance and our responsibility to help create a better America, a better world and Obama is the symbol of that chance. One woman I heard interviewed earlier this week, when asked about all the hopes and dreams invested in Obama and how difficult it would be for him to fullfill all those dreams, said it best when she said that Obama’s election slogan was “yes, we can”: he doesn’t need to do it alone, we all have to work with him.

The ruling class enjoying itself

2008 US election, Life under Capitalism
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Barack and John, supposedly in mortal combat for the presidency, having a good time together. Some would call it a thriumph for the idea of democracy as fair play, but you can guess my attitude from the title. It’s just slightly sickening to see them clowning around while there’s so much at stake. Certaintly doesn’t improve my opinion of Obama, too much of a centrist stoge anyway.

But at least abortion is safe with him, there will be slightly less pressure to punish the poor for their poverty, perhaps even some modest measures to easen the burden of the working classes and of course no half senile, rage addict with his fingers on the button and an Alaskan ignoramus waiting in the wings.

Obama will bring the revolution

2008 US election, US politics
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Andy Newman is engaging in a bit of wishful thinking today, by arguing that the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States will buy space for the left to grow. In particularly:

If Obama wins, then that is a mass popular endorsement of hope — that things should and can change. The revival of trade unionism in the sit down strikes in the 1930s could not have happened without the confidence given by Roosevelt’s New Deal. The growth of the 1960s civil
rights movement, and the growth of women’s liberation and black power movements were linked to expectations of injustice being ended by Kennedy and LB Johnson.

Barack Obama

I’m skeptical, as it reminds me too much of similar guff heard when New Labour was first elected, back in 1997, as witnessed in such thriumphal books like John O’Farrell’s Things Can Only Get Better (Andy seems to recognise this, considering the title of his post). But more importantly, it seems to me Andy has got the relationship between a strong progressive or leftist mass movement and a left leaning president wrong. The movements he mentions, trade unionism and the civil rights movement, existed and knew success before they got a president on their side. Roosevelt started off a moderate and was largely forced into the New Deal, Kennedy gave lip service to the civil rights movement but it was only with his successor LBJ that civil rights legislation really got going. And in both cases this wouldn’t have happened without pressure from a broadbased, grassroots uprising, didn’t go as far as the movement wanted or extended itself to foreign policy, which was just as reactionary under Roosevelt and Kenndey/LBJ as their under their predecessors.

With Obama we’ve seen that his first instincts certainly aren’t anything but centrist or even rightwing. He got lucky in that he didn’t have to vote for the War on Iraq, but it took a long time for him to take a real stand against it once he was elected. Even now, he only wants to leave Iraq to strengthen Afghanistan and he’s hawkish on the “threat” of nuclear armed Iran, as well as saying all the wrong things about Georgia. He does talk the talk about poverty in America, but also felt the need to urge Black fathers to take their responsibility. As Andy admits himself, he has a lot of support from Wall Street which is despairing of the Republicans bollixing up the economy and his core advisors are not exactly leftist firebrands either…

To come back to Andy’s main argument, that Barack Obama will bring a feeling of hope that has been missing for the past eight years, which will open space on the left, I’m with John Pilger, as quoted by Andy. “ An Obama victory will bring intense pressure on the US anti-war and social justice movements to accept a Democratic administration for all its faults. If that happens, domestic resistance to rapacious America will fall silent.” We’ve seen it happen already, as the various centre left organisations like MoveOn have fallen in line behind the Democrats.

Clinton Obama Clinton’s candidacy is now inevitable

US politics
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Nothing demonstrates how sheer godddamn useless the American news media is as the primaries this year. It’s been very funny to see the press veer wildly from their starting position of Hillary Clinton as the designated winner, only for Obama to be anointed as such the minute after he had won the Iowa primaries, then to be written off again now Clinton has won New Hampshire. This tendency to latch on to the latest shiny thing as the One True Shiny is of course at its worst in the US press, but don’t for a minute think it’s much better elsewhere; just listen a few days to Radio 4’s newscoverage if you want proof.

Meanwhile another annoying feature of the US newsmedia is also in full force, their pretence that their own prejudices, likes and dislikes determine objective reality and are shared by the voters. The pres has alway loved McCain and always assumed against all evidence to the contrart that this was shared by the Republican primary voters. Now that McCain has won New Hampshire, which should not have been a surprise, considering he did this last time as well, expect them to become insufferable in their McCain lovin’.

all of which would be annoying enough on its own, but unfortunately this press posturing can and does influence real world events. If the big story is that Obama or Clinton is winning, instead of the much more prosaic truth that they both have now picked up roughly the same number of delegates, chances are people alter their voting. Doesn’t always work of course; the big Hillary Crying Jag that was such a sure sign to the pundits that she had lost the plot seems to have done exactly the opposite. Because the media blew it up so much it galvanised some groups of voters into voting for her.