[Peace-discuss] Prospects for Obama

[C. G. Estabrook]

	November 8, 2008
	Progressives for Obama: still intoxicated

Now that the intoxication of the Obama victory is over (or should be over), one 
wonders how long it will take the pro-Obama left to wake up to a hangover. For 
the last few days, news reports should have given them an Excedrin-sized 
headache. Instead of ushering in a new New Deal, Obama seems to be all about 
ushering in Bill Clinton’s 3rd term but in this case we are dealing with 
America’s first real Black president rather than the claim made on Clinton’s 
behalf by Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson in 2001 that he “took so many initiatives 
he made us think for a while we had elected the first black president.”

First and foremost, Obama’s selection of Rahm Emanuel is a clear indication that 
he will promote DLC type politics of the sort that characterized the 
Clinton-Gore years. While some liberals are surprised by this choice, they 
should remember that Obama came to Connecticut to back Joseph Lieberman in 2006.

On the economics front, the possible choice of Lawrence Summers as Secretary of 
the Treasury is just as disgusting. When he was president of Harvard University, 
Summers became notorious for claiming that women did not succeed in science and 
math careers because of their genes. He also called African-American professor 
Cornel West on the carpet and lectured him about how his scholarship was not up 
to snuff, thus convincing West to find work elsewhere.

But perhaps Summers is being considered for the job because of his experience as 
chief economist of the World Bank. If so, Obama is obviously insensitive to the 
rights of his fellow Africans in light of the fact that Summers once proposed 
exporting pollution to poor African nations stating “the economic logic behind 
dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we 
should face up to that”. For all of the talk about Obama being the second coming 
of Martin Luther King Jr., I doubt that King would have ever had anything to do 
with the Lawrence Summers of the world.

None of this seems to have made any impact on the “Progressives for Obama” blog, 
a home to a number of 1960s radicals including former SDS leaders Tom Hayden and 
Carl Davidson, as well as Bill Fletcher Jr., a Senior Scholar with the Institute 
for Policy Studies, the past president of TransAfrica Forum, and former 
education director of the AFL-CIO.

Fletcher, who is African-American, is an occasional contributor to Freedom Road 
Socialist Organization, a group that emerged out of the Maoist “New Communist 
Movement” described by Max Elbaum in “Revolution in the Air”. Most of the 
leaders of this movement came out of SDS, including one Bob Avakian.

It is important to understand that the Maoists of the 1960s, while rejecting the 
“revisionist” CPUSA, grew to accept many of its key ideas, including working in 
the Democratic Party. Irwin Silber, who is a bit older than the SDS radicals but 
who wrote for the SDS-aligned Guardian newspaper (the American radical weekly 
that went out of business some time ago-not to be confused with the British 
daily), formed a New Communist group called Line of March. As its principal 
spokesman, Silber wrote a series of articles directed to the CPUSA that could 
only be described as love-hate. He had the seemingly impossible task of 
convincing the party to return to its revolutionary roots, which is tantamount 
to asking the Republicans to become the party of Lincoln once again.

My first contact with this milieu occurred shortly after joining Committee in 
Solidarity with the People of El Salvador in 1981 when I ran into an 
African-American member of the Communist Workers Party, a number of whose 
members were shot by the Klan in North Carolina 2 years earlier. Ron had gone to 
work as an assistant to a Black Democrat in Brooklyn, an act that struck me as 
rather disjoined from his ultraleft politics at the time. The CWP eventually 
folded and many of its members simply continued as Democratic Party activists.

Turning to the first of the post-November 4th blog entries at Progressives for 
Obama, you can find Tom Hayden explaining why Obama’s campaign marks the 
beginning of a new New Left:

     "I haven’t heard any of the Obama grass-roots supporters proposing that we 
expand the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, extend NAFTA or tinker around with 
global warming. They are our newest best hope for creating the climate and the 
pressure necessary to achieve social change, and we need to listen, follow and 
work with them. A new New Left is at hand, and we need to avoid the irony of 
becoming the Old Left."

Unlike the activists in the New Communist Movement, Hayden went straight from 
SDS into the Democratic Party without passing go. He ran as a Democratic 
candidate for Senate in California in 1976 and never looked back. Currently he 
serves on the board of the Progressive Democrats of America alongside 
ex-Demogreen Medea Benjamin and a host of other left liberals.

Unfortunately, all those years in the Democratic Party have served to eat out 
that portion of Hayden’s brain that might have memories of the real New Left. 
SDS was a genuine radical movement that challenged capitalist injustice across 
the board, while the people who went out to canvas for Obama had much more in 
common with the Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy campaigns of 1968 that were 
designed to get young people off the streets into safe, acceptable, time-wasting 
electoral operations.

One day after Hayden’s piece appeared, Fletcher weighed in with a call to lend 
“critical support” to Obama. One imagines that the need for criticism of any 
support must have been prompted by the spectacle of the President-elect’s DLC 
trajectory. Fletcher admits:

     "With regard to foreign policy, this is extremely complicated and quite 
troubling. While Obama has emphasized the need for negotiations as a first step 
in international relations, when confronted by forces to his Right, he has 
tended to back down and often suggest highly questionable military and 
crypto-military options in handling crises, e.g., unilateral attacks on Al Qaeda 
bases in Pakistan. Some people around Obama seem to be advocating a get-tough 
approach toward Iran, which itself could lead to hostilities."

Fletcher also suggests that “there will more than likely be outreach to Africa, 
though the character of that outreach is as yet to be determined.” Well, perhaps 
with Summers as Secretary of the Treasury, we might see toxic radioactive waste 
being shipped to Africa. After all, there will be a need to deal with such 
material if Obama’s pro-nuclear appetites are satisfied over the next four years.

Fletcher tries to fill in the details on what “critical support” means:

     "President Obama will need to be pushed on many areas, including foreign 
policy; healthcare; housing; jobs; and in general, the need for a pro-people 
approach to addressing the economic crisis. Taking this approach of critical 
support means, tactically, pointing out what has NOT been accomplished in the 
Obama agenda on the one hand, and, on the other, challenging the new 
Administration when it advances policies that are regressive, e.g., threatening 
Iran or Cuba and compromising with the insurance companies on healthcare."

One cannot be exactly sure what Fletcher is referring to when it comes to the 
matter of “compromising with insurance companies on healthcare”. There is not a 
single post on the Progressives for Obama blog analyzing Obama’s inadequate 
healthcare proposals or calling for single-payer, a solution adopted by the 
Nader campaign. I suspect that any criticisms of Obama’s healthcare proposals 
will be offered hat in hand, as is typical of the pro-Obama left. With a general 
absence of criticism during his campaign from Hayden and company, one would be 
hard put to imagine much of it taking place from now on. What you are likely to 
see is the sort of thing found on Huffington Post and Air America, stale barbs 
directed at Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin.

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