Reply #95: West made more sense back in November 2008:

[struggle4progress]

November 19, 2008
Cornel West on the Election of Barack Obama: "I Hope He Is a Progressive Lincoln, I Aspire to Be the Frederick Douglass to Put Pressure on Him"

... For me, my criticism of Barack has to do with trying to acknowledge the degree to which, one, thank God we’re at the end of the age of Ronald Reagan, we’re at the end of the era of conservatism, we’re coming to the end of the epoch of the Southern Strategy. For the first time now, we’ve got some democratic possibilities. This has been a political ice age, and the melting is just beginning. And Barack Obama is a symbol, but we’ve got to move from symbol to substance. We’ve got to move from what he represents in a broad sense—and it’s a beautiful thing to have a black man in the White House, we know that, and black slaves and laborers and other white immigrants built the White House. And to have a black family there, significant; black face for the American empire, fine. Can we revitalize democratic possibilities on the ground with Barack in the White House? I think we can. We can put some serious pressure on him, and we can actually continue the democratic awakening among working people and poor people and push Barack in a progressive direction ...

You know, I fear that Brother Barack might be challenged by what Bill Clinton was. When you have been an outsider to the establishment, you want to make the establishment feel secure, and therefore, you want to recycle names that the establishment feels are legitimate names. And therefore, you’re reluctant to step out too far, because you’ll be unable to proceed and unable to govern with a smoothness that you think ought to be characteristic of your regime. And so, he ends up selecting people who the mainstream are going to herald as legitimate, rather than make that break and acknowledge this is a new day, and it ought to be the age of everyday people, the age of ordinary people. That’s what I think. And it’s ironic, because there’s a sense in which Brother Barack Obama might be reluctant to step into the new age of Obama and remains looking backward to the end of the Clinton moment. And I say, no, we need to break free. Now, it could be like FDR: he’s just reluctant, and we’ll have to push him. And that’s fine ...

Well, we use, in many ways, his own words. He says that he wants the bottoms up. That’s fine. We organize, we mobilize. We don’t look simply for a top down. The Clintonites have often been top down. It’s the bottom up. We organize, we mobilize. We consolidate our organizations. And in the end, of course, we may have to take to the streets. That’s how people’s power is expressed, but it’s expressed in a critical and, for me, in a loving way ...

Yes. America’s hanging in the balance, state of emergency, sense of urgency. I’m a blues man in the life of the mind, a jazzman in the world of ideas, and the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of a personal catastrophe, expressed lyrically and endured with grace and dignity. How do we deal with catastrophic circumstances of our children, catastrophic circumstances of our workers, catastrophic circumstances of our gay brothers and lesbian sisters? Let us not forget Proposition 8 in other states that denied the rights of our gay brothers and lesbian sisters, even as we celebrate Brother Barack Obama. The catastrophic ought to be our focus. That’s what blues people are about. For Christians, it’s the cross as a catastrophic—what kind of sensitivity do we have for people wrestling with catastrophic circumstances? And how do they resist? How do they endure? How do they persevere? How do we democratize and embrace all of humanity so that the wretched of the earth are able to live lives of decency and dignity? ...

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/11/19/cornel_west_on_the_election_of