I've been seeing more and more lamentations in the liberal blogosphere that Obama is some kind of stalking horse for unbridled corporate and military interests - that he is an intentionally deceptive fraud who not only scales back his promises of economic and other reforms, but actively works to subvert those goals. In other words, the increasingly prevalent accusation goes, he is in some senses "worse than Bush" because, whereas Bush was blatantly and aggressively Randian and neoconservative, Obama has "tricked" the voters with promises of reform and now uses the presidential perch to cynically destroy the agenda he supposedly represented. A sort of Manchurian Candidate for military and corporate interests, if you will.
I'll be frank. I think these theories are bunk.
I say so not because I'm a reflexive defender of President Obama (I think many of my posts refute that claim), but because I think there are much simpler and more obvious explanations for his behavior. Part of the problem is that, as a candidate, Obama communicated in vaguely aspirational enough ways to allow people to project their own hopes and beliefs onto him, "like a blank screen," as he himself acknowledged in The Audacity of Hope. I'll even admit that I was, to a degree, one of those people caught up in the emotional appeal of his candidacy and the historical power of his unexpectedly rapid rise. But even people who never fell for his broad, wispy declarations during the campaign - who instead found footholds of agreement in his actual policy proposals - could have seen the indications that he would not be the transformative president his powerful political marketing apparatus had advertised.</div>
The conclusion seems unavoidable to me that President Obama is the same as Senator Obama, who was likely the same as pre-politics Barack Obama, which is that he remains precisely the way he himself has always said he is: politically moderate (perhaps even "center-right"), temperamentally cool, and, most importantly, stubbornly more interested in trying to bridge divides than picking and winning fights. I do realize that many others have made these same observations, but I think it is very important that we do not confuse these qualities with the assumption that Obama is a natural enemy of progressivism or, worse, an actively neoconservative force more malignant than the ham-handed George W. Bush.
In light of the things we actually know about Barack Obama, Occam’s razor seems to compel the rather banal conclusion that he’s just not the type of leader – or hasn’t yet learned to be the type of leader – who believes in sweeping action and overt political battle. Everything about him suggests that he is genuinely of the mind that the intense rancor and divisions in present American society call first and foremost for calm, careful action, and that he has developed over the course of his learning and career a sort of allergy for anything that seems "ideological" in any direction. Now consider the immense historical weight of being the first black president, and the widely held racist presumption that a black president would necessarily be radical and vengeful, and one can see why he would further emphasize his innate moderation and non-combativeness, even at a time that calls for the opposite.
I also think the moribund, reactionary nature of the establishment media, combined with today's unparalleled degree of corporate mastery of political marketing and integration into the political system, impose an immense inertial drag on the mere thought of overtly confronting and fundamentally changing the status quo super-structures of wealth and power. Consider a most recent example, from The Nation: a horrifically detailed exposition of the countless ways financial, military, and industrial interests have practically taken over our national discourse. Just an excerpt from the must-read piece:
Since 2007 at least seventy-five registered lobbyists, public relations representatives and corporate officials--people paid by companies and trade groups to manage their public image and promote their financial and political interests--have appeared on MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, CNBC and Fox Business Network with no disclosure of the corporate interests that had paid them. Many have been regulars on more than one of the cable networks, turning in dozens--and in some cases hundreds--of appearances.
For lobbyists, PR firms and corporate officials, going on cable television is a chance to promote clients and their interests on the most widely cited source of news in the United States. These appearances also generate good will and access to major players inside the Democratic and Republican parties. For their part, the cable networks, eager to fill time and afraid of upsetting the political elite, have often looked the other way. At times, the networks have even disregarded their own written ethics guidelines. Just about everyone involved is heavily invested in maintaining the current system, with the exception of the viewer.
While lobbyists and PR flacks have long tried to spin the press, the launch of Fox News and MSNBC in 1996 and the Clinton impeachment saga that followed helped create the cauldron of twenty-four-hour political analysis that so many influence peddlers call home. Since then, guests with serious conflicts of interest have popped up with alarming regularity on every network.
I repeat: read the whole thing. The bottom line is that our entire political discourse and elite decision-making mechanism has become riddled with corrupting influences with a level of sophistication and saturation that makes the Gilded Age look like a paragon of civic virtue. This new reality of finely tuned, market-tested, socially engineered neo-corruption conspires with the president's innate political and personal characteristics to create the failure of leadership that we see today.
In short, the causes come from innumerable directions, from within and without, defying any attempt to cast the problem as the singular fault of President Obama's alleged perfidy or overt allegiance to right-wing philosophy. I mean not to make excuses for the president; indeed, the concept of leadership implies that a leader must courageously beat back overweening influence and opposition to blaze a difficult and unbeaten path, and Obama largely has not done so. I seek only to examine causes, as dispassionately and objectively as I can, without resorting to emotionally satisfying simplicity or withdrawing into the self-sustaining cocoon of defeatism and fatalism.
The causes of today's dreadful Democratic and presidential reluctance to fight for sufficient reform and reparative policy are numerous and complex. While loathsome in its own right, this characteristic is transformed from unfortunate to pernicious by the simultaneous collapse of the Republican Party into a solipsistic, intransigent temper tantrum of unbending dogma and fantasy. While historical parallels to today's circumstances exist in abundance, no era can match the contemporary perfection of corporate marketing and invasion into every aspect of our government's and society's nervous systems. Furthermore, when combined with the ingrained restraint of our current president, and the abject malpractice of our establishment media, these conditions present a daunting challenge to advocates of the necessary level of profound change required to rehabilitate America.
To me, this is not cause for hopelessness and resignation. Rather, it just means that "the rest of us" will have to redouble our efforts, steel our resolve, and turn up the heat. After all, political movements - like biological and climate systems - have critical mass tipping points when the status quo finally breaks into a profound and fundamental shift. An important thing to remember about any tipping point is that its timing is notoriously hard to predict before it occurs, which often gives the false impression that it will never come to be. But all the action and excitement is at the peak of the wave when it finally crests, not in the placid waters far behind it.
Surf's up. Don't get lost at sea.