"Tonight is a particular honor for me because, let’s face it, my presence on this stage is pretty unlikely..." and with those words the most extraordinary political talent in a generation introduced himself to America.
I remember when I first heard about Barack Obama. It was 2 A.M. and I was watching one of Stu Rothenberg's seminars at American University about handicapping races. At the end he paused and he said that there was a little known candidate in a tight race for the Democratic nomination for an Illinois Senate seat, he was running third, but Rothenberg told his students, that he hadn't seen a politician with this much talent, ever. He told them to remember the name, Barack Obama. So, I got involved in following the race through whatever news I could get, it wasn't a lot. I wrote a research paper on the race for a class while an undergrad at Michigan, and while I was writing it Obama won the primary after the front-runner dropped out due to a sex scandal (Blair Hull). Obama began a campaign against the self-proclaimed pious, daily-church-going-Catholic, millionaire-ex-investment-banker-turned-high-school-teacher-of-black-kids, celebrity-husband-of-actress-Jerri-Ryan, Jack Ryan. Mr. Ryan, although a self-declared pious man, began the campaign, in classic Chicago fashion, from the gutter, hiring a guy to follow Obama around with a camera firing insults at him. Things looked extremely tight until Mr. Ryan was forced to drop out because of a sex scandal. Then the nearly dead Illinois Republican Party asked Alan Keyes to run against Obama, there is no punch line, that's what really happened. Needless to say Obama won, ignited a huge following across the state, and after giving the 2004 Keynote Address at the Democratic National Convention became a household name.
I was personally on the bandwagon. Obama was the biracial son of a Kenyan-born economist and a Kansas-born anthropologist, raised in Indonesia and Hawaii, educated at Occidental then Columbia, and a graduate of Harvard Law School (magna cum laude), where he was elected to the position of editor of the Harvard Law Review, the most prestigious position within any law school on the planet, and to top it off, the first black to hold the position. Between Columbia and Harvard he worked within the business community and as a community organizer in Chicago, part of a Gamaliel organized alliance of churches. During this time he embraced the Christian faith and was baptized. While interning for a summer during his study at Harvard he interned at Sidney & Austin corporate law firm and met Michelle Robinson, his current wife. After Harvard instead of taking any number of prestigious and well-paying corporate jobs or clerking jobs he returned to Chicago and led a massive voter registration drive for the 1992 Presidential and Senate elections that delivered Bill Clinton to the White House and Carol Mosely Braun to the Senate. He then took a job at Miner, Barnhill & Galland in the civil rights division and taught constitutional law at University of Chicago. In 1996 he ran for Illinois' State Senate from the 13th District (Chicago's South Side). While in the State Senate he helped author an Illinois Earned Income Tax Credit, a bill requiring police interrogations be video tapped, a laudable effort to amend the Illinois state constitution to define healthcare as a right and guarantee full coverage within 5 years, and he led efforts to crackdown on predatory lending. He ran against Rep. Bobby Rush in 2000 and was humiliatingly defeated 61% to 30%. Then in 2004 he ran for the US Senate and won.
During the campaign he sounded like a true progressive and when the build-up to the war in Iraq began he spoke out eloquently against what he called a "stupid war".
Once in the Senate he hired some very interesting staffers including, former Dashcle chief-of-staff, Karen Kornbluh, an economist who is directly tied to Robert Rubin to serve as policy advisor, and Samanth Power, a Pulitzer-winning human rights author. Again and again he worked both sides of the left and center-left spectrum. He worked in corporate law and civil rights law. He worked as a investment banker in the business community and as a community organizer in the South Side of Chicago. He hired Samantha Power and a leading proponent of Rubinomics. He was praised by the DLC but asked that his name be removed from their list of "New Democrats" (Obama to Have Name Removed From DLC List). He has been praised as a "Hamiltonian" by Republican NYT columnist David Brooks (Run, Barack, Run). He is a blank slate to so many that he seems to be everyone's savior. He is the consumate pragmatic politician, seeing both sides and never taking a stand.
A recent NYT article about Obama's time at Harvard Law mentions his seeming "fair-mindedness". "He proved deft at navigating an institution scorched with ideological battles, many of which revolved around race. He developed a leadership style based more on furthering consensus than on imposing his own ideas. Surrounded by students who enjoyed the sound of their own voices, Mr. Obama cast himself as an eager listener, sometimes giving warring classmates the impression that he agreed with all of them at once" (In Law School, Obama Found Political Voice). Perhaps this explains his on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand approach to political issues that has allowed so many to project so much onto him in such a short period of time. But, campaigns are about definition and it will be soon time for Obama to take some stands. I, for one, hope they are as politically astute and courageous as his stand on the Iraq War, however, I have my doubts.
For starters, Obama supported neoconservative Joe Lieberman's "independent" Senate race against anti-war Democrat Ned Lamont (Obama Endorses Lieberman for Senate). Obama even requested that Lieberman be assigned his "Senate Mentor" (Joe Lieberman: Barack Obama's Mentor in the Senate). Then there is Obama's hiring of a protege of Robert Rubin and his support of the Brookings Insitute's Hamilton Project, a corporate-funded neoliberal think tank founded by Rubin himself (Mr. Obama Goes to Washington). There was the "distancing" Obama attempted after Dick Durbin's courageous likening of Guantanamo Bay to Nazis or Stalin-era camps (Obama's Game), and his pre-emptive critique of an Alito filibuster (Alito Filibuster Won't Work, Obama Says).
He told Joe Klein that he hadn't even thought about Al Gore's well-publicized "carbon tax" even as he wouldn't shut up about Ethanol and energy independence (The Fresh Face). Speaking of Ethanol, Obama's defining cause of his short term in the US Senate has been energy, particularly the manufacture and use of E85 fuels and their corresponding flexfuel cars, trucks, and SUVs. In this Obama looks less like a true fresh face, but the same-old tired political message dressed up in a new suit. Agribusiness and the auto industry loves E85 (named for the 85% Ethanol levels). Agribusiness because it makes them mountains of profits, and the auto industry because it allows them to look green while still manufacturing the low-gas-mileage autos that can run on either E85 or regular gasoline. Besides, every report ever made shows that there is likley little or no net environmental benefit to ethanol after you factor in the manufacturing and transportation costs (Barack Obama, Inc.). Instead of delivering a truly progressive and visionary energy agenda he is dressing up ethanol in military fatigues, talking about how our national security relies on decreasing energy dependence, meaning we need more ethanol. I wonder if it is just a coincidence that one of the companies making the most profit off of E85 is Archer Daniels Midland Corporation, an Illinois based agribusiness behemoth? Obama has since worked with Republicans on a bill to raise fuel economy standards 4% annually, a truly modest proposal, but one made before the Democrats won back the Senate. As with the Democratic Party as a whole, Obama will hopefully be judged by what he does now. As he said, "most of the legislation I’ve proposed will be more modest in its goals than it would be if I were in the majority party" (Barack Obama, Inc.).
I still have my doubts. Although Obama has made ethics reform another priority of his Senate identity, he hasn't blushed, even for a moment, at pork barelling. Obama helped to get Illinois $6.2 billion in pork in the infamous 2005 transportation bill (including the Prairie Parkway--that mess of a brand new road that was supposed to make Hastert a rich man). He also supported the corporate backed class action lawsuit "tort reform" bill that made it harder to get corporate accountability.
Perhaps worst of all for me personally he dismissed my personal hero, Paul Wellstone, as a gad-fly. He seems to be positioning himself as a progressive centrist who is not beholden to anyone and willing to "speak honestly" to liberals. Like his wholly inappropriate blog posting surrounding the Roberts nomination (Tone, Truth, and the Democratic Party). Obama is about positioning himself constantly. Nothing new you might say. Ok, I agree, but let's please remember that and stop annointing Obama as a wunderkind or messiah. Obama is not a movement, hell, he's not even a leader. Sure, he supports some progressive issues, but we cannot stop pushing him, because he is, exclusively a politician. Don't forget that.
Be Brave. Be Kind. Be Loving.
