Now that the primary season is over, we can see that the clear winner was Hillary Clinton.
Oh, I know. Barack Obama got the most votes and the most delegates, and he’ll be the Democratic presidential nominee this August, but increasingly, it’s becoming obvious that he’s just a pretty wrapper. Sneak a peak inside the wrapper and you’ll find Hillary Clinton inside.
Look at the facts.
No sooner did the last votes get counted in Montana, than Obama hied himself off to Washington to show his fealty to the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), where he promised to do whatever Israel wanted. You would have thought he was Bush or Hillary, so fulsome was his promise to unquestioningly back the worst policies and actions of Israel’s criminally insane right-wing government. Claim all of Jerusalem for the Jewish state? Fine by him. Starve and terrorize a million people in Gaza? No problemo. Attack Iran to prevent a merely suspected nuclear program from eventually producing a possible bomb? Okay. Negotiate with Hamas? Never.
Then there was the FISA and Fourth Amendment-violating campaign of spying by the National Security Agency. Some members of Congress and the courts have been trying for years to find out what Bush and Cheney have really been up to with this program, but they’ve been stymied by the administration’s insistence that the phone companies, who enabled most of the spying, are immune from prosecution and don’t have to surrender records of, or talk about what they actually did. Congress, with the help of a spineless Democratic majority in both houses, came up in June with a bill that endorses the spying and gives retroactive immunity to the phone companies. 15 Senators—all Democrats-- opposed that wretched sell-out of the Constitution and the American people. Sen. Obama supported it, just like Clinton.
When the Supreme Court, in a rare exception to a rash of reactionary rulings in the past few weeks, overturned a state law authorizing the death penalty for the rape of a child, Obama stood up for the death penalty, saying that he thought states should have the right to kill anyone who would sexually abuse a child. I guess he must think the states should be able to kill people convicted of killing someone too, since murder has to be at least as nasty as child rape. Another Clinton position. Never mind that most of the people who get the death penalty are persons of color, and that almost all the 4000 people on America’s bulging death rows are either poor, desperately poor, retarded or simply insane. Never mind that rape is one of the most likely crimes to lead to wrongful convictions.
Barack was out there dissing black dads, too, charging them, as a class, with abandonment of their children, even though studies show that black fathers are no less likely to abandon their kids than are white dads. Okay, that’s not really a Hillary position. It’s more akin to Bill Clinton’s attacks on prominent blacks like Jesse Jackson or Sister Soulja during his campaigns for higher office.
It’s getting harder and harder to see any light between Obama’s and Hillary’s positions on the Iraq War too, what with Obama backing away from his earlier campaign pledge to end the war within 16 months of taking office and saying instead that he would “listen to the generals” and that withdrawal would depend upon the situation on the ground.
Finally, Obama, after showing a remarkable ability to inspire tons of small donations and support from individuals, and to fund a huge national campaign without much in the way of corporate support, is greedily slurping from Hillary’s cesspool of corporate backers, now that she’s out of the way. Soon, he’ll be wallowing in tainted cash from Wall Street commercial and investment banks and hedge funds, telecom companies, defense contractors, Big Pharma companies, the HMO industry, and the entertainment industry. He’ll be owned like just about every other politician in Washington.
The transmogrification of an upstart people’s candidate for “change” into just another front man for the corporatocracy will be complete.
Hillary will have won, but in the corporal form of Barack Obama.
The joke, of course, is that this evocation by Obama of his inner Clinton is not going to win him many votes, and may in fact lose him far more than he gains. Being Clinton, after all, didn’t win it for Hillary Clinton. It was Obama’s differences from Clinton that won him the primary votes.
Clintonian positions didn’t really win the presidency for Bill Clinton either. It was Ross Perot who won the 1992 election for Clinton, by stealing enough votes from George Bush Sr. to let Clinton win with a mere plurality of the votes cast. There won’t be any Ross Perot this year, though, so Obama can’t hope to squeak by with a minority of the votes cast the way Bill did. In fact there will be at least two candidates—a Green Party one and Ralph Nader--who will be picking off some of the people Obama’s imitation of Clinton will turn off sufficiently for them to abandon him. There will also be a Libertarian candidate running, whose outspoken opposition to the war will attract disillusioned erstwhile Obama backers. Many more voters may just stay home in disgust. (It was also Al Gore's decision to run a Clintonesque campaign of triangulation and pursuit of those elusive "mainstream" voters that made his run against Bush in 2000 close enough for the election to be stolen.)
Meanwhile, those Hillary primary voters Obama seems intent on pursuing at the expense of the progressive vote—the pro-Israel hawks in New York and Florida, the “hard-working whites” of the West Virginia hollers, the Pennsylvania hills and the flatlands of Ohio and Indiana—aren’t going to vote for him just because he adopts Hillary’s positions. They’ll want the real deal, not just a front man posing as a front woman, so they’ll go for John McCain (just as they would have in November had Hillary won the nomination).
You gotta ask why a guy who had it all going for him is suddenly making such incredibly bad strategic decisions.
Dave Lindorff, a columnist for Counterpunch, is author of several recent books ("This Can't Be Happening! Resisting the Disintegration of American Democracy" and "Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal"). His latest book, coauthored with Barbara Olshanshky, is "The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office (St. Martin's Press, May 2006). His writing is available at http://www.thiscantbehappening.net
Lindorff's analysis is spot-on. I wonder how Dave now
feels, though, about an article he wrote several months ago, when Obama was still positioning himself to the left of Hillary. In that article, Dave was feeling cautiously positive about Obama. He suggested that a valid reason for supporting Obama might be not so much the candidate himself (whose progressive credentials were never too convincing) but rather the “movement” he seemed at that time to have inspired (the wave of idealistic youth, & so on). The basic idea was that the “movement” might determine the course of events more than the man himself.
At the time, that analysis seemed interesting & plausible. With Obama’s lurch to the right, however, it appears that this theory was too optimistic; & that the Democrats have merely snookered their own base once again, with an exceptionally slick marketing operation. You have to be pretty slick to out-Clinton the Clintons, and that’s what Obama has done.
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Richard Mynick (2 articles, 3 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 1121 comments)
on Saturday, June 28, 2008 at 1:26:03 PM
Howard Zinn, in fact, is still saying the same thing, and of course, it is still possible, though I suspect increasingly unlikely. The idea is that if Obama is elected because of a popular movement, much of it not directly responsible to him--the many new voters, young voters, black voters, independents, etc. who have flocked to his ambiguous and largely vacuous call for "change"--that he will be compelled to at least to some extent accomodate their demands. This was essentially what happened in the case of Franklin Roosevelt in 1932, as I wrote earllier. Roosevelt was no "New Dealer" when he was running for office, but his campaign, in opposition to Herbert Hoover, inspired such hope among the poor and the working classes that in the end he was compelled to respond to their demands for real government activism.
If, and it is a huge IF, the progressives backing Obama, including the trade union movement, act in concert to demand more of him, especially during the coming campaign, and then after the election, there is at least the hope that something similar could happen--especially if as seems likely, Democrats sweep into firm control of the Congress, eliminating the need to compromise with Republicans to win passage of legislation.
The problem is that the more Obama sells out to the moneyed interests who have always backed the Clintons, the harder it will be to pry him loose from their clutches.
Also, if he continues on the present path, pursuing voters that he is unlikely to win over in any case, he is likely to lose the election anyhow.
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Dave Lindorff (319 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 152 comments)
on Sunday, June 29, 2008 at 9:12:59 AM
David, I'd like to see the sourcing that Obama has (or will) be accepting more corporate cash then private donations.
I know Clinton did, but Obama seemed to have NO shortage of money coming in from private donors, allowing him the higher ground as he shatters all records.
Maybe I haven't been keeping up, has he thrown this election-reform high ground out the window for money he doesn't even need? Please inform me!
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Gustav Wynn (51 articles, 34 quicklinks, 5 diaries, 240 comments)
on Monday, June 30, 2008 at 10:37:09 AM
In the shadows is Bill. Sure, they're trashing cars in Orlando for Hillary's sake, but that sort of thing will backfire, especially in a state where federal intervention is not wanted.
I am one who thinks Obama must acknowledge what has happened in the United States since he was born. Part of the enhancement of Kennedy's civil rights actions needed desperately an affable Southern Baptist to declare that children of all colors should go to school in places like Little Rock. My desire is to see some writing about big tent Democratic feelings, which is not anything MSM seems interested in. During the primary, feelings ran high between the DLC gang and those who have other names of one kind or another. And through it all was Hillary not quite certain of the chasm, IMHO, but she surely must feel that Bill is important in Democratic politics.
It would be great for those who think that tradition carries weight for the rank and file voter to realize that the race/gender question is not as important as foreign and domestic policies in 2008.
I ask how we can make the crises of today relevant. It's a lot more than a stupid economy. Or a stupid war. People who are hurting (meaning headlines in hometown papers about shortages in community pantries) are not interested in reading psychobabble concerning two Alpha males.
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Margaret Bassett (21 articles, 1364 quicklinks, 28 diaries, 824 comments)
on Sunday, June 29, 2008 at 1:50:33 PM
