Obama a Liberal? Think again

Note: this post was originally published in June 8, 2008.

Obama doesn’t need Hillary as VP; he’s got himself

This somewhat cryptic subtitle is written in the wake of fierce speculation as to whether Obama will make Clinton his vice-presidential running mate. But it also refers to the news that Obama chose to make his first major appearance, as the de facto Democratic candidate, at the AIPAC meeting on Wednesday, June 4th. AIPAC stands for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and the organisation’s own website describes AIPAC as ‘America’s Pro-Israel Lobby’. It was during an AIPAC meeting that Barak Obama made a statement that the lobby’s members apparently found ‘pleasantly surprising’: ‘Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided.’(1) The reason for their ‘pleasant surprise’ was the extremism of Obama’s position; not even the far right-wing Israeli government is making this kind of claim now. To hear such a pledge coming from Obama, ostensibly a centre-right moderate, was the inverse equivalent of George W. Bush going to address a convention of Islamist extremists to declare that ‘Baghdad is the capital of Iraq, and must forever remain free of any form of foreign occupation’. It speaks volumes about the state of American politics—and indeed of the ideologization of vast swathes of the American and British media—that Obama’s statement on Jerusalem, which caused uproar across the Arab world, was blitzed by speculation about whether or not Obama would accept the imposition of Clinton as the vice-presidential running mate.

John Mearsheimer’s and Stephen Walt’s The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (Farrah, Strauss, and Giroux, 2007) has documented the extent to which a succession of Israeli governments have consolidated their control over U.S. foreign policy—and indeed, not just foreign policy. Numerous bloggers have referred to a similar process in the UK. It thus comes as no surprise that a Democratic candidate feels obliged to effectively begin his presidential campaign by bowing—perhaps ‘stooping’ is a more accurate word—as low as he can to the seemingly all-powerful Israeli lobby. Presumably Obama and his advisers will have calculated that failure to do so would trigger, amongst other things, the kind of campaign that was threatened by the Clinton camp. According to the Guardian, Congressman Rob Edwards, a Clinton supporter,

‘claimed a senior member of her team [Hillary Clinton’s team] had discussed with him exploiting tensions between Jews and African-Americans…”There have been signals coming out of the Clinton campaign that have racial overtones that indeed disturb me,” Andrews told the New Jersey Star-Ledger. “Frankly, I had a private conversation with a high-ranking person in the campaign … that used a racial line of argument that I found very disconcerting. It was extremely disconcerting given the rank of this person. It was very disturbing.”’ (2)

While the Clinton camp has denied this statement, it is entirely credible that the conversation occurred, or that it was deployed by the Clintons as a tactic designed to cow the Obama camp into taking on Hillary Clinton as the vice-presidential partner. Its credibility rests on the Clintons’ racism, a racism that has been well documented in the course of the Democratic primaries. How else to describe Bill Clinton’s innuendo in which he compared Obama’s campaign to that of Jesse Jackson: ‘Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in ’84 and ’88,’ Clinton said at a rally in Columbia, South Carolina, before adding that ‘Jackson ran a good campaign. And Obama ran a good campaign here.’(3) (To anyone willing to hear between the lines, Bill Clinton’s implication was crystal clear: Obama’s was another short-lived Afro-American presidential campaign.) And how else to interpret Hillary Clinton’s own comment that ‘My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California…’(4) (The implication here was equally clear, even if again, it was only implied: if Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968—but more importantly, if the same thing happened to Martin Luther King in 1968—then surely Obama himself might be killed in 2008?) After this statement, the Clintons’ racism became at one and the same time a form of ‘vulturism’.

The above is a long way of saying that we should take the statement about the Clintons stoking Afro-American and Jewish hatred seriously. In this context, it might be argued that Obama had little choice but to seek to allay the far right. In fact, it is now clear that, after his Jerusalem statement, Obama is well on his way to proving that he does not really need a VP that is as racist and as far to the right as Hillary Clinton is. On the contrary, he is well on his way to proving what many of us suspected: that the moderate Obama was an Obama for the benefit of the Democratic primaries, and that when the push of the primaries becomes the shove of the presidential campaign itself, Obama will be little or no different from Hillary Clinton. From this point of view, debate about the racism (or indeed sexism) of the Democratic primaries must give way to debate about the class-bound nature of U.S. politics, and the manner in which lobbies representing vested interests will be working at once to consolidate, and to deepen the death-grip of neo-liberal, managerial capitalism over U.S. politics.

Update June 21, 2008: This week’s news that Obama has decided to forego public financing for his presidential campaign more than confirms the gist of this post, that Obama stands not for change, but for more of the same. See ‘Obama tarnished by rejecting public money for election fight‘ in Guardian, June 21, 2008.

Update June 23, 2008: More evidence, if any was needed: see ‘Obama faces criticism over wiretapping bill‘ in today’s Guardian.

References

(1) ‘Obama’s Comments on Israel Stir Criticism in U.S.’ in New York Times, June 7, 2008. Accessed June 7, 2008.
(2) ‘Clinton and Obama “laughing” after secret late-night meeting’ in Guardian, June 7, 2008. Accessed June 7, 2008.
(3) See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qqd2dfjl2pw&eurl=http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/
(4) See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vyFqmp4wzI.

~ by crocwatch on 18 November 2008.