February 15, 2008
Holding Barack Obama Accountable
By Bruce Dixon
The presidential campaign of Barack Obama has become a media parade on its
way to a coronation. Journalists and leading Democrats have done shockingly
little to pin Obama down, to hold him specifically responsible for anything
beyond his slogans of “yes we can” and “change we can believe in”. Prominent
Black Democrats, many ministers and the traditional Black leadership class are
doing less than anybody to hold Obama accountable, peddling instead a supposed
racial obligation among African Americans to support this second coming of
Joshua and his campaign as “the movement” itself. What would holding Barack
Obama accountable on war and peace, on social security, health care and other
issues look like, and is it possible to hold a political “rock star” accountable
at all?
Whether it is truly possible to hold elected officials accountable in a
political system where big money, big media, big corporations and the very rich
call all the shots is uncertain. But we have tried and will keep trying. So will
others. The stakes are too high not to.
How We Held Obama’s Feet to the Fire in 2003
Although close friends and confidants had been talking up a run for
national office since the early 1990s, Barack Obama in 2003 was still an
Illinois state senator running in the Democratic primary for the U.S. Senate.
This reporter, a longtime and former Chicago community and political organizer,
had worked with Obama in 1992’s highly successful Project VOTE Illinois
registration drive. After moving to Georgia in 2000, I managed to keep in touch
with events at home, and was well aware of Obama’s run for the US
Senate.
While researching a story on the Democratic Leadership Council for the
internet magazine Black Commentator in April and May of 2003, I ran across the
DLC’s “100 to Watch” list for 2003, in which Barack Obama was prominently
featured as one of the DLC’s favorite “rising stars”. This was ominous news
because the DLC was and still is the right wing’s Trojan Horse inside the
Democratic party.
The DLC exists to guarantee that wealthy individuals and corporations who
make large campaign donations have more say in the Democratic party than do
flesh and blood Democratic voters. The DLC achieves this by closely examining
and questioning the records, the policy stands and the persons of officeholders
and candidates to ensure that they are safe and worthy recipients of elite
largesse. The DLC also supplies them with right wing policy advisers beholden to
those same interests, and hooks up approved candidates with the big money
donors.
Then as now, the DLC favors bigger military budgets and more imperial wars,
wholesale privatization of government functions including social security, and
in so-called “free trade” agreements like NAFTA which are actually investor
rights agreements. Evidently, the giant insurance companies, the airlines, oil
companies, Wall Street, military contractors and others had closely examined and
vetted Barack Obama and found him pleasing.
I revisited Obama’s primary election campaign web site, something I had not
done for a month or two. To my dismay I found the 2002 antiwar speech, the same
one which Barack Obama touts to this day as evidence of his antiwar backbone and
prescience, which had been prominently featured before, had vanished from his
web site, along with all other evidence that Obama had ever taken a plain spoken
stand against the invasion and occupation of Iraq. With the president riding
high in the polls, and Illinois’ Black and antiwar vote safely in his pocket,
Obama appeared to be running away from his opposition to the war, and from the
Democratic party’s base. Free, at last.
After calls to Obama’s campaign office yielded no satisfactory answers, we
published an article in the June 5, 2003 issue of Black Commentator effectively
calling Barack Obama out. We drew attention to the disappearance of any
indication that U.S. Senate candidate Obama opposed the Iraq war at all from his
web site and public statements. We noted with consternation that the Democratic
Leadership Council, the right wing Trojan Horse inside the Democratic party, had
apparently vetted and approved Obama, naming him as one of its “100 to Watch”
that season. This is what real journalists are supposed to do — fact check
candidates, investigate the facts, tell the truth to audiences and hold the
little clay feet of politicians and corporations to the fire.
Facing the possible erosion of his base among progressive Democrats in
Illinois, Obama contacted us. We printed his response in Black Commentator’s
June 19 issue and queried the candidate on three “bright line” issues that
clearly distinguish between corporate-funded DLC Democrats and authentic
progressives. We concluded the dialog by printing Obama’s response on June 26,
2003. For the convenience of our readers in 2007, all three of these articles
can be found here.
It was our June 2003 exchange with candidate Obama that prompted him to
restore the antiwar speech on his web site, though not as prominently as before,
the same antiwar speech which is now touted as evidence of his early and
consistent opposition to the war. Our three “bright line” questions invited him
to distinguish himself as an authentic progressive on single payer national
health care, on the war in Iraq, and on NAFTA. And it was our public exposure of
the fact and implications of the DLC’s embrace of Obama’s career which caused
him to explicitly renounce any formal ties with the Democratic Leadership
Council. We didn’t do it because we were haters. We were doing our duty as
agitators.
Holding Barack Obama Accountable in 2008
That was then. This is now.
The 2008 Obama presidential run may be the most slickly orchestrated
marketing machine in memory. That’s not a good thing. Marketing is not even
distantly related to democracy or civic empowerment. Marketing is about creating
emotional, even irrational bonds between your product and your target audience.
From its Bloody Sunday 2007 proclamation that Obama was the second coming of
Joshua to its nationally televised kickoff at Abe Lincoln’s tomb to the tens of
millions of dollars in breathless free media coverage lavished on it by the
establishment media, the campaign’s deft manipulation of hopeful themes and
emotionally potent symbols has led many to impute their own cherished views to
Obama, whether he endorses them or not.
To cite the most obvious example, the Obama campaign cynically bills itself
as “the movement”, the continuation and fulfillment of Dr. King’s legacy. But
the speeches of its candidate carefully limit the application of all his troop
withdrawal statements to “combat troops” and “combat brigades”, omitting the six
figure number of armed mercenary contractors in Iraq, along with “training”,
“counterinsurgency” and other kinds of troops. Obama also presses for an
expansion of the US Army and Marines by more than 100,000 troops and a larger
military budget even than the Bush regime. The fact that both these stands fly
in the face of the legacy of Martin Luther King, and flatly contradict the
wishes of most Democratic voters is utterly invisible in the establishment
media, and in the discourse of established Black leaders on the Obama campaign.
The average voter is ill-equipped to read Obama’s statements on these and other
issues as closely as one might read a predatory loan application or a jacked up
insurance policy, trying to determine exactly what is covered.
As we pointed out back in December
The Obama campaign is heavy on symbolism, and long on vague catch phrases
like “new leadership,” “new ideas,” “a politics of hope,” and “let’s dream
America again” calculated to appeal to millions of disaffected Americans without
actually meaning much of anything. Corporate media actively bill Obama as “the
candidate of hope,” and anointed representative of the “Joshua generation.”
There are good reasons campaign placards at Obama rallies say “change we can
believe in” instead of “stop the war — vote Obama” or “repeal NAFTA - Barack in
‘08.” The first set of messages are hopeful and vague. The second are popular
demands among the voters Obama needs against which his past, present and future
performance may be checked. When the comparison is made, the results are
dismaying to many who want to support Barack Obama.
Who Will Speak Truth to Power? And When?
No less a luminary than Dr. Michael Eric Dyson last month asserted that the
time to pressure Obama to cut the military budget would not come till after the
election when, as he said “we have a seat at the table.” We think this is
transparently wrong. Obama responded to our calling him out in 2003 because he
was still in an election campaign, and needed every vote he could get. The day
after the election, he could have ignored us with relative safety, just as
Cheney and Bush ignore their approval ratings in the twenty and thirty percent
range the last three years and more.
But in 2003 Obama was a mere mortal. Now corporate media have made him a
rock star, Joshua, a prince on his way to a coronation. Those who raise
questions about Obama’s commitment to a progressive agenda will have to struggle
to be heard. That’s just the way it is. They may even have to be impolite at
times. That’s just the way it is too. Rock stars, royalty and the uncritical
adulation they require make little room for polite criticism or democratic
discussion.
Third party runs for the presidency have sometimes succeeded in exerting
leftward pressure on Democratic presidential candidates. The best example is
1948, when Henry Wallace campaigned for president on the Progressive Party
ticket with Paul Robeson at his side defying Jim Crow laws in dozens of states.
It was this credible threat on the part of the Progressive Party to peel Black
voters away from the Democratic party which led Truman to issue his election
year executive order de-segregating the armed forces. This year, Cynthia
McKinney and Ralph Nader have both declared their intention to explore
presidential candidacies this year outside the Democratic party. Both have
exemplary records of public service. Neither is a hater. Both are agitators in
the best sense of that word. If Barack Obama, or for that matter Hillary Clinton
is to be the Democratic presidential nominee, it’s time they felt the heat to
line up with Democratic voters, rather than with the DLC and the party’s biggest
donors.
Ironically, Hillary Clinton, also a corporate DLC candidate to the core,
may have been more responsive to some heat from the party’s grassroots on a few
questions than Barack Obama. Clinton has at least promised to repeal No Child
Left Behind, the legislation that has forced an unproven and unworkable “teach
to the test” regime upon public schools nationwide, and carved tens of billions
nationwide from the budgets of schools to foster a privatized, for-profit
education industry. By contrast, Obama is still mumbling about “adequately
funding” this failed and malevolent educational experiment. Similarly, in a
California debate which showed the tiny differences between the Democratic front
runners, it was Hillary Clinton who broke the corporate taboo by at least
mentioning single payer, the workable universal health care system implemented
by every other advanced industrial country on earth and favored by most American
voters. Clinton didn’t do this because she loves us, or because she is innately
more progressive than Obama. She did it because she hard pressed and because
activists are less confused and less likely to he silenced by the pernicious
notion that her campaign is “the movement” itself.
It’s time for a little less respect for the high and mighty of either
party, and a little more action. It’s high time for activists inside and outside
the Democratic party to look for creative, innovative, sometimes impolite and
civilly disobedient ways to reach larger audiences as they speak truth to the
powerful. Even and especially when those in power are nominal
Democrats.
Below are links to the original pages in which we called Barack Obama out
for apparently running away from his early opposition to the war, and his ties
with the DLC:
This is the June 5, 2003 issue
of Black Commentator, with the story “In Search of the Real Barack Obama”
This is the June 12, 2003 issue
of Black Commentator with the DLC story
http://www.blackcommentator.com/46/issue_46.html
http://www.blackcommentator
On June 19, 2003 we printed
Obama’s response and his reason for eliminating the speech from his web site. He
said the web site was for current stuff implied with the “formal” end to
hostilities in Iraq it was “outdated” and removed by his staff to make room for
more current stuff. Yeah. Right.
http://www.blackcommentator.com/47/issue_47.html
http://www.blackcommentator
And we wrapped it up by
printing Obama’s response to our three follow-up questions, intended to
delineate the “bright line” between being an authentic progressive and being
something else. We wrung from him an explicit renunciation of the DLC at this
time.
http://www.blackcommentator.com/48/issue_48.html
http://www.blackcommentator
Bruce Dixon is the
managing editor of the Black Agenda Report, where this article first
appeared. Read other
articles by Bruce, or visit
Bruce's website.
