An Analysis of Obamamania

Would You Like Change With That?

An Analysis of Obamamania

By Doug Henwood
Left Business Observer #117, March 2008.
www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Obama.html

Super Tuesday II, as Fox dubbed it, took some steam out
of the Obama bandwagon, but he's still the likely
Democratic nominee, and therefore the likely president-
to-be. Which is remarkable, really-a nonparticipant can
only stand slackjawed in awe of Obamamania. Previously
rational people whom LBO admires, like Barbara
Ehrenreich and Christopher Hayes, have fallen in love
with the Senator's brand of change we can believe in, a
slogan that has to be one of the emptiest since
Sandburg's 'The people, yes!,' that the New Party used
in New York in the early 1990s. Obama has become the
Tokio Hotel of politics.

On what is this mania based? 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.

In this binary world, when you criticize Obama, people
immediately include you're a Hillary Clinton fan. Uh,
no. Her politics are bellicose and neoliberal. Her
'experience' consists largely of having watched her
husband be president for eight years, though it's
likely they were sleeping in separate bedrooms for much
of the time. A plague on all their houses.

Agendas

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 (DLC); 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. A share of Obama
stock on the Iowa Electronic Market was 30 on May 19,
2007, the day of Jones's Obama bash; it peaked at 86 on
March 1, a gain of 187% (in a year where triple digits
are rare). It's since settled back into the low 70s,
which is still quite a gain.

The phantasmic

LBO would be the last to argue that politics is all
about rationality. Fantasy matters. But fantasy can
have some relationship to policy. Take the example of
Ronald Reagan, a man for whom Obama professed some
admiration for having rolled back the 'excesses of the
1960s and 1970s' and bringing back 'a sense of dynamism
and entrepreneurship that had been missing.' Reagan
promised to make America 'stand tall again' and 'to get
government off the backs of the people.' Certainly
these phrases didn't appeal to the rational faculties
of the electorate, but they did correspond with a
military buildup, a greater willingness to go to war,
and an economic agenda of deregulation and reverence
for private wealth. And Reagan had real political
forces behind him-first, his cabal of right-wing
Southern California businessmen, later supplemented by
the corporate and financial establishment, and
operating with a playbook written by movement
conservatives and the Heritage Foundation.

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. (Under attack from Clinton and
McCain, he did get specific in his long Wisconsin
victory speech. This brought attacks from Karl Rove and
others, placing him on the 'far left'; it's not likely
we'll see much more of this irresponsible stuff from
Obama as November approaches.) 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.
Obama already when he talks 'black' (e.g., with his
'Cousin Pookie' riffs, which are the exact equivalent
of Shelby Steele's rantings about underclass, shiftless
'Sam') opts for the Bookerite/Cosbyite metaphor of
victim-blaming in the phony first-person plural, and he
has always played the Immigrant Success Story Up From
Slavery Ain't America Great and Don't I Show It angle.
And, moreover, what many of his white supporters like
about him is that he doesn't have the ‘chip on the
shoulder' that so many indigenous blacks do. Add all
this to his commitment to appealing to the right and to
the investor class, and the upshot is that inequality
could lose whatever vestigial connotations it has as a
species of injustice and be fully consolidated as the
marker, on the bottom end that is, of those losers who
failed to do what the market requires of them or a sign
of their essential inferiority."

Turn to cheer

Enough critique; the dialectic demands something
constructive to induce some forward motion. 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.

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