Hope and Obama: One Year Later
January 22nd, 2010 § Leave a Comment
On January 20, 2009 Barack Hussein Obama was inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States. He entered office with the assistance of a slew of successful advertising campaigns centered around the idea of ‘hope,’ and endorsements from a myriad of institutions and well-known public figures — all the way from former president Bill Clinton, to public opinion influencer and talk-show host Oprah Winfrey. The clip below appeared earlier this week on Fault Lines. Host Avi Lewis interviewed a variety of voices, from those who were initially die-hard supporters, to Sarah Palin fans.
Several other progressive commentators have also reflected on Obama in light of his first presidential anniversary. Here’s what some of them had to say:
Howard Zinn, The Nation:
I think people are dazzled by Obama’s rhetoric, and that people ought to begin to understand that Obama is going to be a mediocre president–which means, in our time, a dangerous president–unless there is some national movement to push him in a better direction.
Laura Flanders, The Nation:
A year on it looks as if it’s not progressives who’ve spent the year inaugurating. If the Democrat’s loss in Massachusetts is anything to go by, it’s the anti-Obama Right who’ve spent the year creating a movement: some of it racist, some corporate, and some plain desperate.
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Nonetheless, the Right’s MoveOn is only half the equation. Democratic leaders are the other. From war, to health care, to the Employee Free Choice Act, Democrats in the Obama administration have walked away from every proposition that stood a chance of igniting their grassroots base. Those now calling Coakley smug, know whereof they speak. Smugness is epidemic.
John Pilger, New Statesmen:
In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described a superstate, Oceania, whose language of war inverted lies that “passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’.”
Barack Obama is the leader of a contemporary Oceania. In two speeches at the close of the decade, the Nobel Peace Prize-winner affirmed that peace was no longer peace, but rather a permanent war that “extends well beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan” to “disorderly regions, failed states, diffuse enemies”. He called this “global security” and invited our gratitude. To the people of Afghanistan, which the US has invaded and occupied, he said wittily: “We have no interest in occupying your country.”
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The most telling forerunners of the Obama Plan, which the Nobel Peace Prize-winner and his general and his PR men prefer we forget, are those that failed in Afghanistan itself. The British in the 19th century and the Soviets in the 20th century attempted to conquer that wild country by ethnic cleansing and were seen off, though after terrible bloodshed. Imperial cemeteries are their memorials. People power, sometimes baffling, often heroic, remains the seed beneath the snow, and invaders fear it.
“It was curious,” wrote Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four, “to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same – everywhere, all over the world . . . people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same – people who . . . were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.”
Medea Benjamin, Common Dreams:
Obama, I am losing hope. This is not the change I believe in. The change I believe in puts people and our planet before industry, it promotes peace, international law and human rights instead of militarism. As you are asking Congress to approve the largest Pentagon budget in history, plus another $33 billion to pay for your Afghan surge, the prophetic works of Dr. Martin Luther King sound a clarion call: A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
Gary Younge, The Guardian:
All of this comes by way of critique rather than criticism, and explanation as opposed to excuse. Obama does not need the benefit of our doubt. He is the president of the most powerful country on the planet. He has enough benefits already. But the absence of rational discussion will lead, ineluctably, to the absence of rational conclusions. Tomorrow being Martin Luther King day, those who want to compare him to the civil rights leader must first acknowledge that King never had to stand for election. If he did, he would certainly have lost. We are only still talking about Obama because he won. And his victory was secured with narrow margins on a mainstream agenda. One need not accept these limitations in order to acknowledge their existence.
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These are early days. But the risk at this moment is twofold. First, that Obama ends this year with no progressive legislative victories. Second, and arguably worse, that he embraces legislation that sounds progressive but does not substantially improve people’s lives. People don’t want healthcare reform; they want affordable healthcare. They don’t want a stimulus bill; they want jobs. The time for lofty rhetoric has long gone. The time for measured analysis has been too long coming.
