On Jul 28, 2011, at 5:27 PM, Julio Huato wrote:
> Doug wrote:
>
>> Coates and Gary Younge gave me a hard time for not understanding
>> how Obama had mobilized the youth of color. I argued that that
>> didn't amount to a hill of beans - the "mobilization" was little more than a
>> fan club, and Obama was just another DLC type, not much different in substance
>> from Hillary Clinton. But to them, I was just a cranky old white intellectual
>> elitist and such. I wish we could reconvene so I could say "I told you so."
>
> It seems to me that *they told you so*.
>
> It seems to me that they told you -- or suggested or implied to you --
> that at the time the left had to bet, not on pseudo-radicals waging
> the finger and sitting on the margins of the electoral process, but
> precisely on those who got involved and vested in support of Obama
> (including the author of this op-ed in the NY Times), those masses of
> young people, some doing very creative forms of political work.
Julio, that's ridiculous. There was no mobilization. It was empty from the first. A bunch of people, including some who should have known better (like Younge), were drunk on Obamamania in the summer of 2008. The "psuedo-radical" bit is insulting, on top of the absurdity of this - it was obvious to me at that time that this would all end badly, and I was right. How is this "pseudo-radical"? The p-r position was that the Obama campaign meant something good. It was a snare, a delusion, a waste. The left is on the ropes and the right is setting the agenda.
Doug