The Cynicism of Hope

If you like cynicism in politics, you’ve got to love Barack Obama.  There’s nothing naïve or fanciful about the way he says one thing to one audience and another thing to a different voter or funding group. It’s all about cold calculation under the perverse, narrow-spectrum, and “winner-take-all” rules of the United States’ corporate-crafted elections system.

 

PRAISING REAGAN FOR SAVING US FROM “THE EXCESSES OF THE 1960S AND 1970S”

 

Speaking recently to the privileged editors of the Reno (Nevada) Gazette, the supposedly (so the Fox News crowd insists) left-wing Obama sought to give “conservatives” (1) reason to jump on board his “movement” for “Hope,” “Unity,” and “Change.”  He found it useful to give special praise to a leading historical enemy of peace, justice, and racial equality – Ronald Reagan.  Here is a precious quotation from the self-described “progressive” Obama, courtesy of YouTube:

 

“I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not.  He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn't much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating.  I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing”

 

Wow.

 

As liberal blogger Mat Stoller notes, Obama “agrees with Reagan's basic frame that the 1960s and 1970s were full of 'excesses' and that government had grown large and unaccountable. Those excesses, of course, were feminism, the consumer rights movement, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, and the antiwar movement.  The libertarian anti-government ideology of an unaccountable large liberal government was designed by ideological conservatives,” Stoller rightly adds, “to take advantage of the backlash against these 'excesses.'”

 

“Reagan was not a sunny optimist pushing dynamic entrepreneurship,” Stoller rightly observes, “but a savvy politician using a civil rights backlash to catapult conservatives to power” (1A).

 

Obama knows that very well but he’s not about to say it to “conservatives” whose endorsement he’s seeking in Nevada.

 

PRAISING KING FOR CHALLENGING INJUSTICE AND INEQUALITY

 

Speaking last Sunday to a predominantly black audience in the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta(2), Obama’s message the message was very different. Obama had a different hero in mind – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who helped lead the movement that provoked the white “backlash” that Reagan rode to power. After 1960, Ebenezer was the site of many sermons by the famous leader in the struggle for black equality. 

 

Preaching at Ebenezer one day before the national Martin Luther King holiday,  Obama had his eyes on the upcoming “black primary” in South Carolina.  More than half of South Carolina’s registered Democrats are African-American.

 

As Obama and his handlers know, black political sentiments stand well to the left of the majority white opinion Obama is trying to win over in his bid for the White House.  Those sentiments are also well to the left of the predominantly white corporate and imperial power-brokers Obama knows to hold the keys to the ultimate establishment job – the U.S. presidency.

 

And so in his Ebenezer oration last Sunday, there was no praise for Ronald Reagan, who remains understandably unpopular in the black community.  There was no beating up on the “excessive” 1960s, when King and the movement he represented ended legal segregation and won black voting rights in the deep South.

 

Obama invoked King’s memory to advocate focusing on “common challenges we face – war and poverty, injustice and inequality.” Obama praised Dr. King for “leading by marching and going to jail and suffering threats and being away from his family.  He led by taking a stand against a war,” Obama said, “knowing full well that it would diminish his popularity.  He led by challenging our economic structures, understanding that it would cause deep discomfort.”

 

“The changes that are needed,” Obama added, “are not just a matter of tinkering at the edges, and they will not come if politicians simply tell us what we want to hear.”

 

King would have agreed.

 

“OUR [GLORIOUS] FREE MARKET SYSTEM”

 

But Obama’s policy agenda has been repeatedly and accurately described as militantly “incrementalist” – the very epitome of “tinkering at the edges.”

 

And it’s hard to escape the conclusion that Obama was telling his black listeners in Atlanta what he thought they wanted to hear while he is content to say something else entirely to more privileged audiences.

 

King: “Something is Wrong With Our Economic System”

 

It is true that King “challenged our economic structures.”  To be more explicit about it in ways Obama would never dare, the democratic socialist King challenged the moral legitimacy capitalism and called for “the radical reconstruction of society itself” (2A).

 

King also contrasted the endemic poverty and inequality evident in capitalist America with the much lower poverty levels and greater equality of more social-democratic European states. “Maybe something is wrong with our economic system,” King told an interviewer, observing that (in historian David Garrow’s words) “in democratic socialist societies such as Sweden there was no poverty, no unemployment and no slums” (2B).

 

Obama: “Our Greatest Asset” - Capitalism

 

But in his remarkably power-friendly campaign book The Audacity of Hope (New York: 2006), Obama praised the industrialized world’s most unequal and wealth-top-heavy nation – the United States – for the glorious workings of its savagely regressive capitalist system. “It takes a trip overseas,” Obama said, “to fully appreciate just how good Americans have it; even our poor take for granted goods and services – electricity, clean water, indoor plumbing, telephones, televisions, and household appliances – that are still unattainable for most of the world.  America may have been blessed with some of the planet’s best real estate,” Obama added, “but clearly it’s not just our natural resources that account for our economic success.  Our greatest asset has been our system of social organization, a system that for generations has encouraged constant innovation, individual initiative and efficient allocation of resources...our free market system.”

 

How about that?

 

Never mind the terrible outcomes of America’s distinctively anti-social and incidentally heavily state-protected “free market system” and “business culture.”  Those unfortunate results include the marvelously “efficient,” climate-warming contributions of a business-dominated nation that constitutes 5 percent of the world’s population but contributes more than a quarter of the planet’s carbon emissions.  Other notable effects include the innovative generation of poverty and deep poverty for millions of U.S. children while executives atop “defense” firms like Boeing and Raytheon rake in billions of taxpayer dollars for helping Uncle Sam kill and maim untold hundreds of thousands of Iraqi, Afghan, and Palestinian civilians. 

 

Obama’s Audacity left it to what he considers the lunatic left fringe to note the American System’s “efficient” allocation of half the nation’s wealth to the top 1 percent of the U.S. population and its systematic subordination of the common good to private profit.  “Unreasonable” Marxists, anarchists and “conspiracy theorists” were left to observe that business-ruled workplaces and labor markets steal “individual initiative” from millions of American workers subjected to the monotonous repetition of imbecilic and soul-crushing operations conducted for such increasingly unbearable stretches of time – at stagnating levels of  material reward and security – that working people are increasingly unable to participate meaningfully in the great “democracy” Obama trumpets as the Founders’ great legacy.

 

It Depends on Where You Go

 

As for “a trip overseas” showing how good life is in the U.S. for “even our poor”...it depends on where the “overseas” trip takes you. If it brings the traveler to much of the rest of the industrialized world, where state (so-called “free market”) capitalism’s inherent tendencies towards wealth inequality and corporate rule are considerably more tempered by social-democratic programs and popular movements, the comparison  is generally less than flattering to the United States, reminding the minimally attentive societal observer that the United States’ “unmatched prosperity” is doled out in harshly regressive ways that create relatively high percentages and numbers of poor and uninsured households, drastically long working hours, rampant economic insecurity and generally inadequate and under-funded public services alongside simply spectacular opulence for the privileged few (3).

 

Of course, one does not have to cross “seas” to appreciate the distinctions indicated here. A trip across the Rio Grande to the proximate “Third World” nation Mexico will yield many examples consistent with Obama’s praise of the United States’ grand “prosperity.”  But a trip to Canada is counter-intuitive for Obama’s narrative, revealing considerably lower poverty rates and broader economic security partly reflecting the fact that Canada possesses a single-payer health insurance system that entitles the janitor as well as the company executive to quality health coverage. 

 

Tell it to the People in Englewood

 

It would be interesting to hear how Obama’s paean to “our” glorious “system of social organization” (so-called “free market” capitalism) would go over in a storefront church or community center in the South Side Chicago neighborhood of Englewood.  Part of Obama’s former Illinois  Senate district, Englewood is one of 15 Chicago community eras where more than a quarter of the children are growing up at less than half of the federal government’s notoriously inadequate poverty level(4). But, of course, Obama would be unlikely to glorify the profit system in one of those neighborhoods, where people live at the bottom of the wonderful American System’s steep and intersecting hierarchies of race and class. He says one thing to poor and/or black people and another thing to rich white folks, knowing full well that the latter are immensely more powerful than the former. 

 

“DANGER IN EQUALITY”

 

Talking to blacks in Ebenezer Church, Obama seemed to get worked up against economic disparity. But in The Audacity of Hope, targeting a more mainstream professional and white audience, he actually praised the Great White Fathers of the U.S. for understanding that “there are seeds of anarchy in the idea of individual freedom, an intoxicating danger in the idea of equality. For if everybody is truly free, without the constraints of birth or rank and an inherited social order,” Obama asked, “how can we ever hope to form a society that coheres?”

 

Yikes.

 

It’s no wonder that Obama has been praised as a “Hamiltonian” by the likes of the centrist Republican New York Times columnist David Brooks (4A).

 

 

“NO ONE ASKED?”

 

Speaking of rich white people, in the late summer of 2007, Obama made a revealing statement at the end of a speech that purported to lecture Wall Street’s leaders on their supposed “Common Stake in America’s Prosperity.” Addressing NASDAQ, he spoke to the lords of investment capital in seemingly childish (actually quite cynical) terms that sounded like something out of a Charles Dickens fairy tale. “I believe all of you are as open and willing to listen as anyone else in America,” Obama claimed to think. “I believe you care about this country and the future we are leaving to the next generation. I believe your work to be a part of building a stronger, more vibrant, and more just America. I think,” Obama concluded his fable, “the problem is that no one has asked you to play a part in the project of American renewal”(5). 

 

Again, wow.

 

These were strange beliefs to (claim to) hold in light of the actual historical pattern of business behavior that naturally results from the purpose and structure of the system of private profit that Dr. King denounced as contrary to human needs.  An endless army of nonprofit charities and social service-providers, citizens, environmental and community activists, trade union negotiators, and policymakers has spent decade after decade asking and (often enough) begging the “American” corporate and financial over-class to contribute to the domestic social good.  The positive results are generally marginal and fleeting as the “business community” works with structurally super-empowered effectiveness to distribute wealth and power ever more upward and to serve the needs of private investors above any considerations of social and environmental health at home or abroad. Holding no special allegiance to the American people in an age of corporate globalization, the nation’s economic elite is more than willing to abandon the domestic U.S. society and its workers and communities to serve the ultimate business purpose - enhancing its bottom line (6).

 

“Please sir, more” (Oliver Twist).

 

Dr. King had a very different perspective. Consistent with the teachings of Marx – of whom King was something of an admirer during his years at the Crozier Theological Seminary in the early 1950s [6A] – and contrary to sentimental bourgeois moralists like Charles Dickens (6B),  King argued that "the roots of [economic injustice] are in the [capitalist] system rather in men or faulty operations" (6C).

 

 

“THE AMERICAN MOMENT MUST BE SEIZED ANEW”

 

So much for “challenging our economic structures.” As I have shown on earlier occasions, thing don’t get much better with Obama on race (7) or even on his supposed great ace in the political hole, the Iraq “war”(8).  On these and other matters, he is a truly pale reflection of Dr. King and no more progressive than any of his Democratic presidential rivals.  John Edwards has run to his left on both domestic policy at least(9) and even on race. Obama’s record on the Iraq invasion in the U.S. Senate has actually been no better than Hillary’s (Bill Clinton is right about that) and he admitted (to the New York Times in late July of 2004, one day before his famous Democratic Convention Keynote Address) that he might have joined Edwards and Senator Clinton in voting to authorize Bush’s criminal occupation if he’d been in the Congress and enjoyed their “intelligence” access in the fall of 2002! 

 

Anyone who doubts that Obama is a brazen Man of Empire should examine the numerous shamelessly globalist and U.S.-world-supremacist statements contained in The Audacity of Hope or in Obama’s various foreign policy speeches and writings to date.  Reflecting his openly “American exceptionalist” belief (stated to the Chicago Council of Global Affairs last April 23rd) that “America is the last, best hope on earth”(10), Obama offered up this lovely testament to bipartisan imperial, militarist, and unilateral  arrogance in the pages of the leading establishment foreign policy journal Foreign Affairs last summer: 

 

“The American moment is not over, but it must be seized anew… A strong military is, more than anything, necessary to sustain peace...we must become better prepared to put boots on the ground in order to take on foes on a global scale...I will not hesitate to use force unilaterally, if necessary, to protect the American people or our vital interests...We must also consider using military force in circumstances beyond self-defense, in order to provide for the common security that underpins global stability – to support friends, participate in stability and reconstruction operations, or confront mass atrocities” (11).

 

Obama doesn’t talk like that to black churches in Atlanta and Selma and with good reason: black Americans have long been far ahead of their white counterparts in rejecting the hypocritical homilies that are regularly offered up by the bipartisan governing class in support of the racist, regressive, and expensive American Empire project.

 

Even in his Ebenezer speech, Obama couldn’t bring himself to mention Iraqi victims of the “war that should never have been authorized and never been waged” and which he ran on having “opposed from the beginning.”  As usual, and consistent with his preposterous notion that the occupation of Iraq was launched with the “best of [democratic] intentions” (the export of “freedom”), he can only shed tears for worthy American victims in Iraq.  He has nothing to say for the many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have died thanks to the United States’ brazenly imperialist and colonial invasion.  They are officially unworthy victims, like the hundreds of Lebanese who died in a vicious Israeli assault that Obama grotesquely ran to defend in the summer of 2006 (12).

 

 

OPPOSING AN IMPERIAL MISTAKE VERSUS OPPOSING AN IMPERIALIST CRIME

 

This and much else in Obama’s record stands in sharp contrast to the legacy of Dr. King. How could he credibly argue against violence inside the U.S., King asked, while remaining silent about the mass murder being perpetrated against  Southeast Asia by the U.S. government – identified by King (on April 4, 1967, exactly one year to the day before his assassination or execution) as “the leading purveyor of violence in the world?” How could he credibly call for an end to poverty in the U.S. while not opposing the enormous squandering of government and social resources on American hyper-militarism – a waste that that was strangling the “War on Poverty” in its cradle? .  How could he call for “freedom” at home when the United States was exhibiting its desire to export what King termed “so-called freedom” abroad by bombing villages and napalming children in Vietnam?

 

There are different reasons to oppose a war. Dr. King came out against the U.S. assault on Vietnam because it was (in his view) a criminal wrong that assaulted millions abroad as well as harming Americans and the United States. He clearly and accurately saw the war as criminal, imperial, and relatively one-sided violence. By sharp contrast, Obama opposes (sort of) the Iraq incursion because it is (in his view) a tactical mistake – a “strategic” and “dumb” “blunder- that works against a broader U.S. imperial agenda and global military complex he openly (for those with the time, energy, and skill to look) supports. He clings to the fairy tale notion that “Operation Iraqi Freedom” (OIF) was launched with virtuous purposes in mind (a childish notion that has also been supported by Clinton and Edwards) and cannot acknowledge (neither can other presidential candidates other than Kucinich and Gravel as far as I can tell) the greater damage has done to Iraq than to the U.S. (13). 

 

“BEYOND OUR [RACE] DIVISIONS”: TO THE RIGHT OF EDWARDS

 

A word about race in the aftermath of the latest Democratic presidential debate. Even at Ebenezer the Sunday before the King holiday, Obama displayed his well-known and politically calculated reluctance to acknowledge racism’s powerful role in American life. The most he could manage to say on this issue was that “for most of the country’s history, we in the African-American community have been at the receiving end of man’s inhumanity to man.  And all of us understand intimately the insidious role that race still sometimes plays – on the job, in the schools, in our health care system, and in our criminal justice system.” 

 

The key words here were “race” and “sometimes.” The problem faced by black Americans is more accurately described as the living and powerful legacy and practice of racism and it is experienced by them on a daily, regular, and ubiquitous basis, not just occasionally.

 

During the Democratic presidential debate that took place in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina last Monday night (on King’s birthday), it was left to Edwards alone to speak with real respect for King’s crusade against racialized economic inequality. Only Edwards acknowledged the depth of racial disparity and the continuing role of cumulative and ongoing historical racism in generating that disparity.

 

“If you are an African-American in this country today,” Edwards observed, “you are likely to have a net worth of about 10 percent of what white families have.  This is not accident.  I mean, we can go put our heads against the wall and pretend that the past never happened, pretend that we didn’t live through decades of slavery, followed by decades of segregation, followed by decades of discrimination, which is still going on today (APPLAUSE)…that history and that legacy have consequences.”

 

“If you’re black,” Edwards said, “you’re much more likely to be poor, you’re much less likely to have health care coverage.  That community is hurt worse by poverty than any community in American.  And it’s our responsibility…to take on this moral challenge, to try as best we can to walk in the shadow of Dr. King” (14).

 

By contrast, Obama admonished the media for having “focused a lot on race as we moved down to South Carolina.” While “race is a factor in our society,” Obama said, he was “convinced that white, black, Latino, Asian, people want to move beyond our divisions, and they want to join together… in order to create a movement for change in the county.”  A movement for change based on denial of the depth and degree of racial disparity and of the causes of that disparity.

 

It was all very consistent with Obama’s argument in The Audacity of Hope that "what ails working- and middle-class blacks is not fundamentally different from what ails their white counterparts." Black hopes that Obama would reawaken the tragically unfinished revolutions of Reconstruction and Civil Rights were further dashed by his claim that most black Americans had been "pulled into the economic mainstream" and his argument (during a speech marking the anniversary of the Selma, Alabama Voting Rights march last spring) that 1950s and 1960s civil rights activists had brought black America "90 percent of the way" to racial equality. It's up to Obama and his fellow POST-Civil Rights leaders, he said, to get past "that 10 percent in order to cross over to the other side."

 

Equally calming to the white majority was Obama’s argument in Audacity that “white guilt has largely exhausted itself in America" as "even the most fair-minded of whites...tend to push back against suggestions of racial victimization and race-based claims based on the history of racial discrimination in this country."

 

Here’s a useful summary of some key candidate differences on race:

 

Obama (black): “blacks are 9/10ths of the way to racial equality and have moved into the American mainstream. Racism is mostly a thing of the past and we can close the small gap left by moving forward beyond racial divisions. Even if race still matters sometimes – look, it’s a factor in our society (I’ll admit that much) – the cold fact is that whites don’t want to hear about ‘racial victimization’ and the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. They just don’t care and I have to honor that. I want to be president and must rely on white votes to attain that.  That means I have to downplay race, please right wingers like George Will and William Bennett by talking about how we’ve so wonderfully moved beyond it.  I can get enough black votes simply be being black and by getting in a few superficial fights with Hillary (about what she said about Dr. King and stuff like that). And look, what could be better for moving beyond race than me getting into the White House.” 

 

Edwards (white): “There is an astonishing 10 to 1 white-black wealth gap in the United States, where blacks suffer to a very disproportionate extent from poverty. This harsh disparity reflects both the unresolved legacy of centuries of past racism and racial discrimination that continues today. Whites might not want to hear about this, just like many middle- and upper-class people don’t want to hear me continuing to talk about and against poverty and economic inequality.  But that’s too bad – the issues matter too much not to be discussed and I don’t want to advance my political career by denying harsh social realities. Dr. King’s struggle, which ended on a strong note of economic justice and anti-poverty, is tragically unfinished and honoring his legacy is about something more than superficial candidate battles being fought out like a national soap opera between well-financed corporate Democrats.”

 

(The candidates comparisons would get much worse for Obama if were to include [as I did in my last ZNet article] the contrasts with the reparations advocates and presidential hopefuls Dennis Kucinich and Cynthia McKinney).

 

Dr. King would have appreciated Edwards’ comments. He would cringe at (a) Obama’s continuing willingness to exploit and encourage white racism-denial by downplaying the continuing relevance of historical racial oppression and (b) Obama’s cynical determination that he can rely so heavily on the simple fact of his technical blackness to win black votes even while he praises the legacy of transparently racist politicians like Ronald Reagan.

 

“DEEPLY CONSERVATIVE”

 

Beneath peaceful and populist-sounding claims to the contrary, Obama is largely on the dark side of power when it comes to each of what King called "the triple evils that are interrelated:" racism, economic exploitation/inequality (capitalism), and militarism. It's not for nothing that Obama was tellingly portrayed last May as "deeply conservative" in a supposedly flattering New Yorker write-up titled "The Conciliator" (15). It’s an accurate description, but you probably wouldn’t know it from a speech he gives to black voters he’s courting in a South Carolina church... or to deluded, star-struck progressives in predominantly white Super Tuesday college towns.  Such is the harsh, cold, and cynical underlying reality of the Obama phenomenon, deeply reflective of the corporate, imperial and “winner-take-all” political institutions and culture its standard bearer falsely claims to have risen above.

 

*Most of this essay was written on King day. The section on race was added the day after, once the author had reviewed transcripts of the most recent Democratic presidential debate.

 

** Postscript: today (I am adding this note on Sunday, January 26^th) liberal New York Times columnist Frank Rich wrote that, “unlike Mrs. Clinton, [Obama] would unambiguously represent change in a race with any Republican.”  While Hillary Clinton is a obviously an especially conservative and “insider” type of corporate Democrat, Rich’s judgment on Obama is misleading. The “change” embodied by an Obama candidacy will be highly “ambiguous” – containing numerous conservative, corporate, imperial, nationalistic, and broadly power-conciliatory tendencies – in a race against any Republican...and against any Green Party candidate.

 

 

Veteran Left historian Paul Street (paulstreet99@yahoo.com) is a writer, speaker and activist based in Iowa City, IA and Chicago, IL.  He is the author of Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm); Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007);and  Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in Post-Civil Rights America (New York: Routledge, 2005

 

 

NOTES

 

1.  If that’s what we realty want to call people dedicated to messianic hyper-militarism, to eliminating every decent U.S. social program of the 20th century,  and to radically distributing wealth and power yet further upward in what is already the industrialized world’s most unequal and wealth-top-heavy society by far.

 

1A Matt Stoller, ""Obama's Admiration of Reagan" Open Left, January 16, 2008, read at http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=3263.

 

2 Barack Obama, “the Great Need of the Hour,” Atlanta, GA, January 20, 2008, read at http://www.barackobama.com/2008/01/20/remarks_of_senator_barack_obam_40.php

 

2A. Martin Luther King Jr, “A Testament of Hope” (1968), reproduced in Martin Luther King Jr.  A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writing and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr. (San Francisco, CA: HarperCollins, 1991), edited by James N. Washington, quotation from p. 315..

 

2B. David Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 1986), p. 568.

 

3 For useful empirical comparisons, see Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein and Heather Boushey, The State of Working America 2002-2003 (Ithaca, NY:  Economic Policy Institute and Cornell University Press, 2003), chapter seven, titled “International Comparisons,” pp.395-432

 

4 Paul Street, Still Separate, Unequal: Race, Place, Policy and the State of Black Chicago (Chicago, IL: Chicago Urban League, 2005), p.54, Table 29.

 

4A. David Brooks, “Run, Barack, Run,” New York Times (October 19, 2006), read at http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C02E6DB1F30F93AA25753C1A9609C8B63

 

5 Obama, “Our Common Stake in America’s Prosperity,” New York, September 17, 2007, read at http://www.barackobama.com/2007/09/17/remarks_of_senator_barack_obam_24.php

 

6 For some brilliant and well-informed reflections, see Jeff Faux, The Global Class War: How America’s Bipartisan elite Lost Our Future and What it Will Take to Get it Back (New York: John Wiley, 2006).

 

6A Garrow, Bearing the Cross, p. 43.

 

6B George Orwell, “Charles Dickens” [1939], pp. 413-460 in Orwell, An Age Like This: 1920-1940 (New York, NY: Harcourt Brace, 1968), edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus.

 

6C King, Trumpet of Conscience [1967], quoted in King, A Testament, 642.

 

7 “Barack Obama’s White Appeal: and the Perverse Racial Politics of the Post-Civil Rights Era,” Black Agenda Report (June 20, 2007), read at http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=254&Itemid=34; “Clinton-Obama and the ‘Over’ Struggle for  Black Equality,” ZNet )January 20, 2008), read at http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/16248.

 

8 “What Would Obama Have Done? Voted for the War and Lied About It – Just Like Hillary,” ZNet Magazine (October 13, 2007), read at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=14030;“Establishment Politics in ‘Rebel’s Clothing’: Corporate Power, Populist Pandering, and the Ironies of Identity in the Democratic Presidential Race,” ZNet Magazine (November 18, 2007), read at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=90&ItemID=14316;

“Running Dog Obama,” SleptOn Magazine (July 30, 2007), read at http://www.slepton.com/slepton/viewcontent.pl?id=582.

 

9 On Edwards-Obama differences, see Paul Street, “‘Angry John’ v. KumbayObama.” ZNet (December 20, 2007), read at http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/15969

 

10 Barack Obama, Remarks to Chicago Council on Global Affairs, April 23, 2007, available online at http://www.thechicagocouncil.org/dynamic_page.php?id=64

 

11 Barack Obama, “Renewing American Leadership,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2007.  As Glen Ford noted late last year, What we have in Barack Obama is an alternative War Party, planning an alternative War. He has told us so, and we should believe him. He is no peace candidate, and goes out of his way to prove it.” Glen Ford, “Barack Obama the War Monger,” Black Agenda Report (August 7, 2007), read at http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=305&Itemid=34

 

12 Stephen Zunes, “Barack Obama on the Middle East,” Foreign Policy in Focus (January 10 2008), read at http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/4886

 

13 For (I hope) useful King-Obama comparisons, see Paul Street, “The Pale Reflection: Barack Obama, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Meaning of the Black Revolution,” ZNet Magazine (March 16, 2007), read at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=12336

 and “Obama’s Audacious Deference to Power: A Critical Review of Barack Obama, the Audacity of Hope,” ZNet Magazine (January 24, 2007), read at http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=11936

 

14 Transcript of Democratic Presidential Candidates’ Debate, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, January 21, 2008, read at www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/01/21/debate.transcript/index.html

 

15. Lisa MacFarquar, "The Conciliator: Where is Barack Obama Coming From?" The New Yorker, May 7, 2007).