[Peace-discuss] Why Obama has to do that...

[C. G. Estabrook]

Stuart---

I have no trouble agreeing with the principles you put forth but more difficulty 
accepting the conclusions you draw:

[1] Politicians are not "divinely consistent." True.

[2] We are not oracles.  Also true, altho' I'm not quite sure what you take to 
be the essence of that oracularity that is being denied to us. AFAIK oracles are 
classically ambiguous and misinterpreted. I haven't thought that anything I've 
written on these matters has been particularly ambiguous, but it does seem that 
I've failed to make myself clear to some of our colleagues.  (And I do have to 
admit that, since I read Edith Hamilton's "Mythology" at an impressionable age, 
I've felt some sympathy for Cassandra -- always right, never believed...)

[3] But I don't think Obama on the war and Bush on pollution make much of a 
parallel.  It's said that all analogies limp, but this one is positively 
Oedipal, in at least one sense.  (Perhaps that's the classical theme again, like 
oracle.)
     Bush undoubtedly took the position on pollution that he did because there 
was a vocal environmental lobby and a good deal of public concern on the matter, 
but -- given the people he was working for -- I can't believe he ever meant it. 
  That's consistent with what we've seen of his character.  (As the late Studs 
Terkel said, Bush represents the "evil of banality.")  And the PR worked: after 
the 2004 election a *majority* of Bush voters by survey thought that he favored 
the Kyoto Protocol -- because the Kyoto Protocol was reasonable and Bush was a 
reasonable man...
     But Obama chose against the popular position, so lacked Bush's motive to 
dissemble.  He appeared as an antiwar candidate ("against this war from the 
beginning"), and three-quarters of the populace agreed with him. Nevertheless he 
has consistently taken pro-war positions from the time of his run for the 
Senate, when he discussed the circumstances under which Iran should be attacked, 
to his criticism of Bush and McCain for dragging their feet on attacking Pakistan.
     Bush's statement was a campaign lie, but Obama's seem to indicate his real 
position, because it was the opposite of poll-driven.  From his Berlin speech to 
the final debate, it became undeniable that Obama was asserting the need for an 
expansion of the war on terror "in the most important theatre," AfPak.

[4] Your second example is more curious. As the primary season ended, it was a 
commonplace (put forward by, e.g., NYT columnists Nicholas Kristof and Maureen 
Dowd) that "Clinton was ready to undermine the Democrats" specifically Obama, in 
hopes that a brief McCain interregnum would be followed by "Hillary in 2012." 
There were organizations (e.g., PUMA -- "Party Unity My Ass") of Clinton voters 
boosting McCain; not only was Bill Clinton notoriously reluctant in regard to 
Obama's nomination but also Hillary was brushed aside as Obama's VP, perhaps for 
the same reason.  What really scotched the Hillary-in-2012 campaign was the 
(surprising) success of the Obama campaign against McCain: if McCain couldn't 
win, Hillary couldn't succeed him; so the Clintons belatedly got back with the 
program.  (And maybe they sold their "A Woman for President in 2012" materials 
to Palin: the McCain people seem to think so.)

[5] So you're saying that my attempt to describe accurately what was going on 
was a matter of making "a *divisive* prediction" and therefore shouldn't have 
been done, because it was "a distraction from the issues of peace"?  You can't 
mean that.  "Tell the truth and shame the devil," says Hotspur.

[6] "Obama sees himself as a centrist , [so] where the Center moves, and *has 
moved*, so moves he."   The problem is that that center (and the left and the 
right)  is defined by the media and the parties on a spectrum substantially to 
the right of where the populace is.  It's defined by the dominant class' limits 
of allowable debate, which simply exclude things like real withdrawal from the 
Mideast, single-payer health care, and not bailing out the banks -- which all 
have quite strong support, as you well know, but you'd never know it from the 
media.
     In an interview with Real News in August, Klein attacked MoveOn and the 
other fake left groups for failing to pressure Obama, who, she said, "does not 
have an anti-war position, not in Afghanistan, not in Iraq," -- and discussed 
his  "tilt toward Rubinomics."  She knows that he's a centrist only in the 
specialized sense of US public politics and therefore a great deal of pressure 
will be necessary -- because his policies need to be reversed, not just nudged a 
bit.

[7] I hope you're right that Obama"might actually listen," but I see no evidence 
of much malleability in his positions.  Why won't he soon say, with some 
justice, "Look, you knew what I was going to do in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, 
Palestine, Georgia, Venezuela, etc., etc. -- I said it often enough during the 
campaign"?  And he did, showing a good bit of confidence in his own rhetorical 
ability to palliate the  popular distaste for traditional US policy.  The point 
of "The Audacity of Hope" was that he could sell ruling class policies to the 
mass of Americans, and avoid what he wrote was "the biggest casualty of [the 
Vietnam war] -- the bond of trust between the American people and their 
government"!  It's been noted that there were bigger casualties.

[8] Regarding "how to sustain an organized movement" -- today it's the absence, 
not the presence of an anti-war movement that has to be explained.  The largest 
anti-war demos in human history occurred before the invasion of Iraq, and 
three-quarters of Americans say they disapprove of the war.  So  why -- in 
contrast to 40 years ago -- no movement?
     Part -- surely not all -- of the answer is the Obama campaign itself. 
Obama's undeserved reputation as an anti-war candidate meant that opponents of 
the war were attracted when his candidacy was first bruited about ("Illinois 
Anti-Warriors and the Attractive Senator" 
<http://www.counterpunch.org/estabrook09292005.html>) -- we had a fight in AWARE 
about that -- and Democratic front groups like MoveOn et al. worked hard to 
co-opt the antiwar movement for the Democrats.  They won.  The Obama movement is 
not a source of an anti-war movement but an alternative to it, that ends in 
supporting an expanding war.
     Karl Marx tells a story that he attributes to Luther, that a giant stole 
cattle from a village and dragged them by their tails backwards into his cave; 
when the villagers arrived with the requisite torches, dogs and pitchforks to 
complain, the giant said they had it all wrong: he was *supplying* cattle to the 
village -- just look at the direction of the hoof prints!
     What the giant was doing with the people's cattle, Obama was doing with the 
people's movement...

As another Marx said, "Those are my principles, and if you don't like them ... 
well, I have others."

Regards, CGE


Stuart Levy wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 02, 2008 at 08:49:27PM -0600, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>> Am I to understand, Jenifer, that repeating what Obama actually said -- 
>> that he intends as president to kill more people in Afghanistan and 
>> Pakistan (sc. "finish the job") -- is not an "appropriately nuanced and 
>> civilized way of presenting information and opinions"?  --CGE
> 
> The frustrating part of reading messages like these, Carl,
> is that (a) politicians are not divinely consistent, and
> (b) none of us, including you, is an oracle.  
> 
> G. W. Bush said in 2000 that he would regulate CO2 as a pollutant.
> It's even possible that at the time, he meant it.
> Of course, he did nothing of the sort.  He succumbed to what must
> have been overwhelming, and *entirely predictable*, pressure from
> giant fossil fuel extractors and users.
> 
> So should we have simply quoted Bush at his word, and relied on that
> as a prediction of what he'd do in office, taking no account of the
> political context?  It would have been foolish to do that.
> 
> 
> A few months ago you were telling us, with repetition and apparent
> confidence, that Hillary Clinton was ready to undermine the Democrats:
> that if she lost the nomination she would work to ensure that Obama
> lost the election so as to give her a better chance to win in 2012.
> It would have been a terrible thing for the Democrats, and a very good
> one for the Republicans, if it had happened.  Well... it doesn't seem to have.
> 
> I'm not so much criticizing your making a prediction that didn't come true,
> as making a *divisive* prediction, one with little basis as far as I can see,
> that looked for all the world like a distraction from the issues of peace
> that we are here to address.
> 
> 
> Naomi Klein's take on Obama was interesting.  She's thoroughly disappointed
> with a bunch of his positions and non-positions, and is discouraged
> at the cult-figure treatment that Obama has received, but ... she figures
> that Obama sees himself as a centrist.  Where the Center moves,
> and *has moved*, so moves he.    that is encouraging.
> 
> I absolutely agree that we need to be on the streets in force after the
> election -- no matter who wins.  If McCain wins, I doubt if he'd listen,
> but we should try.  But if Obama wins, he actually might listen.
> We need to get enough attention to move the Center.
> 
> 
> One continuing concern, as many have pointed out (Durl and others
> last night, Klein this week, Tom Hayden at every opportunity) is
> how to sustain an organized movement.  Klein was impressed at what's
> been mobilized for the Obama campaign -- "getting 35,000 people out
> at midnight for a rally in Florida" -- amazed that Americans actually
> could organize.  How much of that will remain after tomorrow?
> _______________________________________________
> Peace-discuss mailing list
> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
> http://lists.chambana.net/cgi-bin/listinfo/peace-discuss