This is going to be a long and meandering one, I'm sorry to say. And it might not be so coherent. Lots of quotations, too. Ok, enough apologizing.
A French diplomatic veteran ticked off all the good news: Obama's pledge to close Guantanamo, the ban on torture, the continued withdrawal from Iraq, his reaching out to Iran and North Korea, engagement on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, the quest for nuclear disarmament, the effort to "reset" relations with Russia. And there is America's new stance on global warming, on display in Copenhagen. This repositioning matters not just to elites but also to a rank-and-file green movement emerging as an alternative on the center-left to social democratic parties, notably in France and Germany. But these are the days of European second thoughts: Obama is still interesting, he's still not George W. Bush, but what can he show for his efforts? His Israeli-Palestinian initiative has gone nowhere. The fruits of his overtures to Iran, Russia and North Korea are far from obvious. Where is the climate change legislation that was supposed to pass Congress?
Yes. What can he show for his efforts? One would think results would be called for. In fact, lots of people have been complaining that so far Obama seems to be a lot of talk, with no action. Or worse: some have claimed that Obama has betrayed the liberals who first fueled his candidacy by breaking several campaign promises, and that his progressive rhetoric was mere seduction meant to get him elected, whereupon he would govern as a centrist or moderate conservative.
This debate has been picking up steam lately with Obama's Afghanistan surge in particular. That sad, slow, agonizing, utterly predictable move prompted Tom Hayden to write in The Nation that:
Obama's escalation in Afghanistan is the last in a string of disappointments. His flip-flopping acceptance of the military coup in Honduras has squandered the trust of Latin America. His Wall Street bailout leaves the poor, the unemployed, minorities and college students on their own. And now comes the Afghanistan-Pakistan decision to escalate the stalemate, which risks his domestic agenda, his Democratic base, and possibly even his presidency.The expediency of his decision was transparent. Satisfy the generals by sending 30,000 more troops. Satisfy the public and peace movement with a timeline for beginning withdrawals of those same troops, with no timeline for completing a withdrawal.
Obama's timeline for the proposed Afghan military surge mirrors exactly the eighteen-month Petraeus timeline for the surge in Iraq.
We'll see. To be clear: I'll support Obama down the road against Sarah Palin, Lou Dobbs or any of the pitchfork carriers for the pre-Obama era. But no bumper sticker until the withdrawal strategy is fully carried out.
The response was swift and merciless. Joan Walsh, usually a welcome voice of restrained compassion--two extremely rare qualities in a political writer--ran a post on her blog at Salon.com called "The Poster Boy for Progressive Self-Delusion," in which she remembered Hayden's earlier endorsement of Obama:
Hayden's delusional Obama endorsement in March 2008 made such an impression on me, I can quote whole sentences from memory. Well, one whole sentence, the first: "All American progressives should unite for Barack Obama." Oh, and I remember that he said Obama's "very biography" and his campaign's "very existence" would cure cancer, make my hair silky smooth, and cause pretty, pretty unicorns to dance in my backyard, too. OK, that last part isn't true.
But I felt like I was in some kind of Maoist reeducation camp, being urged to struggle mightily and cheerfully for Chairman Obama.
So yeah, that old "I told you so" demon drove me back to reread Hayden's Nation piece -- co-signed by Danny Glover, Barbara Ehrenreich and Bill Fletcher Jr. (but redolent of Hayden's manifesto-writing style) -- and boy, it's even worse than I remember. For those of you saying it's not fair to blame progressives for deluding themselves about Obama, please read this, and then try to make the same argument. Some of my favorite lines below:
"All American progressives should unite for Barack Obama. We descend from the proud tradition of independent social movements that have made America a more just and democratic country. We believe that the movement today supporting Barack Obama continues this great tradition of grassroots participation, drawing millions of people out of apathy and into participation in the decisions that affect all our lives. We believe that Barack Obama's very biography reflects the positive potential of the globalization process that also contains such grave threats to our democracy when shaped only by the narrow interests of private corporations in an unregulated global marketplace. We should instead be globalizing the values of equality, a living wage and environmental sustainability in the new world order, not hoping our deepest concerns will be protected by trickle-down economics or charitable billionaires. By its very existence, the Obama campaign will stimulate a vision of globalization from below….
"We intend to join and engage with our brothers and sisters in the vast rainbow of social movements to come together in support of Obama's unprecedented campaign and candidacy. Even though it is candidate-centered, there is no doubt that the campaign is a social movement, one greater than the candidate himself ever imagined…. We have the proven online capacity to reach millions of swing voters in the primary and general election. We can and will defend Obama against negative attacks from any quarter….
"We take very seriously the argument that Americans should elect a first woman President, and we abhor the surfacing of sexism in this supposedly post-feminist era. But none of us would vote for Condoleezza Rice as either the first woman or first African-American President. We regret that the choice divides so many progressive friends and allies, but believe that a Hillary Clinton presidency would be a Clinton presidency all over again, not a triumph of feminism but a restoration of the aging, power-driven Wall Street Democratic hawks at a moment when so much more fresh imagination is possible and needed. A Clinton victory could only be achieved by the dashing of hope among millions of young people on whom a better future depends. The style of the Clintons' attacks on Obama, which are likely to escalate as her chances of winning decline, already risks losing too many Democratic and independent voters in November. We believe that the Hillary Clinton of 1968 would be an Obama volunteer today, just as she once marched in the snows of New Hampshire for Eugene McCarthy against the Democratic establishment."
Oh, and I searched the whole thing: Not one word about Afghanistan. Not even the word "Afghanistan."
[...]
Struggle mightily and cheerfully to forgive yourself for your self-delusion, Tom Hayden and friends...
Clearly, and as Walsh admits, there is some bitterness left over from the 2008 primary here. But leaving that aside for a minute, we can probably all agree that in picking the Afghanistan escalation as his moment to shed his allegiance Hayden is making himself an easy target. Obama certainly spoke at length about Afghanistan being a "just war" both before and after the election; in fact even in his very first speech of note, when he opposed the Iraq war in 2002, he was careful to state "I am not opposed to all wars, just dumb wars," and in this belief he has been quite consistent.
More broadly, Walsh is also correct to note that Obama was never as left-wing on many issues as many liberals seemed to think he was. While there was a widespread belief that Obama was the more progressive candidate, did Obama ever really say he wouldn't staff his White House with ex-Clintonite, New Democrats from the Robert Rubin school of laissez-faire capitalism?
No. But I will say this: he sure as hell let us think so.
Walsh and the "realist" if not "moderate" Democrats that she channels here (she'd dislike that term, but it suits her argument) want us to believe that we're fools to think Obama was somehow different than Clinton or any other frightened, triangulating, centrist Democrat. But in asserting this smug superiority, they want to have it both ways. They want to bask in the president's inspiring rhetoric--in his ability, as Walsh said in a later post on the Afghanistan speech, to be carried away a bit by Obama's trademark rhetorical magic. Yet at the same time, they say that the details--the actual content of that magic--doesn't matter, or should be ignored. Because if we listen to what he actually says in his inspiring speeches, they do not describe a wussy, triangulating New Democrat. They describe a strong, resolute, committed liberal.
***
In his most widely celebrated speech, Obama recited a passage from Dreams From My Father that said:
"People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend's voice up into the rafters....And in that single note - hope! - I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekiel's field of dry bones. Those stories - of survival, and freedom, and hope - became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn't need to feel shame about...memories that all people might study and cherish - and with which we could start to rebuild."
He's talking about the universality of the African-American experience, but not only that. He's also explaining his political beliefs. The movement from slavery to freedom and the constant striving for rights, representation, and one's fair share is something that represents, in a very profound way, the aims and beliefs of American liberalism. In other words, there is a deeper meaning here, particularly given the larger context of the speech as intended to move past the Revered Wright uproar. He was trying to explain the important things about himself, and his beliefs, and why, in a country that had been scarred for so long by right-wing hateful rhetoric, people had nothing to fear from confronting the mistakes of the past--whether inflicted by Bush or by even worse legacies. He was trying to legitimize liberalism.
Think I'm reading too much into it? How about this?
For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle - as we did in the OJ trial - or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright's sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she's playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.
We can do that.
But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we'll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.
That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, "Not this time." This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can't learn; that those kids who don't look like us are somebody else's problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.
This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don't have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.
This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn't look like you might take your job; it's that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.
This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should've been authorized and never should've been waged, and we want to talk about how we'll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.
Expanded education, health care, unions, expanded services for veterans, an end to the war in Iraq. (Not Afghanistan, no. But a stirring, emotional antiwar note nonetheless. Was it wrong to think he believed it?) These are all LIBERAL policy proposals. It's a speech aimed at defining Barack Obama as someone who does more than believe certain things. They animate his being. He is a crusader. He believes with all his heart.
***
Or at least he seemed to. And that "seemed," of course, contains all of Hayden's bitter disillusionment. Obama was a man who presented himself as an unrepentant liberal, specifics be damned. Whatever else you might say about Tom Hayden, he's a man who's spent his life believing passionately in certain things. Can you blame him for feeling inspired by that speech, for believing that it meant Obama was different? And can you really mock him now for feeling so betrayed?
In Obama's Afghanistan speech, Walsh found herself disappointed. The Obama magic wasn't there that night. Well, why not? Surely it couldn't have had anything to do with the content of the speech he was trying to make? With the fact that he was trying to justify escalating a war for bullshit reasons?
Obama was never about simple beliefs and magical unicorns. It was about liberalism. He won people over because he articulated liberalism. And now it turns out it was all bullshit. This is going to be a very difficult thing to handle.
Dionne finishes his piece by praising Obama's speech to the Nobel committee as mixing realism with idealism in some sort of ideal package. "It turns out that there is an Obama doctrine based on a quest for moral balance. Its central insistence is that it's possible to be tough-minded and idealistic, to adhere to a realism rooted in values." Unfortunately, right now that "moral balance" seems to consist mainly in appeasing as many Joe Lieberman Democrats as possible, until the liberal goals he claimed to have in the first place are extinguished altogether. I guess Dionne's point that, well, he hasn't really done what he said he'd do, but he still says it really nicely!
I guess we should have known better than to care about what his pretty words actually meant.
p. s. Obviously I don't buy the theory that Hillary voters knew all this ahead of time. They never truly heard him in the first place.
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