[Peace-discuss] Obama's Game

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Alex Cockburn, at Counterpunch, describes the Potemkin
village that is our junior senator.  --CGE] 

   Obama's Game
   By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

I was harsh about Senator Barack Obama of Illinois here a
couple of weeks ago, and the very next morning his press aide,
Tommy Vietor, was on the phone howling about inaccuracies. It
was an illuminating conversation, indicative of the sort of
instinctive reflexes at work in the office of a man already
breathlessly touted as a possible vice presidential candidate
in 2008 and maybe a presidential candidate somewhere down the
road from there.

Obama's man took grave exception to my use of the word
"distanced" to describe what his boss had done when Illinois'
senior U.S. senator, Dick Durbin, got into trouble for
likening conditions at Guantanamo to those in a Nazi or
Stalin-era camp. This was one of Durbin's finer moments, as he
read an FBI man's eyewitness describing how he had entered
interview rooms "to find a detainee chained hand and foot in a
fetal position to the floor, with no chair, food or water.
Most times they urinated or defecated on themselves, and had
been left there for 18-24 hours or more."

"If I read this to you", Durbin told his fellow senators, "and
did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what
Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would
most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis,
Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime--Pol Pot or
others--that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is
not the case. This was the action of Americans in the
treatment of their prisoners. It is not too late. I hope we
will learn from history. I hope we will change course."

So Durbin paid the penalty of having to eat crow on the Senate
floor. His fellow senator, Obama, did not support him in any
way. Obama said, "we have a tendency to demonize and jump on
and make mockery of each other across the aisle and that is
particularly pronounced when we make mistakes. Each and every
one of us is going to make a mistake once in a while... and
what we hope is that our track record of service, the scope of
how we've operated and interacted with people, will override
whatever particular mistake we make."

That's three uses of the word "mistake". This isn't distancing?

Nor did Obama's man like my description of Obama's
cheerleading for the nuke Iran crowd. Obama recently declared
that when it comes to the U.S. posture on Iran, all options,
including military ones, should be on the table. Now, if Obama
had any sort of guts in such matters he would have said that
if Iraq is to teach America's leaders any lesson, it is that
reckless recourse to the military "option" carries a dreadful
long-term price tag.

He did nothing of the sort, which is not surprising to anyone
who read his speech to the Council of Foreign Relations last
November. Remember the context. Rep. Jack Murtha had just
given a savage jolt to the White House. This be-medalled
former chairman of the House Armed Services committee had
publicly delivered the actual opinion of the generals: "I
believe we need to turn Iraq over to the Iraqis The United
States will immediately redeploy--immediately redeploy. All of
Iraq must know that Iraq is free, free from a United States
occupation. And I believe this will send a signal to the
Sunnis to join the political process."

And who knows, if Murtha's counsel had been followed, maybe it
would have saved Iraq from the horrors now unraveling. But
Democrats fled Murtha, few with more transparent calculation
than Obama who voyaged to the Council on Foreign Relations on
November 22, there to ladle out to the assembled elites such
balderdash as "The President could take the politics out of
Iraq once and for all if he would simply go on television and
say to the American people 'Yes, we made mistakes'", or "we
need to focus our attention on how to reduce the U.S. military
footprint in Iraq. Notice that I say 'reduce,' and not 'fully
withdraw'", or "2006 should be the year that the various Iraqi
factions must arrive at a fair political accommodation to
defeat the insurgency; and , the Administration must make
available to Congress critical information on reality-based
benchmarks that will help us succeed in Iraq."

Obama is one of those politicians whom journalists like to
decorate with words as "adroit" or "politically adept" because
you can actually see him trimming to the wind, the way you see
a conjuror of moderate skill shove the rabbit back up his
sleeve. Above all he is concerned with the task of reassuring
the masters of the Democratic Party, and beyond that, the
politico-corporate establishment, that he is safe. Whatever
bomb might have been in his head has long since been
dis-armed. He's never going to blow up in the face of anyone
of consequence.

There are plenty of black people like that in the Congress
now. After a decade or so of careful corporate funding, as the
Black Congressional Caucus is sinking under the weight of
Democratic Leadership Copuncil clones like Artur Davis of
Alabama, Albert Wynn of Maryland, Sanford Bishop and David
Scott of Georgia, William Jefferson of Louisiana, Gregory
Meeks of New York, all assiduously selling for a mess of
pottage the interests of the voters who sent them to
Washington. Obama has done exactly the same thing. He lobbed
up the first signal flare during the run-up to his 2004 senate
race, when his name began to feature on Democratic Leadership
Council literature as one of the hundred Democratic leaders to
watch . That indispensable publication The Black Commentator
raised a stink about this. "It would be a shame," wrote the
Commentator's Bruce Dixon, " if he is in the process of
becoming 'ideologically freed' from the opinions of the
African American and other Democrats whose votes he needs to win."

Obama wriggled for a while, sending out clouds of mush speak
such as "I believe that politics in any democracy is a game of
addition, not subtraction", but the Commentator held his feet
to the fire. They posed Obama three "bright-line" questions:

    1. Do you favor the withdrawal of the United States from
NAFTA? Will you in the Senate introduce or sponsor legislation
toward that end?

    2. Do you favor the adoption of a single payer system of
universal health care to extend the availability of quality
health care to all persons in this country? Will you in the
Senate introduce or sponsor legislation toward that end?

    3. Would you have voted against the October 10
congressional resolution allowing the president to use
unilateral force against Iraq?

This was in 2003, when Obama clearly felt he could not afford
to endanger left support by answering anything other than Yes
on the questions and so he duly told the Black Commentator
that he would stop hanging his hat in the halls of the DLC and
would tell them to remove his name from their !00-To-Watch
list. Hence his press man, Vietor's, sensitivity to my
allusion in that last to Obama's "mentor" being Senator Joe
Lieberman. As a freshman senator, Vietor insisted, Obama had
been assigned Lieberman as "mentor". Read the Hartford Courant
and you'll find Lieberman boasting that Obama picked him.

Either way, it's obvious that Obama could have brokered a
different mentor if he'd so desired it, same way he could have
declined to go and tout for Lieberman at that Democratic Party
dinner in Connecticut at the end of March. But he clearly
didn't, because he wanted to send out a reassuring signal,
same way as his Political Action Committee, the Hope Fund's,
is raising money for 14 of his senatorial colleagues--ten of
whom are DLC in orientation, which is half of the DLC presence
in the Senate.

There has been a more substantive signal, keenly savored by
the corporate world, where Obama voted for "tort reform", thus
making it far harder for people to get redress or
compensation. Actually the Yes vote in the Senate was
filibuster-proof, s Obama could have voted either way without
it making anydifference. He just wanted the top people to know
j how safe he was.

A woman from Illinois wrote to me after my last column on
Obama, agreeing with my reproofs, and saying:

    Here's an example of how the position and adulation from
those in Washington have gone to his head. I'm involved with
the Springfield (IL) Urban League. We began asking almost
immediately after the election if he could be the keynote
speaker at our annual fundraising dinner--which was held last
fall! His staff delayed positive responses (even as we
continued to call and inquire) until it was too late to get on
the schedule of any nationally recognized 'celebrity.'
(Thankfully, the attendance was excellent and the fundraiser
our best ever--despite the brush off we received from Obama.)
Let me reiterate: Barack Obama blew off speaking before an
audience of 500 primarily African-American voters in
Illinois--the state he purports to represent. He's spoken here
lots of times prior to his election to the Senate, and even
since. But he blew us off for nothing more than continued
visits to states that did not elect him to stump for
sometimes-questionable democrats--like the Lieberman situation."

Some hopeful progressives still say, "Obama has to bob and
weave, while positioning himself at the high table as the
people's champion." But in his advance to the high table he is
divesting himself of all legitimate claims to be any sort of
popular champion, as opposed to another safe black, like
Condoleezza Rice (whom Obama voted to confirm. The Empire
relishes such servants.

And so Obama, the constitutional law professor, voted to close
off any filibuster of Alito and fled Senator Russell
Feingold's motion to censure the President, declaring: "my and
Senator Feingold's view is not unanimous. Some constitutional
scholars and lower court opinions support the president's
argument that he has inherent authority to go outside the
bounds of the law in monitoring the activities of suspected
terrorists. The question is whether the president understood
the law and knowingly flaunted it."

That's not the question at all. The vitality of the
Constitution does not rest on whether Bush understands it, any
more that the integrity of the Criminal Code depends on
whether the President has ever read a line of any statute. We
can safely assume that he doesn't and he hasn't.

And so also did Obama, the constitutional law professor, vote
Yea on March 2 to final passage of the U.S.A PATRIOT
Improvement and Reauthorization Act, unlike ten of his
Democratic colleagues.

Vietor, Obama's man, laughed derisively at my complaint at the
end of my last column how most of her Democratic colleagues
had fled Cynthia McKinney. "She apologized", Vietor cried, as
though that settled the matter. In fact the betrayal of
McKinney, particularly by her black colleagues, was an
appalling and important political moment rewarding the racism
showered on McKinney and the ongoing implosion of the
Congressional Black Caucus. Obama, of course, distanced
himself from her too.

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