Lou asked if I'd post my opening comments. They're below. I also riffed a bit off my Obama piece from March:
<http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Obama.html>.
Time was short, so I had to condense everything, especially the March piece.
I was cast as the wet blanket. I served the role, but it was no fun. It's no fun to rain on parades, even if they're badly in need of a dousing. Most of other panelists remained critical of Obama, but still thought there was some way in which he was a catalyst to building a movement, and that the excitement surrounding his campaign should not be disparaged. Well no, but millions of people are experiencing some sort of misplaced enthusiasm, and they're almost certain to be disappointed. And how the excitation of voters can translate into a movement, when its object could well become chief executive of the bourgeoisie, is never revealed. But hell, I'd love to get excited about a movement - could we have one?
Doug
OBAMA AND THE LEFT Doug Henwood delivered at the Brecht Forum, New York, June 19, 2008
I must say, I thought I'd have to do some work to assemble an updated indictment of Barack Obama (the only presidential candidate in this long campaign whose name my 2-year-old seems interested in saying, whatever that means). But the candidate has done most of my work for me in the past couple of weeks. There's something about the shift from primary to general that brings out the worst in a Democrat.
First, there was the appointment of Jason Furman as a top economic advisor. Furman, as I assume almost everyone knows by now, is famous for having done some apologetics for Wal-Mart. He actually argued that raising Wal-Mart's wage levels would force Wal-Mart to raise prices, and thereby hurting the working class as a whole more than helping it. "Hurting those it aims to help" is almost pathognomonic, as they say in medical science to describe a symptom that is almost a definitive diagnosis of a disease, of orthodox center-right thinking, much like using the phrase "law of unintended consequences." That's not to say Furman's a right-winger. It is to say, though, that he's sort of a DLC-style Democrat, someone out of the Clinton/Rubin/ Summers mold. I'm not so sectarian that I think that that mold isn't a little less moldy than the Bush/Paulson/Feldstein mold, but it's nothing to get passionate about.
And remember that Furman joins Austan Goolsbee, the DLC's top economist, on the Obama economic team. Goolsbee, opponent of a mortgage foreclosure moratorium and eulogist of Milton Friedman.
Then Obama appointed a gang of foreign policy advisors. Among that collection of ghouls: Madeleine Albright, perhaps most famous for saying that the half a million Iraqi children killed by the Clinton administration's sanctions was a price worth paying—not, of course, that she was paying it; Lee Hamilton and David Boren, two Congresspeople noted for their protective attitude towards the CIA; Tony Lake, Clinton's national security advisor; William Perry, who resume includes, along with a stint as Defense Secretary under Clinton, jobs with Boeing, Martin-Marietta, and the Carlyle Group; and Susan Rice, another Clinton leftover, and a cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq.
I can't say I'm surprised by this, since I never doubted that Obama would be anything but a loyal servant of empire, but it should give pause to anyone who thought he'd represent some sort of fresh start. If the AIPAC speech didn't convince you, this probably won't either.
Oh, and there's his statement to Joe Klein, reported in Time magazine, that he'd love to have some Republicans in his cabinet, especially in national security positions. He likes people who push him out of his comfort zone, he says. But only when they're pushing him to the right, it seems.
And I haven't yet mentioned his meeting last week with Franklin Graham, son of Billy, who famously denounced Islam as a wicked religion. No wonder his TV people insisted that no women with headscarves would be allowed to sit behind the candidate—it'd convey the wrong image, you know. It's sorta like a few months ago, when one of his media people issued a call for "more white people" on the set.
Today, he announced that he was foregoing public financing because he's been able to raise so much money on his own. Sorry, that's not the reason. The stated reason is that his supporters have allowed him to declare independence from a broken system. Isn't that rather conservative, that appeal to invididual initiative as opposed to public funding? Yes, he's been able to raise gobs of money from small contributions over the web—but he's also been raising gobs of money from Wall Street. I see no reason why that won't continue.
I'm guessing that in the coming weeks and months, Obama's rightward flirtations will inspire some extravagantly generous interpretations from his fans on the left—interpretations so baroque that Talmudic scholars will turn green with envy.