[Foreword: I originally intended this diary to be, more or less, an encyclopedic rebuttal to all of the accusations of progressive malfeasance directed at President Obama. However, it quickly became unwieldy, so I've decided to begin an occassional series with the above-captioned title of which this is the first installment.]
Recently some champions of the left have taken to opining that perhaps Barack Obama is a "shill" or "stooge" for Wall Street. If you would like some examples of the genre, see these items by Matt Taibbi, David Sirota and Glenn Greenwald. If you want to see a clearinghouse and distillation of this sort of thinking in a rec-listed diary right here at Daily Kos, you can go check out One Pissed Off Liberal's Trojan Horse: The Obama Deception.
For those Obama critics who have repeatedly asked me to provide facts to support my controversial claim that President Obama is, in fact, a solid progressive, this diary is lengthy, chock full o' facts and I expect you to read every word of it. Time to eat your peas.
If you join me below the curlicue, I will demonstrate conclusively why the above-referenced accusations are as ludicrous as an Orly Taitz memorandum of law.
So that everyone understands precisely what I am reacting against, here are exemplary passages from each of the above articles:
Taibbi:
To a bunch of hired stooges put in office to lend an air of democratic legitimacy to what has essentially become a bureaucratic-oligarchic state, what good does such advice do?
[snip]
It strains the imagination to think that the country's smartest businessmen keep paying top dollar for such lousy performance. Is it possible that by "surrendering" at the 11th hour and signing off on a deal that presages deep cuts in spending for the middle class, but avoids tax increases for the rich, Obama is doing exactly what was expected of him?
Sirota:
Obama is not a flaccid Jimmy Carter, as some of his critics insist. He is instead a Franklin Delano Roosevelt -- but a bizarro FDR. He has mustered the legislative strength of his New Deal predecessor -- but he has channeled that strength into propping up the very forces of "organized money" that FDR once challenged.
Greenwald:
Therein lies one of the most enduring attributes of Obama's legacy: in many crucial areas, he has done more to subvert and weaken the left's political agenda than a GOP president could have dreamed of achieving. So potent, so overarching, are tribal loyalties in American politics that partisans will support, or at least tolerate, any and all policies their party's leader endorses - even if those policies are ones they long claimed to loathe.
[snip]
And now he is devoting all of his presidential power to cutting the entitlement programmes that have been the defining hallmark of the Democratic party since Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. The silence from progressive partisans is defeaning - and depressing, though sadly predictable.
[snip]
Obama is now on the verge of injecting what until recently was the politically toxic and unattainable dream of Wall Street and the American right - attacks on the nation's social safety net - into the heart and soul of the Democratic party's platform. Those progressives who are guided more by party loyalty than actual belief will seamlessly transform from virulent opponents of such cuts into their primary defenders.
And thus will Obama succeed - yet again - in gutting not only core Democratic policies, but also the identity and power of the American Left.
And last, but not least, our very own, One Pissed Off Liberal:
This latest abomination shows our government for what it is – outright enemies of the American people. More importantly, it shows Obama for who he is, a willing dupe and loyal servant of the rightwing corporate plutocracy.
I don't think I am exaggerating when I say that these articles all basically accuse Barack Obama of being a Manchurian candidate for right wing business interests. Even a cursory review of his biography reveals that as a paranoid fantasy rivaling birtherism.
Lets consider Barack Obama's adult life before becoming President.
After graduating from Columbia University in 1983, Barack Obama had his one brief dalliance with working for the financial industry, when he worked at a low level job for Business International Corporation. He worked there for about a year before he quit and went to work for New York Public Interest Research Group as a community organizer at City College in Harlem, earning a little less than $10,000.00 a year. For those of you unfamiliar with NYPIRG it is one of several "PIRG" organizations across the country inspired by Ralph Nader.
In 1985, Obama moved to Chicago and went to work as a community organizerfor the Developing Communities Project, where he was paid $13,000.00 a year to work full-time to protect and pursue the rights and interests of the people of an underserved community. Obama worked for DCP for three years before entering law school at Harvard.
Obama began attending Harvard Law School in 1988. At Harvard, he became the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. He graduated manga cum laude (top 10%) in 1991.
After graduating Harvard, Obama returned to Chicago, where he began a fellowship at the University of Chicago Law School. He was with the University of Chicago for 12 years, eventually becoming a "senior lecturer," a title held at the time only by Barack Obama and a couple of federal judges.
In 1992, Obama led Project Vote, a voter registration drive that helped Carol Mosley Braun get elected Senator. I found an article published in the January, 1993 issue of Chicago Magazine that I find particularly illuminating about the sort of person Obama is:
The most effective minority voter registration drive in memory was the result of careful handiwork by Project Vote!, the local chapter of a not-for-profit national organization. "It was the most efficient campaign I have seen in my 20 years in politics," says Sam Burrell, alderman of the West Side's 29th Ward and a veteran of many registration drives.
At the head of this effort was a little-known 31-year-old African-American lawyer, community organizer, and writer: Barack Obama.
[snip]
In 1984, after Columbia but before Harvard, Obama moved to Chicago. "I came because of Harold Washington," he says. "I wanted to do community organizing, and I couldn't think of a better city than one as energized and hopeful as Chicago was then." He went to work for a South Side church-affiliated development group and "was heartened by the enthusiasm." But barely three years later, Washington died, and Obama, convinced he needed additional skills, enrolled at Harvard Law School. The African-American community he left, rent by political divisions and without a clear leader, went into a steep decline. By 1991, when Obama, law degree in hand, returned to Chicago to work on a book about race relations-having turned his back on the Supreme Court clerkship that is almost a given for the law review's top editor-black voter registration and turnout in the city were at their lowest points since record keeping began.
Six months after he took the helm of Chicago's Project Vote!, those conditions had been reversed.
[snip]
When Newman called, Obama agreed to put his other work aside. "I'm still not quite sure why," Newman says. ''This was not glamorous, high-paying work. But I am certainly grateful. He did one hell of a job."
[snip]
As for Project Vote! itself, its operations in Chicago have officially closed down. Barack Obama has returned to work on his book, which he plans to complete this month. He also is teaching a class at the University of Chicago law school, and is an attorney at Davis Miner Barnhill & Galland. But he continues to consult with the church, community, and political groups involved in the monumental registration drive. "We won't let the momentum die," he says. "I'll take personal responsibility for that. We plan to hold politicians' feet to the flames in 1993, to remind them that we can produce a bloc of voters large enough that it cannot be ignored."
Nor can Obama himself be ignored. The success of the voter-registration drive has marked him as the political star the Mayor should perhaps be watching for. "The sky's the limit for Barack," says Burrell.
Some of Daley's closest advisers are similarly impressed. "In its technical demands, a voter-registration drive is not unlike a mini-political campaign," says John Schmidt, chairman of the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority and a fundraiser for Project Vote! "Barack ran this superbly. I have no doubt he could run an equally good political campaign if that's what he decided to do next."
Obama shrugs off the possibility of running for office. "Who knows?" he says. "But probably not immediately." He smiles. "Was that a sufficiently politic 'maybe'? My sincere answer is, I'll run if I feel I can accomplish more that way than agitating from the outside. I don't know if that's true right now. Let's wait and see what happens in 1993. If the politicians in place now at city and state levels respond to African-American voters' needs, we'll gladly work with and support them. If they don't, we'll work to replace them. That's the message I want Project Vote! to have sent."
In 1996, at the age of 35, after a lot of hard and humbling work, Barack Obama is elected to office for the first time.
What were the highlights of his career as an Illinois State Senator from 1997 until 2004?
From Ryan Lizza's article, How Chicago Politics Shaped Obama, linked above:
Soon, Obama began writing a regular column—“Springfield Report”—for the Hyde Park Herald. In the first one, on February 19, 1997, he wrote, “Last year, President Clinton signed a bill that, for the first time in 60 years, eliminates the federal guarantee of support for poor families and their children.” The column was earnest and wonky. It betrayed no hint of liberal piety about the new law, but emphasized that there weren’t enough entry-level jobs in Chicago to absorb all the welfare recipients who would soon be leaving the system.
In effect, while President Clinton and the national Democratic Party were drifting to the right, State Senator Obama pushed in the opposite direction. The new welfare law was one of the first issues that Obama faced as a legislator. “I am not a defender of the status quo with respect to welfare,” he said, choosing his words with care during debate on the Illinois Senate floor. “Having said that, I probably would not have supported the federal legislation, because I think it had some problems. But I’m a strong believer in making lemonade out of lemons.” Perhaps the law’s most punitive aspect was that it cut off aid to poor legal immigrants, a provision that Clinton, in his 2004 memoir, called “particularly harsh” and “unjustifiable.” The law that Obama helped pass in Illinois restored benefits to this group. (In a continuing effort to produce lemonade, Obama’s first ad of the 2008 general-election campaign says that he “passed laws moving people from welfare to work.”) Obama resisted the national rightward trend of the mid-nineties in other small ways. He sponsored an amendment to the state constitution that would have made health care a universal right in Illinois and helped pass an ethics bill that reformed Illinois’s antiquated campaign-finance system.
[snip]
“Jones basically gave Obama the space to do what Obama wanted to do. Emil made it clear to people that it would be good for them.” Burns, who at that point was working for Jones, was assigned to keep an eye on Obama’s floor votes, which, because he was a Senate candidate, would be under closer scrutiny. The Obama-Jones alliance worked. In one year, 2003, Obama passed much of the legislation, including bills on racial profiling, death-penalty reform, and expanded health insurance for children, that he highlighted in his Senate campaign.
This brings us up to Obama's entrance on the national stage and at this point, I see absolutely no indication that he is a right wing politician, a Wall Street shill or a corporate lackey. On the contrary, I see an independent-minded, patient, pragmatic, progressive politician.
As everyone knows, President Obama bounded onto the national stage when he spoke at the Democratic National Convention in 2004, during his Senate campaign. Barack Obama's speech on that occasion was, to put it mildly, an early indication that he was not going to be from the "I welcome their hatred" wing of the Democratic party indulging in an anachronistic description of the Democratic Party of 2004, since the phrase "I welcome their hatred" would not be popularized until after the crash of '08).
If you'd like to take a trip down memory lane, here you go:
I imagine there are many of you reading this now who applauded this speech right along with me but now taste a little bile at the back of their mouth when they think of the words: "there is not a liberal America and a conservative America - there is the United States of America." I have to admit that makes me a little sad, but I shall persevere.
Of course, Obama wasn't a Senator for long, four years. The first half of that four years, the Republicans controlled congress. The second half of that four years, he was running for President. So, it's fair to say, he didn't leave a huge footprint in the Senate. That's no reflection on his quality as a legislator, just a function of events.
Therefore, determining how "liberal" Obama was as a Senator is inherently difficult. However, National Journal does annual rankings of Senators from liberal to conservative and in 2005, 2006 and 2007 they found Barack Obama to be the 16th, 10th and 1st most liberal Senatorrespectively. Take that for what it's worth, but clearly Barack Obama was at least in or around the top third of the most liberal senators.
Okay, you've read some accusations about the President and you've reviewed some of his background. President Obama decided to spend approximately the first four years after he got out of college doing low paid community organizing for underserved communities. Then, upon graduating from Harvard Law School, with honors, having been the president of Harvard Law Review, Mr. Obama returned to Chicago and resumed his work as a community organizer and eventually ran for and achieved office in the State government, before eventually, after serving seven years in the Illinois State Senate, he became one of the most liberal members of the United States Senate.
It would have been very easy for Mr. Obama, with his credentials, to go cash in on Wall Street.
If he wanted to wield power in service of a right wing agenda, I'm sure the Republicans would have been very happy to have someone (a black man!) of Obama's gifts on their team to sell their snake oil.
But Mr. Obama didn't choose a paycheck and he didn't choose the Republicans. He chose to labor several years in obscurity as a community organizer and a small time politician in service of the underserved.
Now, does it make a lick of sense that that same man is in fact "a hired stooge[] put in office to lend an air of democratic legitimacy to what has essentially become a bureaucratic-oligarchic state?"
Does it seem likely that that same man "has mustered the legislative strength of his New Deal predecessor -- but he has channeled that strength into propping up the very forces of "organized money" that FDR once challenged?"
Is it believable that that same man is "devoting all of his presidential power to cutting the entitlement programmes that have been the defining hallmark of the Democratic party since Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal" because he is hellbent on "gutting not only core Democratic policies, but also the identity and power of the American Left?"
And does it seem even remotely plausible that the man described above is "a willing dupe and loyal servant of the rightwing corporate plutocracy?"
At this point, I think everyone but true flat-earth, dead-enders probably agrees with me that the idea that Barack Obama is a conservative Trojan Horse sent to destroy the Democratic party from within stretches credulity to the breaking point.
However, I imagine many of you saying to yourselves: "Sure, he was a solid progressive at one time, but the power of the Presidency has somehow transformed him into a lapdog for the monied interests, as evidenced by the fact that he has repeatedly betrayed core progressive principles in a manner impossible to explain short of criminal incompetence or fealty to nonprogressive entities."
To which I respond: "Barack Obama has not repeatedly betrayed the progressive values, he has merely had to make many tough compromises and hard decisions in response to horrible economic conditioins, multiple coplicated foreign entanglements and hyper-partisan obstructionism from Republicans. In fact, I will tell you that he has done very well by progressives, under brutal circumstances and that it is hard for me to imagine any President having done better under these circumstances."
To which I imagine you responding: "Those are just standard Obama apologist talking points. I want more facts!"
To which I respond: "We will discuss this further in the next installment of Barack Obama a Wall Street Shill? Oh, Please! (An Occassional Series) wherein I will tackle the Affordable Care Act and why it is way more progressive than (some of) you think."