"Obama...often seems intent on demonizing the very people who helped get him his start"

Karmadillo

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Sun Nov-11-07 01:01 PM
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"Obama...often seems intent on demonizing the very people who helped get him his start"

Edited on Sun Nov-11-07 01:03 PM by Karmadillo

http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=2312

Cut Points In The Foreign Policy Domain: Obama's Questionable Strategy
by: Paul Rosenberg
Sat Nov 10, 2007 at 15:44:37 PM EST

In my diary earlier today on Ron Paul, I noted how he fell among the 0.2% of people totally opposed to federal social welfare policies--a remarkably far-right fringe position from which to launch a campaign that even seeks to appeal to progressives distressed with the Democrats' inept and confused response to the Iraq War. While Ron Paul stands zero chance of being elected President, he is doing a bang-up job of expanding the rightwing extremist base of influence, which is what a hegemonic cultural warrior ought to be doing. Too bad he is on the other side.

Now I want to flip to the other side, and take a look at how a much better positioned progressive candidate--Barack Obama--has managed to do the exact opposite: take a majoritarian position and cut it to pieces. He, too, will probably not be President. But unlike Paul, he is doing virtually nothing to build influence for ideological base. In fact, he's doing the exact opposite: his funciton is to divide and sometimes even demonize that base.

My points of reference here are how Obama himself has characterized the divisions in foreign policy as he sees them, and how he responds.

In a MyDD diary last December, The Two Obamas and Me, Part One, Chris contrasted the principle-driven Obama who first inspired tremendous netroots support with the compromise-driven Obama were seen since, who often seems intent on demonizing the very people who helped get him his start. Chris cited this example:

In town-hall meetings, when those who opposed the war get shrill, Obama makes a point of noting that while he, too, opposed the war, he's "not one of those people who cynically believes Bush went in only for the oil."

Chis followed up:

Did anyone with any power every say that? Did any leading Democrats ever say that? Did any progressive or liberal of any public stature ever say that? If they did, I'd love to see the quote.

More recently, on November 2nd, in a diary, Establishment Revolution?, Chris cited this passage from a Sunday's New York Times magazine article:

In 1981, Obama arrived at Columbia University, where he majored in international relations. He wrote his senior thesis on the North-South debate on trade then raging as part of the demand for a "new international economic order." But he says that he was never much of a lefty. Obama offers himself as the representative of a new generation, free of the dogmas that still burden the Democratic Party. "The Democrats have been stuck in the arguments of Vietnam," he said to me on the campaign plane, "which means that either you're a Scoop Jackson Democrat or you're a Tom Hayden Democrat and you're suspicious of any military action. And that's just not my framework."

The cut points that Obama makes are, I will argue, fundamentally misguided and destructive. Even if the dividions were accurate, the only reason to focus on such divisions in the first place should be to heal them, not simply highlight them. Besides, Ron Paul's example clearly shows that the most effective strategy is not even to talk about divisions. But I don't want to simply be negative. I want to illuminate what the real cut points are, and why it makes so much more sense to focus on them realistically in forming our policy.

lots more...