WASHINGTON TIMES – Barack Obama, the senatorial candidate of 2004, might have a bone to pick with Barack Obama, the presidential candidate of 2008. Videotapes of debates and speeches that were obtained by The Washington Times show that Mr. Obama took positions during his Senate campaign on nearly a half-dozen issues ranging from the Cuba embargo to health care for illegal aliens that conflict with statements that he has made during his run for the White House.

For example, in MSNBC’s Oct. 30 presidential debate, Mr. Obama hesitantly raised his hand and joined with most of his Democratic rivals to declare he opposed decriminalizing marijuana.

But as a U.S. Senate candidate, Mr. Obama told Illinois college students in January 2004 he supported eliminating criminal penalties for marijuana use or possession, a debate video shows. “I think we need to rethink and decriminalize our marijuana laws,” Mr. Obama said during a debate at Northwestern University. “But I’m not somebody who believes in legalization of marijuana

When confronted with the statements on the video, Obama’s campaign offered two explanations to The Times in less than 24 hours. At first, Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor said the candidate had “always” supported decriminalizing marijuana, suggesting that his 2004 statement was correct. Then after The Times posted copies of the video on its Web site, his campaign reversed course and declared he does not support eliminating criminal penalties for marijuana possession and use.
The spokesman blamed confusion over the meaning of decriminalization for the conflicting answers.

Mr. Obama’s differing answers on marijuana are among five conflicts between positions he took while running for Senate in 2004 and those he now articulates while running for president, a review of debate tapes shows. Experts said the likely reason for the changes was that Mr. Obama ran as a liberal during his Senate run but has become more centrist as he pursues the broad coalition required to win the White House. . .

The position changes include:

- In a 2003 forum on health care, Mr. Obama said he supported the children of illegal aliens’ receiving the same benefits as citizens, “whether it’s medical, whether it’s in-state tuition.” Asked specifically whether he included “undocumented” people, Mr. Obama replied, “Absolutely.” But in a CNN debate Jan. 21, when Mr. Obama was asked whether his health care proposal covers illegal aliens, he said “no” and that he first wants to cover the U.S. citizens and legal residents without health care.

- In 2004, Mr. Obama told an audience at Southern Illinois University, “I think it’s time for us to end the embargo with Cuba. . . It’s time for us to acknowledge that that particular policy has failed.” However, he stopped short of calling for an end to the embargo in a Miami Herald op-ed in August. He said he would rely on diplomacy, with a message that if a post-Fidel Castro government made democratic changes, the U.S. “is prepared to take steps to normalize relations and ease the embargo.”

- In an October 2003 NAACP debate, Mr. Obama said he would “vote to abolish” mandatory minimum sentences. “The mandatory minimums take too much discretion away from judges,” he said. Mr. Obama now says on his web site that he would “immediately review sentences to see where we can be smarter on crime and reduce the ineffective warehousing of nonviolent drug offenders.”

- Mr. Obama told an AFL-CIO group in June 2003: “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer, universal health care plan.” But in a recent debate he said he has never endorsed such a plan. “Senator Obama has always said that single-payer universal care is a good idea because it would increase efficiency in the system, but the problem is that it’s not achievable,” Mr. Vietor said.

DOUG HENWOOD, LEFT BUSINESS OBSERVER Obama is inspiring the young, lifting the alienated off their couches, and catalyzing a new movement for . . . change, presumably one we can believe in. The content of this change is hard to specify. Some serious leftists we know and love point to Obama’s roots as a community organizer in Chicago, though many people in a position to know say he didn’t rock many boats in those days. He was embraced by foundation liberals, however, who greased his way into the Harvard Law School via a lakefront condo.

All of which doesn’t make Obama uniquely bad: he’s just another mainstream Democrat with a sleazy real estate guy in his past. Though he’s being touted as an early opponent of the Iraq war, he told the Chicago Tribune in 2004: ‘There’s not that much difference between my position and George Bush’s position . . . ‘ He voted to renew the PATRIOT Act, campaigned for happy warrior Joe Lieberman against Ned Lamont in 2006, and wants to increase the size of the U.S. military. He supports Israel’s continuing torture of the Palestinians penned into the Gaza Strip. A Congressional Quarterly study found his Senate voting record was virtually indistinguishable from Hillary Clinton’s; the only major difference in their votes is a surprising one: a move to limit class actions suits against corporations, which Clinton voted against, and Obama for. Obama’s vote was against the preferences of a Dem financial base, trial lawyers, but pleasing to the Fortune 500 and Wall Street. . .

Some more thoughtful victims of Obama Disease point to detailed position papers on the candidate’s website. These must always be taken with a grain of salt, especially during primary season. Candidate Bill Clinton promised to ‘invest in people’ and ended up being the president of ‘a bunch of fucking bond traders,’ as Hillary’s husband memorably put it. LBJ campaigned as the peace candidate in 1964, and ended up killing a million Indochinese.

Obamians also point to his rejection of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council; they put him on their list of rising stars, and he asked to be removed. Encouraging-except for the fact that his chief economic advisor, Austan Goolsbee, the fellow who told the Canadians not to take the anti-NAFTA rhetoric seriously, is the DLC’s chief economist. Goolsbee has written gushingly about Milton Friedman and denounced the idea of a moratorium on mortgage foreclosures. That hire is more significant than asking to be struck from a list.

Big capital would have no problem with an Obama presidency. Top hedge fund honcho Paul Tudor Jones threw a fundraiser for him at his Greenwich house last spring, ‘The whole of Greenwich is backing Obama,’ one source said of the posh headquarters of the hedge fund industry. They like him because they’re socially liberal, up to a point, and probably eager for a little less war, and think he’s the man to do their work. They’re also confident he wouldn’t undertake any renovations to the distribution of wealth. You could say the same about Clinton-but you know those hedge fund guys. They like a contrary bet. . .

What does Obama have? A lot of slogans that connect with nothing in the real world; in fact, their very emptiness may be the source of their appeal, because it allows people to project whatever they want to onto him, without getting bogged down in specifics, as Reagan liked to say. . . And despite the grand claims of enthusiasts, he doesn’t really have a movement behind him-he’s got a fan club. How does a fan club hold a candidate accountable? It’s not like he’ll take the phone calls of all those 27-year-olds who gave him $100 on the web as quickly as he’d answer a summons from Paul Tudor Jones.

Obama’s appeal is a strange thing. Though he’s added to it as his political momentum builds, his original base consisted of blacks and upper-status whites. The black support is out of racial pride, but the initial white support was driven by his post-partisan, post-racial appeal. Well-off whites love to hear a black man say that racism has largely receded as a toxic force, though it’s really hard to figure out what the hell he’s talking about in a world where black households earn about 60% as much as whites, and where black men are incarcerated at more than six times the rate of white men. And what of this post-partisan business? Politics is about conflicts over resources and priorities, and over the state’s power to coerce; how ever could comity prevail in a world where interests and preferences diverge so widely?

As Adolph Reed told LBO, an Obama presidency “could give us the worst of all possible of worlds: one in which race is completely repackaged as a discourse of celebration and, to the extent that that had already become the only metaphor through which American politics could accommodate critical discussion of inequality, the language of ‘˜disparity,’ it will no longer be possible for critiques of inequality to be heard as an appropriate topic for political discussion. . .

There’s no doubt that Obamalust does embody some phantasmic longing for a better world-more peaceful, egalitarian, and humane. He’ll deliver little of that-but there’s evidence of some admirable popular desires behind the crush. And they will inevitably be disappointed.

As this newsletter has argued for years, there’s great political potential in popular disillusionment with Democrats. The phenomenon was first diagnosed by Garry Wills in Nixon Agonistes. As Wills explained it, throughout the 1950s, left-liberals intellectuals thought that the national malaise was the fault of Eisenhower, and a Democrat would cure it. Well, they got JFK and everything still pretty much sucked, which is what gave rise to the rebellions of the 1960s (and all that excess that Obama wants to junk any remnant of). You could argue that the movements of the 1990s that culminated in Seattle were a minor rerun of this. The sense of malaise and alienation is probably stronger now than it was 50 years ago, and includes a lot more of the working class, whom Stanley Greenberg’s focus groups find to be really pissed off about the cost of living and the way the rich are lording it over the rest of us.

Never did the possibility of disappointment offer so much hope. That’s not what the candidate means by that word, but history can be a great ironist.

http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Obama.html

Barack Obama does not say much about his years in New York City. The time he spent as an undergraduate at Columbia College and then working in Manhattan in the early 1980s surfaces only fleetingly in his memoir. In the book, he casts himself as a solitary wanderer in the metropolis, the outsider searching for a way to “make myself of some use.”

He tells of underheated sublets, a night spent in an alley, a dead neighbor on the landing. From their fire escape, he and an unnamed roommate watch “white people from the better neighborhoods” bring their dogs to defecate on the block. He takes a job in an unidentified “consulting house to multinational corporations,” where he is “a spy behind enemy lines,” startled to find himself with a secretary, a suit and money in the bank.

He barely mentions Columbia, training ground for the elite, where he transferred in his junior year, majoring in political science and international relations and writing his thesis on Soviet nuclear disarmament. He dismisses in one sentence his first community organizing job — work he went on to do in Chicago — though a former supervisor remembers him as “a star performer.”

Senator Obama, an Illinois Democrat now seeking the presidency, suggests in his book that his years in New York were a pivotal period: He ran three miles a day, buckled down to work and “stopped getting high,” which he says he had started doing in high school. Yet he declined repeated requests to talk about his New York years, release his Columbia transcript or identify even a single fellow student, co-worker, roommate or friend from those years.

“He doesn’t remember the names of a lot of people in his life,” said Ben LaBolt, a campaign spokesman.

Mr. Obama has, of course, done plenty of remembering. His 1995 memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” weighs in at more than 450 pages. But he also exercised his writer’s prerogative to decide what to include or leave out. Now, as he presents himself to voters, a look at his years in New York — other people’s accounts and his own — suggests not only what he was like back then but how he chooses to be seen now.

Some say he has taken some literary license in the telling of his story. Dan Armstrong, who worked with Mr. Obama at Business International Corporation in New York in 1984 and has deconstructed Mr. Obama’s account of the job on his blog, analyzethis.net, wrote: “All of Barack’s embellishment serves a larger narrative purpose: to retell the story of the Christ’s temptation. The young, idealistic, would-be community organizer gets a nice suit, joins a consulting house, starts hanging out with investment bankers, and barely escapes moving into the big mansion with the white folks.”

In an interview, Mr. Armstrong added: “There may be some truth to that. But in order to make it a good story, it required a bit of exaggeration.”

Mr. Armstrong’s description of the firm, and those of other co-workers, differs at least in emphasis from Mr. Obama’s. It was a small newsletter-publishing and research firm, with about 250 employees worldwide, that helped companies with foreign operations (they could be called multinationals) understand overseas markets, they said. Far from a bastion of corporate conformity, they said, it was informal and staffed by young people making modest wages. Employees called it “high school with ashtrays.”

Many workers dressed down. Only the vice president in charge of Mr. Obama’s division got a secretary, they said. Mr. Obama was a researcher and writer for a reference service called Financing Foreign Operations. He also wrote for a newsletter, Business International Money Report.

“It was not working for General Foods or Chase Manhattan, that’s for sure,” said Louis Celi, a vice president at the company, which was later taken over by the Economist Intelligence Unit. “And it was not a consulting firm by any stretch of the imagination. I remember the first time I interviewed someone from Morgan Stanley and I got cheese on my tie because I thought my tie was a napkin.”

Mr. Obama arrived in New York in August 1981, at age 20, from Occidental College in Los Angeles. According to his memoir, he passed his first night in an alley near 109th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, unable to get into his apartment. The next morning, he bathed at a hydrant alongside a homeless man.

Like other transfer students, Mr. Obama lived off campus and bounced from one apartment to another. For a while, he said, he lived with a Pakistani whom he calls Sadik. He recalls that when he lived in a walk-up on East 94th Street, he would chat with his Puerto Rican neighbors about the Knicks or the sound of gunfire at night.

He writes that “it was only now that I began to grasp the almost mathematical precision with which America’s race and class problems joined; the depth, the ferocity, of resulting tribal wars; the bile that flowed freely not just out on the streets but in the stalls of Columbia’s bathrooms as well,” where the graffiti was both racist and anti-Semitic.

In a long profile of Mr. Obama in a Columbia alumni magazine in 2005, in which his Columbia years occupied just two paragraphs, he called that time “an intense period of study.”

“I spent a lot of time in the library. I didn’t socialize that much. I was like a monk,” he was quoted as saying.

He said he was somewhat involved with the Black Student Organization and anti-apartheid activities, though, in recent interviews, several prominent student leaders said they did not remember his playing a role.

One person who did remember Mr. Obama was Michael L. Baron, who taught a senior seminar on international politics and American policy. Mr. Baron, now president of an electronics company in Florida, said he was Mr. Obama’s adviser on the senior thesis for that course. Mr. Baron, who later wrote Mr. Obama a recommendation for Harvard Law School, gave him an A in the course.

Columbia was a hotbed for discussion of foreign policy, Mr. Baron said. The faculty included Zbigniew Brzezinski, the former national security adviser, and Zalmay Khalilzad, now the American ambassador to the United Nations. Half of the eight students in the seminar were outstanding, and Mr. Obama was among them, Mr. Baron said.

Michael J. Wolf, who took the seminar with him and went on to become president of MTV Networks, said: “He was very smart. He had a broad sense of international politics and international relations. It was a class with a lot of debate. He was a very, very active participant. I think he was truly distinctive from the other people in that class. He stood out.”

Mr. Obama graduated in 1983. In his memoir, he says he had decided to become a community organizer but could not persuade anyone to hire him. So he found “more conventional work for a year” to pay off his student loans.

“Sometimes, coming out of an interview with Japanese financiers or German bond traders, I would catch my reflection in the elevator doors — see myself in a suit and tie, a briefcase in my hand — and for a split second I would imagine myself as a captain of industry, barking out orders, closing the deal, before I remembered who it was that I had told myself I wanted to be and felt pangs of guilt for my lack of resolve,” Mr. Obama wrote.

Cathy Lazere, his supervisor at Business International, described him as self-assured and bright. “He was very mature and more worldly than other people — on the surface kind of laid back, but kind of in control,” she said. “He had a good sense of himself, which I think a lot of kids at that age don’t.”

After about a year, he was hired by the New York Public Interest Research Group, a nonprofit organization that promotes consumer, environmental and government reform. He became a full-time organizer at City College in Harlem, paid slightly less than $10,000 a year to mobilize student volunteers.

Mr. Obama says he spent three months “trying to convince minority students at City College about the importance of recycling” — a description that surprised some former colleagues. They said that more “bread-and-butter issues” like mass transit, higher education, tuition and financial aid were more likely the emphasis at City College.

“You needed somebody — and here was where Barack was a star — who could make the case to students across the political spectrum,” said Eileen Hershenov, who oversaw Mr. Obama’s work for Nypirg. The job required winning over students on the political left, who would normally disdain a group inspired by Ralph Nader as insufficiently radical, as well as students on the right and those who were not active at all.

Nearly 20 years later, Mr. Obama seemed to remember the experience differently. Gene Karpinski, then executive director of U.S. PIRG, a federation of state watchdog groups, met Mr. Obama in Boston. It was at the time of the 2004 Democratic convention, when Mr. Obama delivered the speech that made him a party luminary. Mr. Karpinski introduced himself. And, he recalled, Mr. Obama told him: “I used to be a PIRG guy. You guys trained me well.”

 

AUDACITY OF HOPE – “Conservatives and Bill Clinton were right about welfare”

PAUL STREET – He opposed an amendment to the Bankruptcy Act that would have capped credit card interest rates at 30 percent.

Obama voted for a business-friendly “tort reform” bill that rolls back working peoples’ ability to obtain reasonable redress and compensation from misbehaving corporations

THE NATION – John Edwards and Hillary Clinton are pledging substantial federal resources to stabilize the mortgage market and intervene on behalf of borrowers. Barack Obama’s proposal is tepid by comparison, short on aggressive government involvement and infused with conservative rhetoric about fiscal responsibility. As he has done on domestic issues like healthcare, job creation and energy policy, Obama is staking out a position to the right of not only populist Edwards but Clinton as well. . . Though he has been a proponent of mortgage fraud legislation in the Senate, he has remained silent on further financial regulations. And much like his broader economic stimulus package, Obama’s foreclosure plan mostly avoids direct government spending in favor of a tax credit for homeowners, which amounts to about $500 on average, beyond which only certain borrowers would be eligible for help from an additional fund. . .

Obama’s disappointing foreclosure plan stems from the centrist politics of his three chief economic advisers and his campaign’s ties to Wall Street institutions opposed to increased financial regulation. David Cutler and Jeffrey Liebman are both Harvard economists who served in the Clinton Administration, and they work on market-oriented solutions to social welfare issues. Cutler advocates improving healthcare through financial incentives; Liebman, the partial privatization of Social Security.

Austan Goolsbee, an economist at the University of Chicago who calls himself a “centrist market economist,” has been most directly involved with crafting Obama’s subprime agenda. . . Robert Pollin, an economist at the University of Massachussets, believes “these three advisers generally reflect Obama’s very moderate economic program, similar to Clintonism.” Wall Street apparently has come to a similar conclusion. Obama had received nearly $10 million in contributions from the finance, insurance and real estate sector through October, and he’s second among presidential candidates of either party in money raised from commercial banks, trailing only Clinton. Goldman Sachs, which made $6 billion from devalued mortgage securities in the first nine months of 2007, is Obama’s top contributor. When asked if Obama would hold these financial institutions accountable for losses incurred by homeowners and investors, his campaign refused to comment.

PAUL STREET – Obama has lent his support to the aptly named Hamilton Project, formed by corporate-neoliberal Citigroup chair Robert Rubin and “other Wall Street Democrats” to counter populist rebellion against corporatist tendencies within the Democratic Party.

IDEOLOGY

PAUL STREET – Obama was recently hailed as a “Hamiltonian” believer in “limited government” and “free trade” by Republican New York Times columnist David Brooks, who praises Obama for having “a mentality formed by globalization, not the SDS.” . . .

POLITICS

PAUL STREET – He had to be shamed off the “New Democrat Directory” of the corporate-right Democratic Leadership Council by the popular left black Internet magazine Black Commentator.

The list was compiled by the DLC and Obama asked to be removed after he began getting flack about it – TPR

He lent his politically influential and financially rewarding assistance to neoconservative pro-war Senator Joe Lieberman’s struggle against the Democratic antiwar insurgent Ned Lamont. Obama has supported other “mainstream Democrats” fighting antiwar progressives in primary races

Obama later reversed his position and supported Lamont in the general election – TPR

He criticized efforts to enact filibuster proceedings against reactionary Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.

Obama “dismissively” referred-in a “tone laced with contempt”-to the late progressive and populist U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone as “something of a gadfly.”

He opposed an amendment to the Bankruptcy Act that would have capped credit card interest rates at 30 percent.

WASHINGTON TIMES – Barack Obama, the senatorial candidate of 2004, might have a bone to pick with Barack Obama, the presidential candidate of 2008. Videotapes of debates and speeches that were obtained by The Washington Times show that Mr. Obama took positions during his Senate campaign on nearly a half-dozen issues ranging from the Cuba embargo to health care for illegal aliens that conflict with statements that he has made during his run for the White House.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS

Obama voted to make John Negroponte the National Intelligence Director.

PAUL STREET – He voted for the appointment of the war criminal Condaleeza Rice to Secretary of State.

He refuses to foreswear the use of first-strike nuclear weapons against Iran.

WASHINGTON TIMES – In 2004, Mr. Obama told an audience at Southern Illinois University, “I think it’s time for us to end the embargo with Cuba. . . It’s time for us to acknowledge that that particular policy has failed.” However, he stopped short of calling for an end to the embargo in a Miami Herald op-ed in August. He said he would rely on diplomacy, with a message that if a post-Fidel Castro government made democratic changes, the U.S. “is prepared to take steps to normalize relations and ease the embargo.”

NEDRA PICKLER, ASSOCIATED PRESS – Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said Wednesday that he would possibly send troops into Pakistan to hunt down terrorists. . .

BUSH REGIME

AP- Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama laid out list of political shortcomings he sees in the Bush administration but said he opposes impeachment for either President George W. Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney. . . “I think you reserve impeachment for grave, grave breeches, and intentional breeches of the president’s authority,” he said.

HEALTH

PAUL STREET – Obama claims to oppose the introduction of single-payer national health insurance on the grounds that such a widely supported social-democratic change would lead to employment difficulties for workers in the private insurance industry-at places like Kaiser and Blue Cross Blue Shield. Does Obama support the American scourge of racially disparate mass incarceration on the grounds that it provides work for tens of thousands of prison guards?

WASHINGTON TIMES – Mr. Obama told an AFL-CIO group in June 2003: “I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer, universal health care plan.” But in a recent debate he said he has never endorsed such a plan. “Senator Obama has always said that single-payer universal care is a good idea because it would increase efficiency in the system, but the problem is that it’s not achievable,” Mr. Vietor said.

CIVIL LIBERTIES

He voted to confirm Michael Chertoff as head of HSA

PAUL STREET – Obama voted to re-authorize the repressive PATRIOT Act.

He opposed Senator Russ Feingold’s (D-WI) move to censure the Bush administration after the president was found to have illegally wiretapped U.S. citizens.

WASHINGTON TIMES – In an October 2003 NAACP debate, Mr. Obama said he would “vote to abolish” mandatory minimum sentences. “The mandatory minimums take too much discretion away from judges,” he said. Mr. Obama now says on his web site that he would “immediately review sentences to see where we can be smarter on crime and reduce the ineffective warehousing of nonviolent drug offenders.”

WHAT OTHERS SAY

WASHINGTON LOBBYIST – Big donors would not be helping out Obama if they didn’t see him as a ‘player’. . . What’s the dollar value of a starry-eyed idealist?

ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT

PAUL STREET – Obama assiduously supported the ethanol-promoting objectives of the Illinois-based firm Archer-Daniels Midland, which has provided him with private jets on at least two occasions. He has also defended the interests of Illinois’ gigantic electrical firm Exelon, America’s leading nuclear plant operator and a company that has given more than $74,000 to his campaigns.

NUCLEAR ENERGY

Obama voted for a nuclear energy bill that included money for bunker buster bombs and full funding for Yucca Mountain.

DALLAS NEWS – Barack Obama says nuclear power should be explored as an energy option. Hillary Rodham Clinton says she’s “agnostic” on whether more nuclear plants should be built. . . “They’ve gone from ‘no’ to ‘yes, but,’ and some even describe themselves as agnostics, and that’s a big improvement,” said Derrick Freeman, senior director of legislative programs for the Nuclear Energy Institute, which supports the nuclear industry. . .

SOURCES OF FUNDING

PAUL STREET – His top career sponsors include Goldman Sachs, Exelon (a leading Midwestern utility and the world’s leading nuclear plant operator), Soros Fund Management, J.P Morgan Chase & Co., a number of leading corporate law and lobbying firms (including Kirkland & Ellis, Skadden Arps, and Sidley Austin LLP), top Chicago investment interests (including Henry Crown & Co and Aerial Capital Management) and the like.

HIS BOOK

PAUL STREET – Obama relates youthful discomfort with his college roommates’ “irresponsible” criticism of “capitalism” and then confesses respect for Ronald Reagan’s supposed success in embodying what Obama calls “American’s longing for order” (p. 31)

Obama commends “the need to raise money from economic elites to finance elections” for “prevent[ing] Democrats…from straying too far from the center” and for marginalizing “those within the Democratic Party who tend toward zealotry” (p. 38) and “radical ideas”

Obama praises fellow centrist Senators John F. Kerry (D-MA) and Hilary Clinton (D-NY) for “believing in maintaining the superiority of the U.S. military” and embracing “the virtues of capitalism” (p. 38). He applauds his “recognizably progressive” Third Way hero Bill Clinton for showing that “markets and fiscal discipline” and “personal responsibility [are] needed to combat poverty” (pp. 34-35).

Obama contends that defense of New Deal and Great Society programs is contrary to “the changing circumstances of globalization” (p.38).

Obama claims that the 1960s New Left expressed the same self-indulgent “more absolutism” (pp. 26-33) that animated the New Right.

The American people, Obama argues, harbor only modest expectation of their government (p.7), reflecting little concern (by Obama’s account) with traditional left goals of social justice and equality.

In Obama’s brand of “progressivism,” serious concern over the nation’s harsh disparities is consigned to leftist “cranks” and other assorted “unreasonable zealots” – people walking in the “absolutist” footsteps of Marx, the New Left, and (though Obama would never acknowledge this) the democratic socialist Martin Luther King, Jr.

Obama praises the United States’ founders for “recognize[ing] that there were seeds of anarchy in the idea of individual freedom, an intoxicating danger in the idea of equality.” If “everybody is truly free, without the constraints of birth or rank and an inherited social order,” Obama asks, then “how can we ever hope to form a society that coheres?” (pp. 86-87)

The Bush-Cheney gang-bangers are “possessed,” Obama says, “of the same mix of virtues and vices, insecurities and long-buried injuries as the rest of us.”

Obama roots the greatness of America in its “free market” capitalist system and “business culture.”

It is left to alienated carpers, “cranks” and “moral absolutists” of the “unreasonable” left (Obama’s basic understanding of radicals) to observe the terrible outcomes of “our” distinctively anti-social (and incidentally heavily state-protected) “market system.”

Obama criticizes “left-leaning populists” like “Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez” for daring to think that developing nations “should resist America’s efforts to expand its hegemony” and for trying to “follow their own path to development.” Such dysfunctional “reject[ion] [of] the ideals of free markets and liberal democracy” will only worsen the situation of the global poor, Obama claims (p. 315).

THE MESSIAH AND HIS GROUPIES

I’ve been following politics since I was about 5. I’ve never seen anything like this. This is bigger than Kennedy. [Obama] comes along, and he seems to have the answers. This is the New Testament. – Chris Matthews

It’s almost like the Messiah, you know? – Jan Young

He looked at me, and the look in his eyes was worth 1,000 words – Field worker

You don’t need to debate policy or discuss the day’s headlines. You have a very personal reason for investing your time and energy in this campaign – that is the most compelling story you can tell. – Obama site

The New Kennedy – Morgenpost, Berlin

“Obama’s finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don’t even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. The other great leaders I’ve heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence. – Ezra Klein

When you listen to Barack Obama, when you really hear him, you witness a very rare thing. You witness a politician who has an ear for eloquence and a tongue dipped in the unvarnished truth – Oprah Winfrey

 

READER COMMENT: ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI

- I recall distinctly that Zbigniew Brzezinski is the author of a book titled “The Grand Chessboard.” In it he asks, now that the Soviet Union is gone, what do we do? He answers, we build up the American Empire, which means that we have to control Eurasia. He is very pissed off with the Bush administration for riding in like a herd of cowboys and screwing up his policy. You are right that Obama is not “right-wing”, but the difference between that and liberal imperialist is slight. – John Schoonover

- Foreign policy guided by Zbigniew Brzezinski? The same Zbigniew Brzezinski who advised the Carter Afghan policy that originally enabled Bin Ladin? In The Grand Chessboard he wrote:

“For most of the history of international affairs, territorial control was the focus of political conflict. Either national self-gratification over the acquisition of larger territory or the sense of national deprivation over the loss of “sacred” land has been the cause of most of the bloody wars fought since the rise of nationalism. It is no exaggeration to say that the territorial imperative has been the main impulse driving the aggressive behavior of nation-states. Empires were also built through the careful seizure and retention of vital geographic assets, such as Gibraltar or the Suez Canal or Singapore, which served as key choke points or linchpins in a system of imperial control. . .

In that context, how America ‘manages’ Eurasia is critical. Eurasia is the globe’s largest continent and is geopolitically axial. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world’s three most advanced and economically productive regions. A mere glance at the map also suggests that control over Eurasia would almost automatically entail Africa’s subordination, rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania geopolitically peripheral to the world’s central continent. About 75 per cent of the world’s people live in Eurasia, and most of the world’s physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for 60 per cent of the world’s GNP and about three-fourths of the world’s known energy resources.”

Does anyone really believe that an Obama administration guided by Brzezinski will turn away from ‘Eurasia’? Caveat emptor

JUSTIN RAIMONDO, ANTI-WAR – “We’ve had enough of a misguided war in Iraq that never should have been fought – a war that needs to end.”

Barack Obama said that in a Des Moines speech back in October, but he’s been repeating it – with added emphasis – as his campaign has taken off. It’s that last line that always gets the loudest, most prolonged applause: the audience goes wild, people stand and cheer – as well they should. We are told that the ideological differences between Obama and the Clintons aren’t all that great, that in fact they barely exist, which I think is a highly dubious proposition, but, in any case, on this issue – the vital question of war and peace – the gulf between them could not be wider, or deeper.

She, after all, voted for the war, and she’s been saber-rattling over Iran – much to AIPAC’s delight. Obama, on the other hand, has taken a clear and consistent antiwar position on the Iraq war. . .

This is the real source of Obama’s streak of solid victories, aside from the hypnotic effects of his oratory: contra the conventional wisdom, it isn’t all about style with him, or “platitudes,” as John McCain puts it. It’s all about his opposition to the Iraq war. . .

Obama has emerged as the antiwar candidate, constantly driving home the point that he – unlike the Senator from New York – had the judgment to doubt the veracity of the President’s case for war from the get-go.

The Clintons are desperately trying to spin this away, with President Priapus denouncing Obama’s antiwar record as “a fairy tale” and The New Republic rather more subtly suggesting “Obama himself may understand that the issue is more complicated than his condemnations of Hillary Clinton’s judgment.”

It is a piece that starts out by chronicling Obama’s memorable performance at a 2002 antiwar rally in Chicago – when very few mainstream politicians were showing up at antiwar events – and charts his subsequent equivocations, wobbles, and doubts, slyly implying that he’s not really all that far away from being a calculating Clintonian himself. . .

It’s odd that Crowley opens his piece with the scene from that rally, but somehow neglects to report what Obama said:

“What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne….

“I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity. He’s a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him.

“But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history. I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.”. . .

In the face of this nationwide upsurge of Obama-mania, the War Party is making threatening noises, such as in this piece in the Jerusalem Post reporting Malcolm Hoenlein’s visit to Israel, where he announced that Obama’s candidacy may represent a threat:

“All the talk about change, but without defining what that change should be is an opening for all kind of mischief. Of course Obama has plenty of Jewish supporters and there are many Jews around him. But there is a legitimate concern over the zeitgeist around the campaign.”. . .

The evidence is all around us, including a recently uncovered internal memo written by an official of the American Jewish Committee that betrays “a quiet unease” over Obama’s Middle East policy positions, as The Forward reports . . .

Another accusation to be hurled at Obama: his chief foreign policy advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinksi, has praised The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, a book by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt that exposes the all-pervasive role of the pro-Israel lobby in this country and its distorting effect on American foreign policy. The Lobby will fight tooth and nail before they’ll let Obama – and Brzezinksi – anywhere near the White House.

Noah Pollak, over at Commentary, is singling out Samantha Power, a foreign policy advisor to Obama, who has dared agree with Brzezinski that the Lobby’s veto power over US policy in the Middle East needs to be abolished before we can move forward. . .

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=12366