Obama in the White House would not

represent any fundamental change in

the direction of US foreign or domestic policy,

but he would, it is believed,

put a new face on US imperialism,

sorely needed after the debacle

of the Bush presidency

Obama's constant harping on bipartisanship

is a clear signal to the ruling elite

that whatever illusions Obama succeeds

in arousing among young people and anti-war voters,

he sees his role as a political lightning rod

Someone who can be trusted to defend the status quo

and work to defuse popular anger against a system

that produces worsening living standards,

attacks on democratic rights and endless wars

Should Obama win the presidency,

his administration will do nothing

to satisfy the demands of those now being

encouraged to place their political hopes in him

I watched the beginning of Barack Obama’s victory speech and immediately dropped into deep cynicism.

Surrounded by supporters waving “CHANGE” signs, the Illinois senator went on for what felt like five minutes about how his success in the Iowa caucuses was a vote for “hope” and “change.”

Those are very nice sentiments, but without substance, they’re meaningless advertising slogans, the revolution of Chevrolet and the eternal youth of Mountain Dew.

At worst, Obama’s talk of “unity” and ending “division” is a naïve anodyne in a country ruled by a ruthless right-wing establishment.

At my most cynical, I suspect he’s running as a combination of John F. Kennedy and Tiger Woods, a charismatic, youthful signifier of idealism with just enough melanin so white people can feel good about not being racist.

Obama Is is a Conventional Bourgeois Politician [Original]

Despite the attempts of the media, in the wake of his caucus victory, to build up Obama as an insurgent figure, the senator from Illinois is anything but.

He has been assiduously promoted by sections of the Democratic Party establishment since his US Senate campaign in 2004, when he was given the role of keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention.

His top campaign staffers are largely drawn from Democratic congressional circles, particularly those linked to former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle and former House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt.

Obama’s presidential campaign raised more money than any Democrat in history in the year preceding the general election.

While Internet fundraising from small donors accounted for a well-publicized portion of this, the bulk came in large donations from well-heeled financial backers of the Democratic Party, who boosted Obama’s credibility as a presidential contender when he topped Hillary Clinton’s quarterly fundraising totals last year.

A profile last year in the Washington Post described his key fundraisers in these terms: “veterans of the Democratic financial establishment: a Hyatt hotel heiress, a New York hedge fund manager, a Hollywood movie mogul and a Chicago billionaire.”

His billionaire supporters include investor Warren Buffett, currency speculator George Soros, hedge fund mogul Paul Tudor Jones and the Henry Crown family. Obama raised more money on Wall Street than either Hillary Clinton or former New York mayor and Republican candidate Rudolph Giuliani.

There is no doubt that the increased turnout in Iowa and the heavy vote for Obama among young people reflect popular hostility to the Bush administration and the war in Iraq—which both Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, Obama’s principal rivals, voted to authorize in 2002.

But the beneficiary of this popular sentiment is a conventional bourgeois politician whose program and political appeal do not challenge in the slightest the consensus of American big business politics.

Obama specializes in hollow rhetoric about “hope,” “change” and “unity,” exemplified by his remarks Thursday night after he was declared the winner in Iowa.

The very emptiness of his appeal makes it possible for voters opposed to Bush and disgusted with figures regarded as the “old guard” of the Democratic Party to project their desire for progressive change onto a politician who has no substantive differences with his Democratic rivals.

While he claimed Thursday night that, if elected, he would end the war in Iraq, Obama has refused to set any deadline for the withdrawal of American troops, not even by 2013, when he would be inaugurated a second time if elected this year and reelected in 2012.

He has called for intensifying US military action in Afghanistan and crossing the border into Pakistan, and has echoed the Bush administration’s campaign of economic sanctions, diplomatic saber-rattling and military threats against Iran.

Obama’s talk of “choosing unity over division” is calculated to obscure the reality of a class-divided society.

There can be no genuine unity of interests between the class of multimillionaires and billionaires, who increasingly monopolize the national wealth and income, and the vast majority who work for a living and struggle to make ends meet.

The senator from Illinois has been promoted by elements in the American financial aristocracy because of his (relative to his peers) rhetorical polish, lack of connection to previous administrations, and bi-racial origins.

Obama in the White House would not represent any fundamental change in the direction of US foreign or domestic policy, but he would, it is believed, put a new face on US imperialism, sorely needed after the debacle of the Bush presidency.

Obama’s success in Iowa touched off a flood of adulatory media attention, including, significantly, friendly commentary from such right-wing figures as former Reagan/Bush cabinet member William Bennett and Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, who praised his non-confrontational approach to business interests and the Republican Party.

The constant harping on bipartisanship is a clear signal to the ruling elite that whatever illusions Obama succeeds in arousing among young people and anti-war voters, he sees his role as a political lightning rod.

Someone who can be trusted to defend the status quo and work to defuse popular anger against a system that produces worsening living standards, attacks on democratic rights and endless wars.

Should Obama win the presidency, his administration will do nothing to satisfy the demands of those now being encouraged to place their political hopes in him.

An Obama nomination is by no means a certainty—still less a victory in the November election. Ten months is a long time, particularly under conditions of growing worldwide financial and political instability, which will produce many shocks within the United States.

Obama: Brand Name Recognition

Every time I hear about how Barack Obama is going to "re-brand" America's image in the Middle East, I can't help but think about Jimmy Carter's toast.

When the idealistic Democrat came to Iran in 1977 to ring in the new year with Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the country's much-despised despot, throngs of young, hopeful Iranians lined the streets to welcome the new American president.

Carter's blunder

After eight years of the Nixon and Ford administrations' blind support for the shah's brutal regime, Iranians thrilled to Carter's promise to re-brand America's image abroad by focusing on human rights.

That call even let many moderate, middle-class Iranians dare to hope that they might ward off the popular revolution everyone knew was coming. But at that historic New Year's dinner, Carter surprised everyone.

In a display of ignorance about the political situation in Iran, he toasted the shah for transforming the country into "an island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world." With those words, Carter unwittingly lit the match of revolution.

It's just this sort of blunder - naive, well-meaning, amateurish, convinced that everyone understands the goodness of U.S. intentions - that worries me again these days.

That's because a curious and dangerous consensus seems to be forming among the chattering classes, on both the left and the right, that what the United States needs in these troubling times is not knowledge and experience but a "fresh face" with an "intuitive sense of the world," and that the mere act of electing Obama will put us on the path to winning the so-called war on terror.

A common fantasy

The argument usually goes something like this: Imagine that a young Muslim boy in, say, Egypt, is watching television when suddenly he sees this black man - the grandson of a Kenyan Muslim, no less! - who spent a small part of his childhood in Indonesia, taking the oath of office as president of the United States.

Suddenly, the boy realizes that the United States is not the demonic, anti-Islamic place he's always been told it was.

Meanwhile, all around the Muslim world, other young would-be jihadists have a similar epiphany. "Maybe Osama bin Laden is wrong," they think. "Maybe America is not so bad after all."

Mind you, it is not anything this new president says or does that changes their minds.

As the conservative pundit Andrew Sullivan describes this imaginary scene in his recent paean to Obama in the Atlantic Monthly, it is Obama's face - just his face - that "proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can."

Or, in the words of the French foreign policy analyst Dominique Moisi, "The very moment he appears on the world's television screens, victorious and smiling, America's image and soft power would experience something like a Copernican revolution."

As someone who once was that young Muslim boy everyone seems to be imagining (albeit in Iran rather than Egypt), I'll let you in on a secret: He could not care less who the president of the United States is.

He is totally unconcerned with whatever barriers a black (or female, for that matter) president would be breaking. He couldn't name three U.S. presidents if he tried. He cares only about one thing: what the United States will do.

Roots of anger

That boy is angry at the United States not because its presidents have all been white. He is angry because of Washington's unconditional support for Israel;

Because the United States has more than 150,000 troops in Iraq;

Because the United States gives the dictator of his country some $2 billion a year in aid, the vast majority of which goes toward supporting a police state.

He is angry at the United States because he thinks it has hegemony over almost every aspect of his world.

The tasks ahead

The post-Bush "war on terror" must be handled, not by "re-branding" the mess Bush has made, but by actually trying to fix the root causes of Muslim hostility towards us.

In their glowing endorsement of Obama, the editors of the Boston Globe noted that "the first American president of the 21st century has not appreciated the intricate realities of our age. The next president must."

True enough. But such "intricate realities" are not best dealt with through "an intuitive grasp of global politics" - Obama's chief asset, according to the Globe - but through an intimate knowledge of those realities and of the nuanced responses necessary to address them.

Limited experience

Obama may possess all the intuition of a fortuneteller. But as chair of a Senate subcommittee on Europe, he has never made an official trip to Western Europe (except a one-day stopover in London in August 2005) or held a single policy hearing.

He's never faced off with foreign leaders and has no idea what a delicate sparring match diplomacy in the Middle East can be. And at a time in which the United States has gone from sole superpower to global pariah in a mere seven years, these things matter.

The main issue in U.S. foreign policy that the next president will face is repairing our image in the world. But in foreign policy, unlike advertising, image is created through action, not branding.

Which is why one cannot help but sense a touch of shirking (not to mention a lack of short-term memory) in all this talk about "intuitive experience" and "re-branding images," particularly when it comes from those who began the "New American Century" as ardent supporters of Bush's wars and his self-advertised "gut" instincts.

It is as though, rather than accepting blame for the mess and taking responsibility for cleaning it up, they would prefer to slap a new coat of paint on the problem and declare it fixed.

It was "intuition" that made the mess in the first place. It will take more than intuition to clean it up. After all, we are not launching a new product. We are electing a president.