Obama is deeply conservative.
- Larissa MacFarquhar, “The Conciliator,” The New Yorker. May 2007.
“STANDING UP” AND KNEELING DOWN
Maybe it’s because Barack Obama and his handlers are sensitive to the need to reassure ruling forces that the “first black United States president” will not challenge existing hierarchies. Maybe it’s because he’s bought and paid for by big money (1). Or maybe it’s because he believes in his “deeply conservative” (2) heart that good Americans show deep respect for their socioeconomic masters. Whatever the explanation, I’ve never seen an avowedly “progressive” political candidate more eager than Obama to display his deep willingness to obsequiously kiss the ring of dominant political and economic authority. For someone who is marching across Iowa and New Hampshire calling working- and middle-class American to “get fired up” and “stand up” for democracy (and for him), Obama sure likes to spend a lot of time groveling before supposed white and upper-class superiors.
BLACK EXPERIENCE “NOT FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT”
We know that the technically black Obama has political reasons to avoid threatening the white electoral majority. Still it is too much for him to absurdly claim, in his power-adoring 2006 campaign book The Audacity of Hope (3), that “what ails working- and middle-class blacks and Latinos is not fundamentally different from what ails their white counterparts”(Obama 2006, p. 245). Also rather audacious is Obama’s praise of the U.S. for historically possessing “an economic system that, more than any other, has offered opportunity to all comers regardless of status, title or rank”(Obama 2006, pp. 231-232) – including apparently the many millions of black chattel “comers” who came in chains, carrying literally subhuman “status.” Just to make sure that no Caucasians fear he’s about reawaken the tragically unfinished revolutions of Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement, Obama calms white anxieties further by claiming that black Americans (who suffer from a median household wealth gap of seven cents on the white dollar in the 21st century United States) have been “pulled into the economic mainstream” (Obama, 2006, pp. 248-49).
He also apologizes for whites’ indifference to the persistence of profound racial inequality and discrimination in the U.S (see Street.2007c and Brown 2003) by explaining that “white guilt has largely exhausted itself in America” as “even the most fair-minded of whites…tend to push back against suggestions of racial victimization and race-based claims based on the history of racial discrimination in this country” (Obama 2006, p. 247). This statement of understanding toleration for white racism-denial deftly consigns racial oppression to the supposedly finished past, cleverly deleting its continuing and deeply cumulative (Brown 2003) relevance in the living historical present (4).
.....
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=90&ItemID=14481