Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics

Paul Street

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317263395
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

Many Americans believe Barak Obama represents a hopeful future for America. But does he also reflect the American politics of the past? This book offers the broadest and best-informed understanding on the meaning of the "Obama phenomenon" to date. Paul Street was on the ground throughout the Iowa campaign, and his stories of the rising Obama phenomenon are poignant. Yet the author's background in American political history allows him to explore the deeper meanings of Obama's remarkable political career. He looks at Obama in relation to contemporary issues of class, race, war, and empire. He considers Obama in the context of our nation's political history, with comparisons to FDR, JFK, Bill Clinton, and other leaders. Street finds that the Obama persona, crafted by campaign consultants and filtered through dominant media trends, masks the "change" candidate's adherence to long-prevailing power structures and party doctrines. He shows how American political culture has produced misperceptions by the electorate of Obama's positions and values. Obama is no magical exception to the narrow-spectrum electoral system and ideological culture that have done so much to define and limit the American political tradition. Yet the author suggests key ways in which Obama potentially advances democratic transformation. Street makes recommendations on how citizens can productively respond to and act upon Obama's influence and the broader historical and social forces that have produced his celebrity and relevance. He also lays out a real agenda for change for the new presidential administration, one that addresses the recent failures of democratic politics.

CHAPTER 1

Obama’s “Dollar Value”

On condition of anonymity, one Washington lobbyist I spoke with was willing to point out the obvious: that big donors would not be helping out Obama if they didn’t see him as a “player.” The lobbyist added: “What’s the dollar value of a starry-eyed idealist?”

—KEN SILVERSTEIN, HARPER’S, NOVEMBER 2006

Mr. Obama is widely portrayed, not least by himself, as a transformational figure who will usher in a new era. But his actual policy proposals, though liberal, tend to be cautious and relatively orthodox.

—PAUL KRUGMAN, NEW YORK TIMES, MARCH 28, 2008

In his view of history, in his respect for tradition, in his skepticism that the world can be changed any way but very, very slowly, Obama is deeply conservative.

—LARISSA MACFARQUHAR, FROM THE NEW YORKER, MAY 7, 2007

“ONE EVENING IN FEBRUARY 2005, in a four-hour meeting stoked by pepperoni pizza and great ambition,” the Chicago Tribune reported in the spring of 2007, “Senator Barack Obama and his senior advisors crafted a strategy to fit the Obama ‘brand.’” The after-hours session, called by Obama’s Senate staff and including Axelrod, took place just weeks after Obama had been sworn into the U.S. Senate. According to Tribune Washington Bureau reporters Mike Dorning and Christi Parsons, in an article entitled “Carefully Crafting the Obama Brand,”

The charismatic celebrity-politician had rocketed from the Illinois state legislature to the U.S. Senate, stirring national interest. The challenge was to maintain altitude despite the limited tools available to a freshman senator whose party was in a minority.

Yet even in those early days, Obama and his advisors were thinking ahead. Some called it the “2010–2012–2016” plan: a potential bid for governor or re-election to the Senate in 2010, followed by a bid for the White House as soon as 2012, not 2016. The way to get there, they decided, was by carefully building a record that matched the brand identity: Obama as a unifier and consensus builder, an almost postpolitical leader.

The staffers in that after-hours session, convened by Obama’s Senate staff and including Chicago political advisor David Axelrod, planned a low-profile strategy that would emphasize workhorse results over headlines. Obama would invest in the long-term profile by not seeming too eager for the bright lights.¹

This Tribune story is disturbing on numerous levels. It suggests a degree of cynicism, manipulation, and ambition that does Not fit very well with the progressive and hopeful image that the Obama campaign has projected. It calls to mind a tension between virtuous public claims and selfish goals behind the scenes. The politician being sold would make sure to seem non-ambitious—“not seeming too eager for the bright lights” and privileging hard work over “headlines”—and respectful toward fellow members of the political class (“establishing good relationships with …. colleagues”). But, by Dorning and Parsons’ account, Obama and his team were actually and quite eagerly all about “the bright lights” and “the headlines” in a “long-term” sense. They were already scheming for the presidency less than a month into his Senate seat. The image of Obama as a humble and hardworking rookie who got along with his colleagues across partisan lines was only part of a marketing strategy to promote him on the path to higher—the highest—office. The great “reformer” Obama may have just become only the third black to sit in the august U.S. Senate since Reconstruction, but for him and his team the Senate was largely a marketing platform for the Next Big Thing—a place to build his reputation as a “unifier” and “consensus builder.” They seemed unconcerned about the authoritarian implications of the concept of a “postpolitical leader,” a commercialized trademark who would rise above democratic and ideological contestation on the road to power atop the most powerful nation in history.

At the same time, the term “Obama brand” suggested the commodified nature of a political culture that tends to reduce elections to corporate-crafted marketing contests revolving around candidate images and characters packaged and sold by corporate consultants and public relations experts. It implied an officeholder politician for sale and more immersed in the world of money, commerce, and capitalism than in public service.

“A Game Only They Can Afford to Play”

And then, one weekend after announcing his presidential candidacy in Springfield, Illinois, in February 2007, between trips to the critical early primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire, Obama attended an event that put these corporate connections on display. “Amid the whirlwind weekend of campaign speeches and events,” Chicago Tribune reporters David Jackson and John McCormick noted two months later, “his entourage arrived at the Hyatt Regency Chicago on East Wacker Drive, where eager fans grazed sandwich and fruit platters and offered checks and credit card payments of up to $2,300.” The Chicago mayor’s brother, former Clinton Commerce Secretary William Daley, was “one of the more prominent faces in a crowd of more than 700 who contributed an estimated $1 million.”

The “crowd” came largely from “global Chicago’s” heavily corporate-connected legal and financial elite.² It stood in interesting contrast to the senator’s Springfield claim that he was running to take America back from “the special interests who’ve turned our government into a game only they can afford to pay.” In his candidacy announcement, Obama said, “They write the checks and you get stuck with the bills; they get the access while you get to write a letter; they think they own the government, but we’re here to take it back. The time for that politics is over. It’s time to turn the page.”³

Would an Obama presidency really “turn the page” away from big-money influence and melt the icy stranglehold that concentrated wealth has long had on U. S. politics and policy? Without forgetting that campaigns and legislative careers do not completely or always reliably predict presidential policies, I suggest in this chapter that an Obama White House could be expected to tilt toward elite economic interests—its leading inhabitant’s onetime populist rhetoric aside—unless and until it was compelled to behave otherwise by an aroused and organized citizenry.

Historical Context: Past Democratic (Party) Betrayals

Like many other Democratic politicians past and present, Obama has throughout his political career walked the thin moral tightrope set up for political candidates under the United States’ “dollar democracy.” His position between the power of big money and the democratic ideal is hardly unique in the history of the Democratic Party, its presidents, and its presidential candidates. Under the influence of corporate and financial elites, the party’s move to the corporate center and away from economic justice on behalf of the poor and the working class—the mission it still purports to uphold with special intensity during campaign seasons—began long before Obama arrived on the political scene. Some review of that history is useful for understanding the nature of the dilemmas faced by those who seek meaningful democratic progress under an Obama (or any other Democratic) presidency.⁴

Jimmy Carter: “Protecting Corporate Wealth and Power”

The Democratic presidency of Jimmy Carter is a case in point. Rising to power on the basis of his promise to recapture and reinvigorate a citizenry disillusioned by the Vietnam War, Watergate, deepening economic insecurity, and growing awareness of environmental deterioration and social disarray, Carter made a populist pitch to American voters. He may have been a millionaire peanut grower, but he put himself forward as an ordinary, plain-speaking farmer moved by simple decency to give ordinary Americans a new sense of hope and change.

Making a special appeal to those who saw themselves as besieged by the rich and powerful, Carter made a heavily publicized speech to the legal profession in which he denounced the use of law to serve and protect the wealthy few. Carter promised to eliminate flagrant tax loopholes for corporations and the rich and proposed to raise the tax on capital gains and reduce rates on individuals. He also promised to introduce major health-care reform providing coverage for millions of uninsured Americans. His personal campaign mission was to restore hope in Washington and America by shrinking the distance between the American people and American politics, and the promise to roll back the power of special corporate interests was a key part of that promise.

Once he attained power, however, Carter “remained,” in Howard Zinn’s words, “within the historic political boundaries of the American system, protecting corporate wealth and power, maintaining a huge military machine that drained the national wealth.” He appointed a strong militarist and nuclear-power advocate as secretary of energy and made numerous other cabinet appointments calculated to win approval from the upper reaches of the “business community.” His 1977 tax reform did little to help working-class and poor people, and the tax bill that Congress passed and Carter signed the following year “was perhaps the most regressive measure since the 1920s,” according to noted liberal author and journalist William Greider. Renowned economist Robert Lekachman said the bulk of the 1978 tax measure’s “benefits accrue[d] to the affluent individuals and corporations.” Carter’s energy bill benefited oil companies more than consumers, and the health-reform measures he pledged never materialized.⁵

Reflecting his declared neoliberal desire to reduce the size of government and lessen its control over the “free market,” Carter supported business-backed legislation that concentrated corporate control and deepened economic insecurity for consumers and workers by deregulating airlines, trucking, natural gas, and banks. He made no effort to expand or renew the antipoverty and social welfare initiatives of his Democratic predecessor, Lyndon B. Johnson, or to strengthen the American labor movement through aggressive enforcement of the National Labor Relations Act. Under Carter, federal funds that might have gone to inner-city schools and health and social services were diverted instead to an expanded military budget even as the press published numerous reports of wasteful “defense” spending and rampant corporate-Pentagon corruption.

By Greider’s account, “Carter’s aides, like Reagan’s, responded mainly to industry complaints, not broad principle.”⁶ In 1979, as Carter diverted money from social programs and contradicted his aim of shrinking government by approving giant, corporate-friendly Pentagon budgets, the Children’s Defense Fund reported that one in every seven American children lacked a known primary health-care source and that one in every three children under the age of seventeen had never seen a dentist.

The confrontation with the plutocratic Reagan administration hardly jolted the Democratic Party out of its rightward drift and back toward the more populist and working-class leanings of the New Deal era. The candidacies of centrist Walter Mondale (1984) and Michael Dukakis (1988) “saw party leaders and pundits massed protectively, standing shoulder to shoulder against the last coherent left populist campaign mounted within the framework of the Democratic Party, by Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition.”⁷

Bill Clinton: “Putting People First”

Things didn’t get much better, from a progressive or populist perspective at least, under the Democratic presidency of William Jefferson Clinton. The 1992 Clinton campaign’s rhetoric contained a “strong streak of populism,” starting with a speech that excoriated the 1980s as “a gilded age of greed.”⁸ Clinton claimed he would restore hope in America by “putting people first” over and above the big corporate interests and privileged few. Contrasting his plebian origins and passionate concern for ordinary working families with the perceived plutocratic indifference of the arch-aristocratic George H.W. Bush, Clinton promised to strengthen unions, fight poverty, introduce universal health care, and reject the regressive, corporate-globalizationist North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Clinton was going to usher in a new era of national “unity” that would restore the connection between the American people and U.S. politics by elevating shared goals of democracy and equality above partisan divisions, economic privilege, and special-interest control.

Once in office, however, Clinton “put Wall Street in charge of national economic strategy.”⁹ His actions most especially reflected not his egalitarian promises but rather his leading role in the rise of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). Formed by business-oriented party elites to increase the party’s distance from labor, environmentalism, blacks, and civil rights, the DLC’s mission was to steer the Democratic Party closer to the corporate, imperial, southern, suburban, and racially accommodationist center. Its goal was to advance postpartisan corporate convergence between Democratic and Republican agendas at the elite level and to impose economically and racially regressive policies underneath the cloak of “progressive” strategy and a “pragmatic,” “get-things-done” realism.

Clinton’s policies and appointments stayed true to his DLC credentials. They also reflected his captivity to powerful corporate and Wall Street interests that key corporate Clinton advisers—including former Goldman Sachs CEO and Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin—famously instructed him not to buck. After attaining office on the basis of the Democratic Party’s standard egalitarian vows, the president “from Hope” quickly defied mainstream public support for socially democratic policies by conducting the public business in regressive accord with the interrelated neoliberal and racially disparate imperatives of empire and inequality.

Clinton’s domestic agenda was first announced as a gigantic jobs-creation program coupled with a determined effort to guarantee health care for all. But, as Howard Zinn has noted, Clinton quickly betrayed these declared campaign priorities by concentrating on reduction of the deficit, which had drastically increased under Reagan and George Bush the First. This emphasis “meant that there would be no bold programs of expenditures for universal health care, education, child care, housing, the environment, the arts, or job creation,” wrote Zinn.¹⁰ Clinton’s “small gestures” toward social democracy d...