[Peace-discuss] Faux liberal

[C. G. Estabrook]

"The leading liberal commentators are clinging to the belief that Obama’s 
blatant doubletalk — sending more troops while announcing their eventual 
withdrawal — is somehow virtuous."

	John R. MacArthur: More and more, Obama seems a faux liberal
	01:00 AM EST on Wednesday, December 16, 2009
	By JOHN R. MacARTHUR

Following President Obama’s war speeches at West Point and Oslo —- two 
breathtaking exercises in political cynicism that killed any hope of authentic 
liberal reform — I’ve got only one question: Have the liberals who worshipped at 
the altar of “change you can believe in” had enough?

There was already ample evidence of Obama’s feeble commitment to peace, progress 
and justice. Ever since he started fundraising for his presidential campaign, 
it’s been clear that the principal change in the offing was skin tone and 
slogans. One only needed to read “The Audacity of Hope” to see how thoroughly 
Obama was enmeshed in the neo-liberal orthodoxies of the Robert Rubin-Clinton 
wing of the Democratic Party. Obama’s impeccably establishment party credentials 
— that is, his fealty to the Democratic leadership of Chicago and Capitol Hill — 
practically guaranteed that he would hew to the status quo when forced to choose.

Even before he announced his candidacy for president, Obama endorsed the Iraq 
hawk Joe Lieberman for re-election to the Senate; then, when Lieberman lost the 
primary to the antiwar Ned Lamont, Obama made sure that he was never seen with 
the official nominee of the Connecticut Democratic Party, a bald act of 
realpolitik that helped Lieberman win as an “independent.” In the U.S. Senate, 
meanwhile, Obama’s voting record on Iraq war funding was identical to Hillary 
Clinton’s.

Liberals, exhausted by President Bush and heartened by Obama’s challenge to the 
pro-invasion Hillary, ignored their new hero’s record and fixated on his one 
major anti-Iraq speech, delivered when he was a state senator. Ironically, it 
was Clinton who best characterized Obama’s candidacy when she said that she and 
John McCain would “put forth” a “lifetime of experience” while “Senator Obama 
will put forth a speech he made in 2002.”

Indeed, apart from extraordinary ambition, there wasn’t much more to Obama than 
that one speech.

So what’s left of the liberal adoration of Obama? The first major defector among 
the camp followers was Gary Wills, who denounced the Afghanistan escalation as a 
“betrayal.” As Wills astutely noted in a New York Review of Books blog, “If we 
had wanted Bush’s wars, and contractors, and corruption, we could have voted for 
John McCain. At least we would have seen our foe facing us, not felt him at our 
back, as now we do.”

But Wills seems to be the exception. For now, the leading liberal commentators 
are clinging to the belief that Obama’s blatant doubletalk — sending more troops 
while announcing their eventual withdrawal — is somehow virtuous.

Typical is Frank Rich, who though critical of the troop buildup, doesn’t “buy 
the criticism that [Obama] contrived a cynical political potpourri to pander to 
every side of the debate on the war.” For the former New York Times theater 
critic, good acting still counts for a lot: “Obama’s speech struck me as the 
sincere product of serious deliberations, an earnest attempt to apply his 
formidable intelligence to one of the most daunting Rubik’s Cubes of foreign 
policy America has ever known.”

That Rich is so impressed by the alleged complexity of Afghanistan and Obama’s 
supposed brilliance speaks in part, I imagine, to Rich’s ignorance of American 
political history. As Rahm Emanuel knows well, milking the role of “war 
president” (with a backdrop of men in uniform) is a time-tested winner in 
re-election campaigns, from Abraham Lincoln in 1864, to Richard Nixon in 1972, 
to George W. Bush in 2004. I suspect that Rich is disturbed that his matinee 
idol is suddenly being called a poseur by respectable people whom Rich might 
meet at a dinner party.

In the same vein, Hendrick Hertzberg, of The New Yorker, twisted himself into 
knots to present the president as an honorable man. “His speech,” Hertzberg 
pronounced, “was a somber appeal to reason, not a rousing call to arms.” Of 
Obama’s “plan,” Hertzberg wrote that “the best that can be claimed for it is 
that it does not guarantee failure, as, in one form or another, the alternatives 
almost certainly do.” From Obama’s (and Hertzberg’s) self-contradictory 
gobbledygook, we may be reassured that “if there is no Obama Doctrine, there is 
an Obama approach — undergirded by humane values but also by a respect for reality.”

Obama’s West Point speech was nothing if not a tribute to fantasy. Almost 
everything he said about fighting terrorism and “stabilizing” Afghanistan and 
Pakistan was counterproductive nonsense (see Edward Luttwak’s recent article in 
The Times Literary Supplement). As for humane values, it takes more than gall to 
tell an audience that includes future dead and maimed soldiers that they’re 
going off to fight for a good cause when, in fact, their presence in Afghanistan 
will create added bloodshed and recruit more volunteers for the Taliban.

Then there’s Tom Hayden, the former radical and author of the Students for A 
Democratic Society’s Port Huron Statement, who was a belligerent booster of 
Obama during last year’s campaign. Hayden, too, is upset about Afghanistan, but 
not enough to cast aside his self-delusion about Obama. Claiming to speak for 
“the antiwar movement,” he laments that the “costs in human lives and tax 
dollars are simply unsustainable” and, worse, that “Obama is squandering any 
hope for his progressive domestic agenda by this tragic escalation of the war.”

Unsustainable? Tragic? There’s no evidence that Obama and his chief of staff see 
any limit to their ability to print dollars, sell Treasury bonds and send 
working-class kids to die in distant lands. And what “progressive” agenda is 
Hayden talking about? So far, Obama’s big domestic goals have been compulsory, 
government-subsidized insurance policies that will further enrich the private 
health-care business, huge increases in Pentagon spending and purely symbolic 
regulation of Wall Street.

While Obama was speaking to the unfortunate cadets, I couldn’t help thinking of 
Richard Nixon and his “secret plan” to end the Vietnam War, a plan that entailed 
a long and pointless continuation of the fighting. Most liberals would agree 
that Nixon was a terrible president. Yet, for all his vicious mendacity, I think 
the sage of San Clemente had a bad conscience about the harm he did, about all 
he caused to die and be crippled.

Instead of shoring up Obama’s image of goodness, liberals really should be 
asking, “Does the president have a conscience?” Because if he does, he’s really 
no better than Nixon.

John R. MacArthur, a monthly contributor, is publisher of Harper’s Magazine.