Last Wednesday Huffington Post’s Bob Cesca posed the question "Why is
Obama acting like George McFly?" For those not up to speed on American
pop culture, this was the character in “Back to the Future” who when
pushed around in high school always gave in to the bullies.
This is a variation on a theme in the print and electronic media that
has occurred with increasing frequency ever since Obama was revealed to
be the second coming of Herbert Hover rather than FDR. Mostly,
explanations have focused on Obama’s ostensible psychological failings
rather than any analysis of class relations in the U.S. in a period of
escalating class warfare against working people and the poor. The
assumption from Huffington Post liberals, The Nation, MSNBC, Michael
Moore et al is that Obama is on the side of the poor but lacks the
cojones to stand up to the bullies in the Republican Party. Cesca puts
it this way:
That character doesn’t look cooperative at all. He looks like a very
smart and very serious… wimp.
He looks like he’s unable to handle negotiations. He looks like George
McFly. He looks like he’s capitulating to a fraternity of hooples who
are wrong about everything; who deny basic economics; who deny basic
math; who exist for no other reason than to, as DougJ at Balloon Juice
described, win elections “by fighting hard over imaginary issues.”
But something doesn’t quite add up. Matt Bai, the repulsive—even more so
than usual—New York Times reporter wrote about Obama’s problems in
navigating between the Democratic Party liberal base and the Republican
Party “bullies” over tax breaks for the rich. It turns out that
“Privately, Mr. Obama has described himself, at times, as essentially a
Blue Dog Democrat, referring to the shrinking caucus of fiscally
conservative members of the party.” Now, of course, it would have been
helpful if Obama had made this public in the 2008 primaries instead of
cultivating an image of reform. Our problem is that bourgeois
politicians keep the truth to themselves. Lyndon Johnson was making
plans to escalate the war in Vietnam at the very moment he was running
ads urging a vote against the warmongering Barry Goldwater in 1964. We
certainly need a Wikileaks dump of the email and private correspondence
that these lying bastards keep hidden while perpetrating a fraud on the
voting public in the next go-round.
full:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/12/05/barack-obama-neville-obama-and-the-mythology-of-appeasement/
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