I mean, the fact that he had the parentage that he had, had the upbringing that he had, that he had the accomplishments that he had, were related endlessly frankly as the equivalent of a progressive politics, right? And certainly I can understand why many people were enraptured basically by the notion of his being the first black president, right?
Or first president publicly recognized as black. I've heard the Warren Harding stories too. And that's understandable, I mean it's understandable that people would consider that a nice thing, right, or a benchmark of some sort, but that's all there was with Obama and his identity was the substitute for this.
And we've seen this, it's not just about Obama. I do happen to have had the good fortune just the blind accident to have lived in the state senate district that he emerged in and having been very close and very much involved in the politics in the district so I got to see the shaping of Obama from the very beginning, but it's true about others.
R.K.: Let's stay on that for a minute because I've spoken with Greg Palast about that and he says that shaping very much involved the Pritzker billionaire family.
A.R.: Oh absolutely. If I thought about it, I would have sent you the concluding paragraph of a column that I wrote in the village voice in January of 1996, that's about Obama and I didn't mention him by name because nobody would have known it. This was just as he was being elected to the state senate and it was clear, I mean, I described him as, I think, a foundation and corporate confection. His base was among the Hyde Park liberals at the University of Chicago and Pritzker and that element. That's where Obama came from.
R.K.: Okay, so wait, Hyde Park liberals at the University of Chicago? That means something to you but maybe not to most of the listeners and readers. What does that mean?
A.R.: Oh true. It's kind of a combo of... well what it basically means is upper status anti-machine daily type liberals and there's the longstanding joke about Hyde Park was where black and white joined hands against the poor.
R.K.: Against what?
A.R.: Against the poor.
R.K.: Against the poor, ah.
A.R.: And I mean the University of Chicago...
R.K.: Neo-liberals in other words?
A.R.: Exactly. That's exactly right. That's his base, it always has been. If you look at his first term, I was just thinking about this because I mentioned this in a response to Michelle Goldberg's dumb comment on my article in the Nation, if you remember his first term, you've got, well, I mean just to name some of the Chicago crowd. Rahm Emanuel, what was his Rabbi basically? Pritzker is now in administration. Austan Goolsbee, who was a professor at the University of Chicago, who never met a free-trade argument that he didn't like, and others.
You can go down the list. Arne Duncan, his former basketball player is leading the charge for the administration and I've got to underscore that preposition, for the administration against public education, public schools, and teachers unions all over the country.
R.K.: Let's break this down a little bit, okay?
A.R.: Okay.
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