Keep Your Eyes on the Prize:
Stop the War, Stop McCain, Vote Obama 2008
By Carl Davidson
Progressives for Obama
http://progressivesforobama.blogspot.com
I think the conclusions of many of the dire concerns and warnings about Obama's recent rightward tilt are on target--we get what we want, some of it anyway, not by relying on saviors, but the hard old-fashioned way, organizing our own clout at the base and building upward. The FDR story--'I agree with you, now make me do it--is a case in point.
But I wouldn't say Obama's 'unprincipled' or 'deeply flawed.' Obama is what he is. He is a 'high road' industrial policy capitalist and multipolar globalist--just read his Cooper Union speech a while back. Clinton is a garden-variety corporate liberal capitalist, which got her on the board of Walmart for years. And McCain is a US hegemonist and an unreconstructed neoliberal capitalist--'state all evil, market all good'--that kind that says 'We're in business to make money, not steel, so we'll gut these plants and speculate in oil futures, and the workers and towns be damned.' In other words, the ones who 'cut taxes' by putting everything on the China Visa card and got us into this mess....
Keep Your Eyes on the Prize:
Stop the War, Stop McCain, Vote Obama 2008
By Carl Davidson
Progressives for Obama
http://progressivesforobama.blogspot.com
I think the conclusions of many of the dire concerns and warnings about Obama's recent rightward tilt are on target--we get what we want, some of it anyway, not by relying on saviors, but the hard old-fashioned way, organizing our own clout at the base and building upward. The FDR story--'I agree with you, now make me do it--is a case in point.
But I wouldn't say Obama's 'unprincipled' or 'deeply flawed.' Obama is what he is. He is a 'high road' industrial policy capitalist and multipolar globalist--just read his Cooper Union speech a while back. Clinton is a garden-variety corporate liberal capitalist, which got her on the board of Walmart for years. And McCain is a US hegemonist and an unreconstructed neoliberal capitalist--'state all evil, market all good'--that kind that says 'We're in business to make money, not steel, so we'll gut these plants and speculate in oil futures, and the workers and towns be damned.' In other words, the ones who 'cut taxes' by putting everything on the China Visa card and got us into this mess.
Actually, truth be told, Obama's brand of capitalism is best for productive businesses, as opposed to speculators, and does least harm to the working class. He's never been a socialist, anti-imperialist, or even a consistent progressive or social democrat. That doesn't mean we can't press him to be better at what he is or asserts, as in ending the war in 2009, and in promoting and building infrastructure for new green businesses and green jobs for youth. All those solar panels and wave and wind turbines have to be built somewhere by someone. And he has started doing more of this recently, along with his other-direction tacts to the center-right.
We need not be surprised, and in fact it's one of the reasons Tom Hayden, Bill Fletcher, Danny Glover and Barbara Ehrenreich set up 'Progressives for Obama' in the first place, knowing this would happen. IF you're not a regular reader, do yourself a favor an become armed on how to support Obama critically. Meanwhile, when your task is to win a majority of Democratic votes and defeat other Democrats in a primary, you put your policy package together in one way. When your task is to win a solid majority of all voters--progressive and center--to isolate and defeat the right, you put it together another way.
It's called politics. What we want to urge, I think, are value-centered politics, where you have a core that keeps you anchored, and avoid any 180 degree turns from one audience to another.
So far, Obama's been fairly true to his own core values. But we need to understand that while our values overlap with his, they are not entirely the same. As I said earlier, he is what he is, and it will still be the greatest popular electoral victory in my lifetime if we can help put him in the White House.
A far more interesting struggle opens up, front and center, the next day. But that's a problem I've also been looking forward to having all my life. We best start preparing for it right now by working this campaign in a way that builds our own strength, as well as puts him over the top.