From barackobama.com: The Obama Illusion

wyldwolf

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Mon Oct-08-07 08:26 PM
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From barackobama.com: The Obama Illusion

Edited on Mon Oct-08-07 09:12 PM by proud patriot

(edited for copyright and original credit-proud patriot-moderator-democraticunderground)

Paul Street at Zmag.org:
http://www.zmag.org/ZMagSite/Feb2007/streetpr0207.html

long before any formal announcement (I’m writing this in early January), it was obvious that overnight sensation Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) wanted to be the U.S.’s next chief executive. The “charismatic” Obama was campaigning by at least November 2005, less than a year out of the Illinois state legislature. During 2006, Obama gave grave and “realistic” foreign policy speeches and made appearances on the “Tonight Show,” “Meet the Press,” “Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” the covers and/or pages of Time, Men’s Vogue, Marie Claire, Vanity Fair, and Washington Life. He appeared at the early political proving grounds of Iowa and New Hampshire. He reached across political and cultural lines—making a special point of talking to the religious right. He released a self-promotional book (deceptively titled The Audacity of Hope) that screamed presidential ambition beneath false humility and ponderous, power-worshipping prose. He received the praise, money, positive media attention, and public recognition that a serious presidential run requires. His campaign fundraising Midas touch became a factor in the mid-term Congressional elections. The significance of his ambition and ever-rising stature is enhanced by the fact that the Democrats’ presumed frontrunner, Hilary Clinton, is seen by many election experts and brokers as unelectable.

If the Democrats’ candidate in 2008 is Obama, we can be sure that the right-wing Republican noise machine will denounce the nation’s potential first non-white male president as a dangerous “leftist.” The charge will be absurd, something that will hardly stop numerous people on the portside of the narrow U.S. political spectrum from claiming Obama as a fellow “progressive.” Certain to be encouraged by Obama and his handlers, this confusion will reflect the desperation and myopia that shaky thinking and the limited choices of the U.S. electoral system regularly instill in liberals and some squishy near leftists.

So what sorts of policies and values could one expect from an imagined Obama presidency? There is quite a bit already in Obama’s short national career that has to be placed in the “never mind” category if one is to seriously to believe his claim (cautiously advanced in The Audacity of Hope) to be a “progressive” concerned with “social and economic justice” and global peace.

Never Mind

Never mind, for example, that Obama was recently hailed as a “Hamiltonian” believer in “limited government” and “free trade” by Republican New York Times columnist David Brooks, who praises Obama for having “a mentality formed by globalization, not the SDS.” Or that he had to be shamed off the “New Democrat Directory” of the corporate-right Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) by the popular left black Internet magazine Black Commentator (Bruce Dixon, “Obama to Have Name Removed From DLC List,” Black Commentator, June 26, 2003).

Never mind that Obama (consistent with Brooks’s description of him) has lent his support to the aptly named Hamilton Project, formed by corporate-neoliberal Citigroup chair Robert Rubin and “other Wall Street Democrats” to counter populist rebellion against corporatist tendencies within the Democratic Party (David Sirota, “Mr. Obama Goes to Washington,” the Nation, June 26). Or that he lent his politically influential and financially rewarding assistance to neoconservative pro-war Senator Joe Lieberman’s (“D”-CT) struggle against the Democratic antiwar insurgent Ned Lamont. Or that Obama has supported other “mainstream Democrats” fighting antiwar progressives in primary races (see Alexander Cockburn, “Obama’s Game,” the Nation, April 24, 2006). Or that he criticized efforts to enact filibuster proceedings against reactionary Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.

http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/jamesgrant/ChlG