analysis
EDITOR’S NOTE: This story was written for the
Sacramento News & Review and the Association of
Alternative Newsweeklies and is reprinted by permission.
T
he possibility of Obama lies in the
movement more than the man.
Barack Obama, it is true, is a
transformational leader. But he needs a
transformational movement to become a
transformational president.
My wife and I have an adopted 8-year
old “biracial” boy whose roots are African-
American. My adult son is married to an
African-American woman with roots in
Jamaica and Costa Rica. Our family is part of
the globalized generation Obama represents.
What is at stake for our kids’ future is real,
palpable, not only political. Their future will
very much be shaped by the outcome of this
election. Millions of people in this country
— and around the world — feel similarly
affected.
Myths are all-important, as Obama writes
in his Dreams From My Father. Fifty years
ago, the mythic Obama existed only as an
aspiration, an ideal, in a country where
interracial love was taboo and interracial
marriage was largely banned.
The early civil-rights movement, the jazz
musicians and the Beat poets dreamed up
this mythic Obama before the literal Obama
could materialize. His African father and
white countercultural mother dared to dream
and love him into existence, incarnate him, at
the creative moment of the historic march on
Washington. Only the overthrow of Jim Crow
segregation then opened space for the dream
to rise politically.
If this sounds unscientifi c or, as some
would say, cultish, think about it. None of
the supposedly expert people in the political,
media or intellectual establishments saw this
day coming. I didn’t expect it myself; the
news was carried to me by a new generation,
including my own grown-up children. It was
dreamed up and built “beyond the radar” or
“outside the box” by experienced dreamers
with long histories in community organizing,
social movements and not a few lost causes.
In one of his best oratorical moments,
Obama summons the spirit of social
movements that were built from the bottom up,
from the Revolutionary War to the abolitionist
crusade to the women’s suffrage cause to the
eight-hour day and the rights of labor, ending
with the time of his birth when the walls came
down in Selma and Montgomery, Ala., and
Delano, Calif. As he repeats this mantra of
movements thousands of times to millions
of Americans, a new cultural understanding
becomes possible. This is the foundation of
a new American story that is badly needed,
one that attributes whatever is great about
this country to the ghosts of those who
came before, in social movements from the
margins.
J
ohn McCain represents a different
American story. I am constantly aware
that he bombed Vietnam at least 25
times before being shot down in a war that
never should have been fought, in a defeat that
still cannot say its name. He wants to continue
the unwinnable Iraq War, costing $10 billion
per month, until every suspect Iraqi is dead,
wounded or detained even though our military
tactics keep causing more young Iraqis to hate
us than ever before. As if fi ghting the war
on terrorism until the end of terrorism isn’t
Transformational president or another disappointment?
That’s up to us. BY TOM HAYDEN
enough for him, McCain wants to reignite
the Cold War until the Russians are forever
broken and humiliated. The vanguard for the
anti-Russian offensive has been Georgia, a
stronghold of the neoconservative lobby and,
incidentally, a cash cow for McCain’s own
foreign-policy adviser Randy Scheunemann,
who made hundreds of thousands of dollars
working as a lobbyist for the country before
joining McCain’s campaign team.
This inability to limit the adventurist
appetite for war is the most dangerous
element of the McCain and Republican
worldview. It is paralleled, of course, by their
inability to limit the corporate appetite for an
unregulated market economy. In combination,
the brew is an economy directed to the needs
of the country-club rich, the oil companies
and military contractors. A form of crony
capitalism slouches forward in place of either
competitive markets or state regulation.
My prediction: If he continues on course,
Obama will win the popular vote by a few
percentage points in November but is at serious
risk in the Electoral College. The institution
rooted in the original slavery compromise
may be a barrier too great to overcome.
Unlike the nadir of 2000, when Al Gore and
the institutional Democrats seemed unable to
mount a resistance, another Electoral College
loss should trigger an unrelenting and forceful
democracy movement against the Electoral
College and other institutional chains on the
right to know, vote and participate.
There are many outside the Obama
movement who assert that the candidate is
“not progressive enough,” that Obama will
be co-opted as a new face for American
interventionism, that in any event real change
cannot be achieved from the top down.
These criticisms are correct. But in the
end, they miss the larger point.
Most of us want President Obama to
withdraw troops from Iraq more rapidly than
in 16 months. But it is important that Obama’s
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position is shared by Iraq’s prime minister
and the vast majority of both our people. The
Iraqi regime, pressured by its own people,
has rejected the White House and McCain’s
refusal to adopt a timetable.
The real problem with Obama’s position on
Iraq is his adherence to the outmoded Baker-
Hamilton proposal to leave thousands of
American troops behind for training, advising
and ill-defi ned “counterterrorism” operations.
Obama should be pressured to reconsider this
recipe for a low-visibility counterinsurgency
quagmire.
On Iran, Obama has usefully emphasized
diplomacy as the only path to manage the
bilateral crisis and assure the possibility of
orderly withdrawal from Iraq. He should be
pressed to resist any escalation.
On Afghanistan, Obama has proposed
transferring 10,000 American combat troops
from Iraq, which means out of the frying pan
and into the fi re. Pakistan could be Obama’s
Bay of Pigs, a debacle. On Israel-Palestine, he
will pursue diplomacy more aggressively, but
little more. Altogether, the counterinsurgencies
in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan are likely
to become a spreading global quagmire and
a human rights nightmare, nullifying the
funding prospects for health-care reform or
other domestic initiatives.
In Latin America, Obama has been out
of step and out of touch with the winds of
democratic change sweeping Latin America.
His commitment to fulfi lling the United
Nations’ anti-poverty goals, or to eradicating
sweatshops through a global living wage,
is underwhelming and — given his anti-
terrorism wars — will be underfi nanced.
And so on. The man will disappoint as
well as inspire.
O
nce again, then, why support him by
knocking on doors, sending money,
monitoring polling places, getting our
hopes up? There are three reasons that stand
out in my mind. First, American progressives,
radicals and populists need to be part of the vast
Obama coalition, not perceived as negative
do-nothings in the minds of the young people
and African Americans at the center of the
organized campaign. It is not a “lesser evil” for
anyone of my generation’s background to send
an African-American Democrat to the White
House. Pressure from supporters of Obama
is more effective than pressure from critics
who don’t care much if he wins and won’t
lift a fi nger to help him. Second, his court
appointments will keep us from a right-wing
lock on social, economic and civil liberties
issues during our lifetime. Third, we all can
chew gum and walk at the same time; that is,
it should be no problem to vote for Obama and
picket his White House when justifi ed.
Obama himself says he has solid
progressive roots but that he intends to
campaign and govern from the center. (He
has said he is neither a “Scoop” Jackson
Democrat nor a Tom Hayden Democrat.) That
is a challenge to rise up, organize and reshape
the center and build a climate of public
opinion so intense that it becomes necessary
to redeploy from military quagmires, take on
the unregulated corporations and uncontrolled
global warming and devote resources to
domestic priorities like health care, the green
economy and inner-city jobs for youth.
What is missing in the current equation is
not a capable and enlightened centrist but a
progressive social movement on a scale like
those of the past.
The creative tension between large social
movements and enlightened Machiavellian
leaders is the historical model that has
produced the most important reforms in the
course of American history.
Mainstream political leaders will not move
to the left of their own base. There are no
shortcuts to radical change without a powerful
and effective constituency organized from the
bottom up. The next chapter in Obama’s new
American story remains to be written, perhaps
by the most visionary of his own supporters.
His own movement will have to pull
him towards full withdrawal from Iraq, or
the regulation of the great fi nancial power
centers, instead of waiting for him to lead.
Already among his elite caste of fundraisers,
there is more interest in his position on the
capital-gains tax than holding Halliburton
accountable. And his “cast of 300” national
security advisers, according to The New York
Times, “fall well within centrist Democratic
foreign policy thinking.”
Progressives need to unite for Barack
Obama but also unite — organically at least,
not in a top-down way — on issues like peace,
the environment, the economy, media reform,
campaign fi nance and equality like never
before. The growing confl ict today is between
democracy and empire, and the battlefronts
are many and often confusing. Even the
Bush years have failed to unite American
progressives as effectively as occurred
during Vietnam. There is no reason to expect
a President McCain to unify anything more
than our manic depression.
But there is the improbable hope that the
movement set ablaze by the Obama campaign
will be enough to elect Obama and a more
progressive Congress in November, creating
an explosion of rising expectations for social
movements — here and around the world —
that President Obama will be compelled to
meet in 2009.
That is a moment to live and fi ght for . ew
EUGENE WEEKLY AUGUST 21, 2008 11