10
Feb
Walt Kelly meets Barack Obama on the beach
A recent Barack Obama campaign email carried the tag line “We are the change we’ve been waiting for”, drawn from a speech he made after the February 5th primary extravaganza. The line leaves me cold because my resistance to Obama arises in large part from his inflationary rhetoric, but it nagged at me for several days for reasons beyond that. I finally realized that it reminded me of Walt Kelly’s famous “We have met the enemy and he is us” line from a Pogo strip on pollution; it’s sort of the flip side.
Obama is at pains to simultaneously demythologize himself and cast himself as the harbinger of deep political and cultural change in this country. “I don’t want to present myself as some sort of singular figure” is fundamentally at odds with “We are the change we’ve been waiting for”; there is no “we” in his movement without him. He’s the walrus. Goo goo g’joob.
That’s not inevitably a bad thing. If Dennis Kucinich could have inspired a personality cult, I might have joined it. But Kucinich’s cult would have been policy-driven; more or less singular ideas harnessed to a man. Obama’s is Obama-driven; his policies aren’t notably different from Clinton’s other than a modestly less militarist approach to foreign policy. (I say ‘modestly’ because “the wrong war at the wrong time” isn’t exactly a clarion call to reexamine the fundamentals of America’s historical approach to military power and foreign policy). And there’s little to distinguish him from the rest of the defunct Democratic field: Bleach him, age him, set him up with a volume of Neil Kinnock’s speeches and you’ve got Joe Biden instead of Barack Obama.
Any Democratic president will ring in significant changes from the Bush administration. Political appointees would presumably be directed to run their agencies more for the benefit of the public and less for the benefit of major campaign contributors and theocracy fans. Some of the more egregious Bush executive orders would be undone. Assuming the requisite lack of deference to Senate Republicans, we would get some decent federal judges for a change, maybe even a non-reactionary Supreme Court justice or two.
Those are important and desirable changes. They’re not, however, dependent on the election of a particular individual from a pool of two who are both operating within the margins of a corporate-friendly, militarist orthodoxy, and who both have yet to acknowledge the degree to which their very similar legislative agendas will be hamstrung by the budget and a smaller but more obstinate Republican minority.
Which is to say that supporters of either Democratic candidate, Obama especially, would be well advised to lower their expectations from the “walking on water” ballpark to the “not drowning” one.
According to me. Your mileage may vary.
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Thought you weren’t going to write about these two any more. It is your blog, of course, so carry on!
He did pretty well in Maine of all places.
February 10th, 2008 at 5:20 pmHey, I held out for what seemed like days. Once I got the Pogo idea into my head, though, I had to make the graphic, and once I spent all that time combining two different oceans, a possum and Obama, I pretty much had to write something about it.
February 10th, 2008 at 5:32 pmI was, and still am a Joe Biden supporter (just not for president anymore), and take offense at you dragging Joe and that lame old Kinnock SNAFU into this. Joe has forgotten more than Obambi knows about foreign policy in particular. Plus, Joe doesn’t speak like a preacher delivering a sermon.
I’ve never seen what is so special about either Hillary or Obama, once you get past people being Ga-ga over the gender and race thing. They represent “Baggage” and “Disneyland” respectively, as far as I’m concerned.
The Democrats are so busy congratulationg themselves over a female and a black candidate that they can’t seem to wake up to the reality that neither of these people is that special, and at a time when we really could use someone with special qualifications as our next president. As you said, the BIGGEST change would be just getting Bush and Company evicted from the White House.
If one buys into the Obama “Change” thing then he/she must have been born yesterday. It reminds me of a commercial that is now running which blares out “I want it ALL! I want it ALL! And I want it NOW!” I believe it is a commercial for a credit card. It is the sort of attitude that often leads to buyer’s remorse.
But then there is also the media, and whoever controls them, who have a lot of influence over chosing candidates by selective coverage………
February 11th, 2008 at 6:38 amHi, Donna. Thanks for the comment. Obviously I’m uninspired by the choices, but I wouldn’t place Biden above them; among the foreign policy things he’s forgotten is not to cast votes greenlighting a stupid war. He also voted for the malevolently punitive bankruptcy bill, which in its own small way is contributing to our ongoing housing disaster. If he were elected, I’d worry that he would try to finesse Iraq in ways that would make life even worse for Iraqis. But we don’t have to worry about it unless he gets the secretary of state gig.
February 11th, 2008 at 7:05 amAt first i was interested in Obama, now I feel kind of creepy about it.
February 11th, 2008 at 8:13 amIt is more about how great the campaign is rather then issues.
Blair, that’s because there isn’t much to distinguish him on the issues. I voted for him in the CA primary on the theory that anything one can do to break up the Democratic party establishment log jam Clinton represents is a good thing. Beyond that, I don’t much care for him. As perhaps one can see. But Clinton on the issues, even though she has a fabulous command of them, isn’t much better: they’re both proceeding as if they won’t be taking office in a recession with an out of control budget and a very thorny foreign policy situation confronting them.
February 11th, 2008 at 8:48 amComeon Weldon, You’ve got to know that voting on these bills, like the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 isn’t just a black and white process. The Republicans controlled Congress then and were going to have this bill passed anyway. Joe just got some stuff in it that got Moms and Kids first in line as creditors so that Dead-beat Dad’s couldn’t skip out by declaring bankruptcy. He made it a better piece of legislation than it would have been.
Sure he voted “Yes” on that resolution that allowed Bush to use military force, but I place the blame where it belongs – in the Bush/Cheney camp. They were the ones who twisted it around to get what they wanted. There’s plenty of blame to go around – for the Media, who didn’t raise hell, and all of the people who weren’t writing and calling their congressmen, telling them that the idea was nuts. And BTW, I WAS doing this at the time.
And Joe is the only one who has a political plan to get out of Iraq. It is very compatible with the history of the place, which has never been anything but a manufactured country anyway. If Gertrude Bell hadn’t had so much sway at the time it might very well have been a plan very similar to Joe’s that the Brits would have gone with (as proposed by Sir Gilbert Clayton of the Arab Bureau), because the Sunnis wanted an Arab kingdom, and the Shiites wanted an Islamic religious state, and the Kurds wanted an independent Kurdish state.
Politics is pretty much local, and loyalties go to the families of Arabs, who haven’t had much of a genuine national identity. Saddam held the country together by force.
Here it is, going on 100 years later and these preferences haven’t changed all that much. So I think that Joe Biden’s plan is well worth a try. As Colin Powell said, “You break it, you own it.”
February 11th, 2008 at 12:12 pmGet a settlement and then get out.
Just another helpless US Senator, incapable of foreseeing what quite literally millions and millions of less plugged-in Americans did: that the administration were determined to invade Iraq and were telling whatever lies were necessary to do so.
The bankruptcy bill is pretty black and white, and slipping in a minor fix doesn’t mitigate the impact of the thing. I can’t help but think there’s a connection between his status as one of the leading recipients of credit card company campaign cash and his support of a bill that was essentially written by credit card company lobbyists.
I’ve read his Iraq plan, and provoked a fairly exhaustive discussion of it last year here. In short, I think it’s hallucinatory.
February 11th, 2008 at 3:03 pmWell, everyone thinks his own fleas are gazelles, and I’m no exception. Apparently neither are you. ‘Alaikum as salaam.
February 11th, 2008 at 3:28 pmI wish I had a flea to imagine a gazelle. Shalom …
February 11th, 2008 at 3:44 pmSince winning is useful, how he campaigns is useful. It only takes you so far, but it is more than Dems seem to know about a bit too often. So, if he has even a slightly better chance of winning, that would be a big plus.
And, his success in purple/red states is of interest in that regard.
I also think we need to move on and though she isn’t her husband, it seems they have much of the same people on their side, and I don’t want more of the 1990s. Again, maybe at the end of the day, this won’t matter too much policy wise, but on how things are run (executive appointments etc.) maybe it would.
And, I think there is a chance the people who will go on the Obama bandwagon, including those who will work for his administration, just has a chance to advance some of the positives his campaign promotes. They might both be establishment types, but Clinton seems a bit more blatantly so.
Seems a bit more to hope for with Obama, maybe more than a bit in some ways. And, though some appreciate the “devil we know” logic, I rather not go that route. Let Clinton stay in the Senate … Obama seems somewhat more useful in the executive role, esp. its more symbolic side.
Could be wrong. But, they don’t seem equivalent to me, even if the differences aren’t policy related. But, policy is often not the only thing anyway. This should not be inferred to me I am not concerned about the guy. But, I don’t agree with those who suggest it doesn’t really matter who wins the nomination or election.
February 11th, 2008 at 5:26 pmI think if you want to point up similarity between Clinton and Obama you have to ignore a couple of things. Obama was willing to go against the war, at least to a certain extent, when that stand was unpopular. Clinton was not. Also, Clinton is much more in the pockets of business. That may be a matter of degree but it’s important.
Finally, the “vision thing” does matter. Otherwise you’re stuck with the way the media and business (and the right wing) frame the debate. Clinton is entirely clueless here, because she lacks imagination and she wants to be liked. You can’t get vision by asking a pollster and a campaign strategist.
February 12th, 2008 at 2:05 amToday, Hillary Clinton was the only Democratic U.S. Senator “Not Voting” on the Democrats’ proposed legislation in the Senate stripping telecom immunity from the FISA renewal bill; all but the most conservative Democrats voted for the provision, the Dodd Amendment, No. 3907. Senator Obama, like most Democrats, voted “Yea” on this Democratic provision. No Republican voted “Yea” on it. Only Democrats favored it. In other words, Hillary was the only Democratic Senator refusing to vote on whether to provide retroactive legal immunity to telecom companies that illegally assisted the Bush Administration to spy against American citizens without a warrant. She was the only Democratic Senator to avoid voting on whether the FISA bill should be stripped of its ex-post-facto provision, its provision that violated the U.S. Constitution’s clear dictum: “No … ex post facto Law shall be passed.”
February 12th, 2008 at 10:34 amLittle as I like Clinton, her decision to go campaigning rather than stick around for the doomed FISA vote is perfectly understandable. Had she been there, she would have voted against it. It would have been nice had she and Obama taken the lead on the issue months ago, but there’s really not much she could have done today.
February 12th, 2008 at 8:26 pmThe maxim about showing up does seem to matter to some primary/caucus voters.
February 13th, 2008 at 8:29 amYeah, but Obama didn’t stick around for the final vote either. I’m calling this one a wash.
February 13th, 2008 at 9:18 amI’d call it a half-effort, at least, which is not enough for some, but more than we get sometimes.
February 14th, 2008 at 8:33 am“Political appointees would presumably be directed to run their agencies more for the benefit of the public and less for the benefit of major campaign contributors and theocracy fans.”
You don’t actually live in this country, do you?
March 14th, 2008 at 4:56 am