Taking Obama's Measure
by Louis Proyect
Book Review
Hodge, Roger D.: The Mendacity of Hope: Barack Obama and the
Betrayal of American Liberalism, HarperCollins, 2010, 259 pages,
ISBN 978-0-06-201126-8
Ali, Tariq: The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War
Abroad, Verso, 2010, 153 pages, ISBN-13 978-1-84467-449-7
Street, Paul: The Emperor's New Clothes: Barack Obama in the
Real World of Power Paradigm, 2010, 274 pages, ISBN
978-1-59451-845-4 (paperback)
(Swans - March 14, 2011) Starting in 2005, just after things had
turned completely sour in Iraq, a visit to your local bookstore
would reveal a plethora of books about how rotten George W. Bush
was. Eric Alterman's The Book on Bush: How George W. (Mis)leads
America and David Corn's The Lies of George W. Bush were fairly
typical offerings, amounting to the printed version of what could
be heard any evening on MSNBC.
While people like Alterman and Corn viewed Barack Obama's election
as a kind of Second Coming, it took not much longer than a year
for disillusionment to sink in. Criticisms of Obama, however, do
not go for the jugular as they did with Bush. No matter how many
terrible things he does, there will be a lemming-like march in
2012 to line up behind him in order to stave off Republican
control of the White House. Liberals have trouble understanding
that it is exactly the "centrist" politics of the current
administration that will lead to its ouster, if such an ouster
takes place.
Given the abysmal record of the Obama presidency so far, which
amounts to Bush's third term in many respects, it is testimony to
his continued hold on liberal America that only three critical
books have emerged from the left. (The ones emanating from the
right are exclusively crackpot exercises making the case that
Obama is spearheading a drive toward socialism.)
Of the three, Roger Hodge's The Mendacity of Hope is likely to be
the only one for sale in Barnes and Noble or Borders. Published by
HarperCollins, it has been widely reviewed in the mainstream
press. The author was formerly an editor at Harper's Magazine,
which has no connection to the publisher HarperCollins although
they were initially part of the same company launched in the early
1800s by James and John Harper. Today Rupert Murdoch's News
Corporation owns HarperCollins, an outlet obviously calculated to
make money based on whatever sells -- right or left.
That being said, it is doubtful that HarperCollins would have had
the slightest interest in Tariq Ali's The Obama Syndrome or Paul
Street's The Empire's New Clothes, the two other books reviewed
here. Ali and Street approach the Obama administration from the
standpoint of Marxism, an ideology that will not get you in the
front door at HarperCollins. Ali's book was published by Verso,
where he has been an editor for decades. Street comes to us
courtesy of Paradigm Publishers, a left-oriented scholarly imprint
that will likely never be able to afford a quarter-page ad in The
New York Times Book Review or The New York Review of Books. That
being said, readers trying to make sense of arguably the most
reactionary Democratic president since Grover Cleveland should
seek out all three books.
full: http://swans.com/library/art17/lproy66.html
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