The Content of Obama's Character Doesn't Measure up to King

From Timshel this past weekend we get:

Bobby Jindal may campaign for the Republican nominee, but when he shows up to vote in November he'll be pulling the lever (or "pressing the button" in today's voting procedure) for Barack Obama. (Nothing available online at the moment, but his comments about Barack go beyond "effusive praise") He seems to believe in him as a person.

Yeah maybe. Or maybe it just takes one phony to know another. Jindal also heaped praise on every single candidate running in either party... feeding speculation that he is angling for a spot on somebody's (likely McCain's) ticket. He's got exactly zero chance of landing that spot, btw, but that's another discussion for another time.

Ricky also comes out and states something I think many of us fear in the back of our minds regarding an Obama candidacy

If Barack Obama gets nominated, I honestly do believe that we will see a legitimate attempt on his life. I don't think that there's some governmental conspiracy behind this, it's what I think about the ability of the American populace to be able to deal with a truly inspirational "black" candidate. We're exactly 40 years from 1968, and I don't think that's insignificant.

Numerology aside, I guess we could become witness to such ugliness. These are tenuous and disturbed times we're living through, after all. But I think people tend to discount the fact that the surveillance, harassment, and possibly assassination of MLK was every bit An Act of State as it was an act of hate. And there are reasons for that. King represented a very real and serious threat to the American economic and imperial establishment that Obama simply does not.

On April 4, 1967, Dr. King delivered one of the most important speeches in American history. In it, he not only his declared opposition to the war in Vietnam, but he also challenged Americans to change their assumptions toward their nation's increasingly imperial role in the world that had led it to become, in King's words, "the greatest purveyor of violence on Earth." The following excerpt is a bit long for a blog post but you read it anyway. In fact read the entire speech, if you are unfamiliar with it. It's a fine example of the kind of "inspiring" rhetoric the Obama cultists like to pretend their candidate is capable of.

... The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality we will find ourselves organizing clergy- and laymen-concerned committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy. Such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which now has justified the presence of U.S. military "advisors" in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counter-revolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Colombia and why American napalm and green beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru. It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."

Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken -- the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investment.

I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life's roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

On what side of this struggle for the American soul does Barack Obama fall? In Iraq, Obama has promised to begin reducing the American force there. However, an Obama Presidency will not mean an abandonment of the American imperial interest in Iraq... or anywhere else for that matter. Obama would certainly maintain some military presence in Iraq with much the same mission the current force is carrying out (security, police training, etc.). Nor will Obama will abandon the permanent American military bases in that country.

In the video below (link with transcript), Jonathan Schell discusses the Obama (and Clinton) foreign policies and the ways in which they represent a continuity within rather than a "change" from our long history of murderous global domination. It's maybe a bit of a long video for a long-ish blog post, but watch it anyway.



This is not anything near a commitment to Dr. King's long overdue "revolution of values" that would "change" America's ambition to dominate the world through threat or use of military might.

Consensus Elite Democrats will argue that Obama's preferance for bullying with words before bombs (although bombs are never "off the table") constitutes a DIFFERENCE from the bloodier Bush/Cheney approach. And it does. Obama will be slightly more reluctant to explode non-belligerent sovereign peoples in his pursuit of a corporate-colonial agenda. But Obama cultists believe that this DIFFERENCE constitutes an INSPIRATIONAL CHANGE which we are supposed to run out the door and get all grass rootsy about. Clearly such people are either delusional, excitable, or lying.

The disconnect between the enthusiasm of Obama's cultists and the degree to which he deserves this adoration goes beyond a question of how high he will count before launching missiles. Here is Dr. King addressing the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in August of 1967.

I want to say to you as I move to my conclusion, as we talk about Where do we go from here, that we honestly face the fact that the movement must address itself to the question of restructuring the whole of American society. There are forty million poor people here. And one day we must ask the question, Why are there forty million poor people in America? And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth. When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I'm simply saying that more and more, we've got to begin to ask questions about the whole society. We are called upon to help the discouraged beggars in life's marketplace. But one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. It means that questions must be raised. You see, my friends, when you deal with this, you begin to ask the question, Who owns the oil? You begin to ask the question, Who owns the iron ore? You begin to ask the question, Why is it that people have to pay water bills in a world that is two-thirds water? These are questions that must be asked.

Now, don't think that you have me in a bind today. I'm not talking about communism.

What I'm saying to you this morning is that communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both. Now, when I say question the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.

During this Black History Month, many of you who either have or work with children are sure to come across one or another who asks you why anyone would want to murder this man who talked so often and so passionately about love and non-violence. The answer lies in the above words which speak to the purposes Dr. King believed his philosophy logically called him to pursue. Likewise, those of you who wonder about the seriousness of any potential threat to Barack Obama's life should he become the Democratic nominee are urged to take his lack of commitment to such purposes into account.

Obama lacks either the courage or the inclination to argue that the "edifice needs restructuring." Obama is running for President of the United States. As such he seeks to be caretaker to this edifice not its "change agent" in any meaningful sense. Tellingly, he does not talk about the ways in which racism, economic exploitation, and war are "triple evils that are interrelated." Quite the contrary, in fact, he treats each as a separate plank for discussion.

In Iraq, if one does not see the connection between war and exploitation, then it becomes possible to accept reducing the size of a troop presence without addressing the reasons those troops are there in the first place. At home, if one does not see the connection between race and exploitation then it becomes possible for one to speak superficially about race without satisfactorily addressing class or poverty.

In this article, David Sirota writes about a strange phenomenon evident in the Democratic exit polling. Despite the fact that Hillary is more easily connected to her corporate donors (particularly in the health care sector) she consistently beats Obama among lower income voters.

In most states, polls show Hillary Clinton is beating Barack Obama among voters making $50,000 a year or less—many of whom say the economy is their top concern. Yes, the New York senator who appeared on the cover of Fortune magazine as Big Business’s candidate is winning economically insecure, lower-income communities over the Illinois senator who grew up as an organizer helping those communities combat unemployment. This absurd phenomenon is a product of both message and bias.

Obama has let Clinton characterize the 1990s as a nirvana, rather than a time that sowed the seeds of our current troubles. He barely criticizes the Clinton administration for championing job-killing trade agreements. He does not question that same administration’s role in deregulating the financial industry and thereby intensifying today’s boom-bust catastrophes. And he rarely points out what McClatchy Newspapers reported this week: that Clinton spent most of her career at a law firm “where she represented big companies and served on corporate boards,” including Wal-Mart’s.

Obama hasn’t touched any of this for two reasons.

First, his campaign relies on corporate donations. Though Obama certainly is less industry-owned than Clinton, the Washington Post noted last spring that he was the top recipient of Wall Street contributions. That cash is hush money, contingent on candidates silencing their populist rhetoric.

But while this pressure to keep quiet affects all politicians, it is especially intense against black leaders.

“If Obama started talking like John Edwards and tapped into working-class, blue-collar proletarian rage, suddenly all of those white voters who are viewing him within the lens of transcendence would start seeing him differently,” says Charles Ellison of the University of Denver’s Center for African American Policy.

That’s because once Obama parroted Edwards’ attacks on greed and inequality, he would “be stigmatized as a candidate mobilizing race,” says Manning Marable, a Columbia University history professor. That is, the media would immediately portray him as another Jesse Jackson—a figure whose progressivism has been (unfairly) depicted as racial politics anathema to white swing voters.

Remember, this is always how power-challenging African-Americans are marginalized. The establishment cites a black leader’s race- and class-unifying populism as supposed proof of his or her radical, race-centric views. An extreme example of this came from the FBI, which labeled Martin Luther King Jr. “the most dangerous man in America” for talking about poverty. More typical is the attitude exemplified by Joe Klein’s 2006 Time magazine column. He called progressive Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., “an African-American of a certain age and ideology, easily stereotyped” and “one of the ancient band of left-liberals who grew up in the angry hothouse of inner-city, racial-preference politics.”

And so here we find Obama doing exactly the opposite of what King tells us is necessary to effectively "question the whole society." Instead of talking about how race and class are interrelated, Obama chooses to treat them separately. He triangulates his message so as not to scare his Wall Street benefactors with "old politics" and "class warfare". Meanwhile, his racial message is about... well just race.

Obama's stump speech is full of feel-good platitudes where the prejudices of the "past" are overcome by "change". Once there was segregation. Now I am running for President. Yes We Can. It's mildly "inspiring" stuff but also sufficiently detached from anything substantive to qualify as more or less identity politics.

Yes We Can is a clever slogan because the Obama campaign has fitted it to appeal to the overheated "change" cultists on the one hand, (who tend to be white, middle-class professionals.... young college students and older people who rather pathetically imagine themselves to be kind of like college students) and to black voters of all situations on the other hand who perceive the "We" as a call to racial solidarity... again only on the basis of race itself.

"Great," you say, "Obama is building a big coalition combining Yuppie economic conservatives with a solid block race vote." In New Orleans, we are already familiar with politicians who appeal to upper class whites based on economics and to blacks based on race. We call such politicians Ray Nagin. So far that's worked out well. Maybe someday the whole country can farm out social services like public education to bizarre privatization schemes too. Candidate Obama says he'll try.


Barack Obama represents a slightly less offensive alternative to Hillary Clinton and, if he becomes the nominee, will similarly represent a slightly better choice than John McCain (whose new video is out, I see). Given the choices, there isn't necessarily anything horribly wrong with casting a vote his way. But the a-historical cultists would have us believe that there is something inescapably right about doing so. In making their case, the cultists have invited comparisons between their candidate and some of the giants of the 20th century. Such comparisons find their man laughably inadequate.

Because Obama is too timid to speak clearly about poverty and class, because he is not committed to rolling back American imperialism, because he lacks the courage of Martin Luther King who challenged Americans to reexamine their values (even at the expense of his own personal safety and ultimately his life no less), Obama does not deserve to be compared with a leader like King. Democrats need to get their heads out of the clouds and go to war (in multiple senses of the phrase) with the candidate they actually have.