By Wayne Brown
Talk about a campaign of shocks! Not ten days ago, the outcome of this year’s presidential election seemed already cast, if not in stone, then in ‘quailing’ cement. Polls and markets alike were uniformly predicting a comfortable Obama victory come November. (So much so that last week, in what was clearly desperation, John McCain acquiesced in a major shake-up of his campaign staff.)
But that was before Obama — ‘unprovoked,’ as Trinidadians might say — suddenly embarked on a dizzying series of flipflops.
Obama had already gone back on his 2007 pledge to accept public financing in the ‘general.’ He had done a fair job of finessing this, explaining that since his campaign was being financed by an extraordinary number of small contributors, he was in effect already taking taxpayers’ money and — unlike Hilary or McCain — wouldn’t be saddled as president with IOUs to the traditional big-money power-brokers.
But then last week Obama launched into a packed schedule of big-ticket fund-raising events: a grievous wound in the hearts of true believers into which his chief finance operative only rubbed salt by explaining that the campaign had relied on internet fund-raising because its candidate had been too busy campaigning to do otherwise. Translation: Those 1.5 million small donors, one of the suddenly-remaindered glories of the Obama primary campaign, had been courted out of necessity, not principle, all along.
And that was just the beginning. In rapid succession over the past week and a bit, Obama has:
Gone back on his vow to filibuster an upcoming FISA bill that included immunity for telecommunications companies which had illegally opened their customers’ records to the Bush administration, thus effectively sanctioning more warrantless wiretapping of US citizens in future.
Supported the Supreme Court’s recent decision to overturn the District of Columbia’s gun-control law, weakly claiming that the court provided a guide to “reasonable regulations enacted by local communities to keep their streets safe” (this, from the Chicago South Side community organizer!)
Promised evangelical Christians to expand GW Bush’s Faith-based Initiative, a policy that clearly violated the constitutional separation of church and state Opposed the Supreme Court’s barring of the death penalty for non-capital offences Opined that Nafta — which he’d once condemned as having “devastating” consequences for American blue-collar workers — was a pretty good thing, after all
Rushed to reject retired General Wesley Clark’s blunt but hardly unexceptional remark that McCain’s war experience didn’t by itself qualify him to be president
Allowed that he might “refine” his Iraq policy as a result of his upcoming visit to that war-destroyed country. How ‘changed, changed utterly’ seemed the Obama of July 4 from the candidate who’d clinched the Democratic nomination just a month earlier!
For a while, the US mainstream media tried to ride this series of body blows to their image of the Golden Boy. They repeatedly reminded readers/viewers that, traditionally, successful candidates had won their party’s nomination by appealing to its base, then shifted their positions to appeal to the centre in the general election.
There were, however, at least two major flaws in such a parallel, and they soon gave it up.
The first flaw (we shall come to the second) was that, collectively, Obama’s staggering position-reversals comprised a shift not towards the centre but to the right — and indeed at times to the far right. Obama’s cave on FISA, eg, was not that far away domestically from what it would mean if, in the realm of foreign policy, he were suddenly to affirm the value of Guantanamo, or the Bush administration’s abandonment of habeas corpus. His prompt rejection (he has since qualified it) of General Clark’s commonsensical observation re McCain pandered to the worst, war-adoring sentimentalism of the Republicans’ guns-and-churches crowd. With his support for extending the death penalty to non-capital crimes, Obama aligned himself with the primitive weltanschauung of the American heartland — the ‘red’ states — and against the sensibility of that nation’s comparatively cosmopolitan coasts (to say nothing of scandalizing his myriad European supporters). Charlton Heston would have cheered his defence of the Supreme Court’s overturning of DC’s gun-control law. And so on.
By last Wednesday, the rightwing Wall Street Journal felt able to jeer that the reason Obama kept likening a McCain presidency to a Bush third term was so that no one might notice that his own presidency would in fact be ‘George Bush’s third term.’ The pro-Obama blogs were wild with grief, and an almost insupportable sense of betrayal. One columnist titled his piece ‘The Audacity of Cynicism.’ When on Wednesday Obama allowed that he might yet “refine” his position on Iraq, the uproar was instant, and so huge that Obama was forced to call a press conference to try to quash it.
Even The New York Times — which supports Obama — editorialized on Friday, with evident sorrow:
“Senator Barack Obama stirred his legions of supporters, and raised our hopes, promising to change the old order of things. He spoke with passion about breaking out of the partisan mold of bickering and catering to special pleaders, promised to end President Bush’s abuses of power and subverting of the Constitution and disowned the big-money power brokers who have corrupted Washington politics… Mr. Obama’s shifts are striking because he was the candidate… of passionate convictions who did not play old political games.”
And the paper concluded scathingly (throwing Obama’s campaign slogan back at him): “We don’t want any ‘redefining’ on these big questions. This country needs change it can believe in.”
Obama’s suddenly-embattled defenders in the press — a tiny fraction of those who would have leapt to his defence just a fortnight ago — did what they could. They pointed (with some justification) to important distinctions between the secular riders attached to his ‘faith-based initiative’ and GW Bush’s unrestrainedly ‘theocratic’ one. They argued (citing Nafta, unfortunately) that some flipflops are the result of genuine enlightenment. They explained that Obama was now merely acting out the ‘moderation’ he had long professed. Situating themselves in the ‘grown-ups’ realm of real politik, they defended Obama’s reversals as mandatory if he wished to be elected president and not merely to be remembered as a seven-days wonder, ‘like George McGovern.’
The NYT’s editorial, however, put its finger firmly on the second major flaw of the moving-to-the-centre scenario.
The reality is that, all along, Obama has been leading not just a party, or a faction of a party, but a movement. And what is at stake in November is not merely another election but catharsis: a moment of national absolution for a country roundly sullied and disgraced by eight years of the Bush administration’s barbaric policies.
The easy explanation — and it may be the only comprehensible one — for Obama’s sudden and tectonic shifts of position is that he assumes he has a lock on the blue states and seriously means to fight McCain for the red ones. But if that’s the case, he may for the first time be fatally misunderstanding the mood of his country. America isn’t longing for a new president, or even for an historic ‘first black president.’ America is longing for redemption.
Woe betide Obama if he doesn’t realize that.
