Cornel West Worries About Barack Obama's "Kansas Influence"

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Tue May-17-11 10:58 AM
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Cornel West Worries About Barack Obama's "Kansas Influence"

Jonathan Chait Cornel West Uncovers The Disturbing Truth

You are familiar with the hypothesis that Barack Obama genetically inherited a disposition toward radical Kenyan anti-colonial thinking through his absent father. Now comes Cornel West, inevitably expressing his bitter disappointment with Obama's corporate sellout ways, explicating the opposite hypothesis:

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He's a secret believer in Kansan pro-colonialism!

I also enjoyed this part of West's analysis about Obama's personnel choices:

�I was thinking maybe he has at least some progressive populist instincts that could become more manifest after the cautious policies of being a senator and working with Lieberman as his mentor,� he says. �But it became very clear when I looked at the neoliberal economic team. The first announcement of Summers and Geithner I went ballistic. I said, �Oh, my God, I have really been misled at a very deep level.� And the same is true for Dennis Ross and the other neo-imperial elites. I said, �I have been thoroughly misled, all this populist language is just a facade. I was under the impression that he might bring in the voices of brother Joseph Stiglitz and brother Paul Krugman. I figured, OK, given the structure of constraints of the capitalist democratic procedure that�s probably the best he could do. But at least he would have some voices concerned about working people, dealing with issues of jobs and downsizing and banks, some semblance of democratic accountability for Wall Street oligarchs and corporate plutocrats who are just running amuck. I was completely wrong.�

Summers and Krugman may have some personality and tactical differences, but the difference between supporting a $1.2 trillion fiscal stimulus and supporting an $800 billion fiscal stimulus is not exactly the difference between corporate oligarchy and socialism.

Exactly!

David Weigel: Cornel West Worries About Barack Obama's "Kansas Influence"

Jonathan Chait is right. Cornel West's interview with Chris Hedges gives us -- at last! -- a lefty analogue to the far right's worries about whether or not Kenyan DNA did a number on Barack Obama's patriotism.

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Now: Around 47 percent of that is (or was) unmistakably true, as anyone who's read Dreams from My Father can tell you. Obama will be the first person to admit that he never felt at home in white or in black culture. But here we go:

It is understandable. He feels most comfortable with upper middle-class white and Jewish men who consider themselves very smart, very savvy and very effective in getting what they want. He�s got two homes. He has got his family and whatever challenges go on there, and this other home. Larry Summers blows his mind because he�s so smart. He�s got Establishment connections. He�s embracing me. It is this smartness, this truncated brilliance, that titillates and stimulates brother Barack and makes him feel at home.

This doesn't strike me as a good catch-all explanation for why Obama appointed a non-socialist economic team. If you want to be around smart Jewish men, and you want to staff an administration, you've got your pick of academic socialists. No; this strikes me as an over-reading of why Obama chose Summers, who was he key figure in a decade-old feud with West. (Summers criticized the seriousness of West's work after he released an album, and West hot-footed it to Princeton.) Obama's blunders on economic policy (I'd rank the re-appointment of Bernanke high up there) make less sense if viewed as the result of cultural conditioning, more sense if viewed as fealty to the people Obama needs to get re-elected. I guess it's nice to have West out there, though, demonstrating from another angle how useful the analyze-Obama-through-genetic code style of punditry is.

:rofl: