On 9/19/2010 3:29 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
>> They did not expect the administration to capitulate to the Republicans and the bankers, and they were not - from a bourgeois standpoint, and despite the verities of many on the left - ridiculously utopian to expect it to be otherwise.
> Sure they were. C'mon, Marv, Obama himself showed no tendencies to buck the system that had made him, and he made that very clear by how he campaigned and the people he surrounded himself with. That, plus the absence of any serious popular movement (except the fan club that constituted his former base), made the outcome not at all a surprise.
I think this can be taken too far. The liberal Obamaniacs in 2007 may have been delusional to see a progressive hero in BHO. I sure thought so at the time. But I think you're forgetting the atmosphere of, say, Nov. 2008-March 2009. There was a real sense that a big hole had been torn in normality and that no one could predict what would come next. In that context it was not necessarily overdetermined that Obama would continue to be Obama - that he wouldn't choose to test the waters a little, out of a politician's sense of feeling out opportunities, to see if it might be profitable for him to step a bit outside the Obama persona.
SA