The Progressive: "Obama No"

Adolph Reed, Jr., whom Katha Pollitt, of Mother Jones Magazine has called: "the smartest person of any race, class, or gender writing on race, class, and gender"  delivers a brutally scathing assessment of the Obama Presidential campaign in the May, 2008 issue of The Progressive Magazine, entitled, "Obama No."

Here's Reed's opening paragraph from The Progressive piece:

(see below the fold)

I've never been an Obama supporter. I've known him since the very beginning of his political career, which was his campaign for the seat in my state senate district in Chicago. He struck me then as a vacuous opportunist, a good performer with an ear for how to make white liberals like him. I argued at the time that his fundamental political center of gravity, beneath an empty rhetoric of hope and change and new directions, is neoliberal.

And, here's Reed's closing comments:

Because he's tried carefully to say enough of whatever the audiences he's been speaking to at the time want to hear while leaving himself enough space later on to deny his intentions to leave that impression, his record represents precisely the "character" weakness the Republicans have exploited in every Democratic candidate since Dukakis: Another Dem trying to put things over on the American people.

Obama's campaign has been very clever in carving out a strategy to amass Democratic delegate votes, but its momentum is in some ways a Potemkin construction--built largely on victories in states that no Democrat will win in November--that will fall apart under Republican pressure.

And then where will we be?

Again, here's the link to the full piece.

Reed is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania.