[Peace-discuss] The left holds its tongue

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Sunday, 26 October 2008
	Obama, the first-rate Republican

Is there anything the front-runner will not say to become President? No 
progressive cause would have a chance with him in charge.

As a left-winger I might be expected to be supporting Barack Obama. And indeed, 
in these last days I've been scraping around, trying to muster a single positive 
reason to encourage a vote for Obama. Please note my accent on the positive, 
since the candidate himself has couched his appeal in this idiom. Why vote for 
Obama-Biden, as opposed to against the McCain-Palin ticket?

Obama invokes change. Yet never has the dead hand of the past had a "reform" 
candidate so firmly by the windpipe. Is it possible to confront America's 
problems without talking about the arms budget? The Pentagon is spending more 
than at any point since the end of the Second World War. In "real dollars" – an 
optimistic concept these days – the $635bn appropriated in fiscal 2007 is 5 per 
cent above the previous all-time high, reached in 1952. Obama wants to enlarge 
the armed services by 90,000. He pledges to escalate the US war in Afghanistan; 
to attack Pakistan's territory if it obstructs any unilateral US mission to kill 
Osama bin Laden; and to wage a war against terror in a hundred countries, 
creating a new international intelligence and law enforcement "infrastructure" 
to take down terrorist networks. A fresh start? Where does this differ from 
Bush's commitment on 20 September 2001, to an ongoing "war on terror" against 
"every terrorist group of global reach" and "any nation that continues to 
harbour or support terrorism"?

Obama's liberal defenders comfort themselves with the thought that "he had to 
say that to get elected". He didn't. After eight years of Bush, Americans are 
receptive to reassessing America's imperial role. Obama has shunned this 
opportunity. If elected, he will be a prisoner of his promise that on his watch 
Afghanistan will not be lost, nor the white man's burden shirked.

Whatever drawdown of troops in Iraq that does take place in the event of Obama's 
victory will be a brief hiccup amid the blare and thunder of fresh "resolve". In 
the event of Obama's victory, the most immediate consequence overseas will most 
likely be brusque imperial reassertion. Already, Joe Biden, the shopworn poster 
boy for Israeli intransigence and Cold War hysteria, is yelping stridently about 
the new administration's "mettle" being tested in the first six months by the 
Russians and their surrogates. Obama is far more hawkish than McCain on Iran.

After eight years of unrelenting assault on constitutional liberties by Bush and 
Cheney, public and judicial enthusiasm for tyranny has waned. Obama has 
preferred to stand with Bush and Cheney. In February, seeking a liberal profile 
in the primaries, Obama stood against warrantless wiretapping. His support for 
liberty did not survive for long. Five months later, he voted in favour and 
declared that "the ability to monitor and track individuals who want to attack 
the United States is a vital counter-terrorism tool".

Every politician, good or bad, is an ambitious opportunist. But beneath this 
topsoil, the ones who make a constructive dent on history have some bedrock of 
fidelity to some central idea. In Obama's case, this "idea" is the ultimate 
distillation of identity politics: the idea of his blackness. Those who claim 
that if he were white he would be cantering effortlessly into the White House do 
not understand that without his most salient physical characteristic Obama would 
be seen as a second-tier senator with unimpressive credentials.

As a political organiser of his own advancement, Obama is a wonder. But I have 
yet to identify a single uplifting intention to which he has remained constant 
if it has presented any risk to his progress. We could say that he has not yet 
had occasion to adjust his relatively decent stances on immigration and 
labour-law reform. And what of public funding of his campaign? Another 
commitment made becomes a commitment betrayed. His campaign treasury is a vast 
hogswallow that, if it had been amassed by a Republican, would be the topic of 
thunderous liberal complaint.

Obama's run has been the negation of almost every decent progressive principle, 
with scarcely a bleat of protest from the progressives seeking to hold him to 
account. The Michael Moores stay silent. Obama has crooked the knee to bankers 
and Wall Street, to the oil companies, the coal companies, the nuclear lobby, 
the big agricultural combines. He is more popular with Pentagon contractors than 
McCain, and has been the most popular of the candidates with Washington 
lobbyists. He has been fearless in offending progressives, constant in appeasing 
the powerful.

So no, this is not an exciting or liberating moment in America's politics. If 
you want a memento of what could be exciting, go to the website of the 
Nader-Gonzalez campaign and read its platform on popular participation and 
initiative. Or read the portions of Libertarian Party candidate Bob Barr's 
platform on foreign policy and constitutional rights. The standard these days 
for what the left finds tolerable is awfully low. The more the left holds its 
tongue, the lower the standard will go.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/alexander-cockburn-obama-the-firstrate-republican-973691.html