andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> You know anyone more liberal in public life today?
> Actually he's been quite good here in Illinois. Carrol
> can bitch that he's not a commie, but there are no
> commies in the Illinois statehouse.
I don't think we have any office holder in the u.s. today with the stature of Wayne Morse, whom I respected enormoously, though he definitely was not a Commie.
I have one concrete and one more abstract objection to Obama:
1. He supports Kerry's projected mass slaughter in Iraq. Wayne Morse was _very_ good on Vietnam. And when he was still a Republican, he conducted a one-man filibuster against a proposal by the Eisenhower administration which he believed was "ecologically"* unsound. (*That was not the term he used. Jessie and I had gone to a movie in downtown D.C., and as we were leaving we saw the flag was up over the Capitol so we dropped in to see what was happening, and there was Wayne Morse, talking away at midnight.) He couldn't keep it up, of course, but that is the kind of person I might support, at least passively, if he/she were in the Senate today. A single sort-of liberal or 10 of them won't make any difference in how things work out in D.C. A really loud voice in the Senate saying NO to the pricks is always useful, and general estimation of the DP would not prevent honoring and supporting such a voice. That Obama is not. I suspect he's only in the Senate, incidentally, because he has Daley's approval.
2. The abstract objection is that I am persuaded that u.s. politics will continue to swing to the right (whether a Dem or a Rep is in the whitehouse) unless stopped by a really large and militant mass movement. I also think there's good historical and empirical evidence that the DP functions in u.s. politics to block, abort, absorb, & generally frustrate such movements (even at the cost of losing elections). And silver-tongued sort-of liberals in the party, while they make no substantive or practical difference in u.s. policy, are of major importance in maintaining the image of the D.P., and image without which it could not do its dirty work.
Those judgments might be correct or incorrect, but they don't constitute an objection to Obama not being a commie.
I campaigned for Jackson in 1988, knowing not only that he was not a Commie but that he was almost certainly an opportunistic careerist. The point was that the Jackson campaign contributed to building networks among activists and opening up public debate -- Obama (as the quotations Yoshie give illustrate) only contributes to keeping public debate within proper limits.
Carrol