IN SEARCH OF OBAMA

Links to full Paul Street articles at bottom

MONEY, ECONOMY & LABOR

AUDACITY OF HOPE - "Conservatives and Bill Clinton were right about welfare"

PAUL STREET - He opposed an amendment to the Bankruptcy Act that would have capped credit card interest rates at 30 percent.

Obama voted for a business-friendly "tort reform" bill that rolls back working peoples' ability to obtain reasonable redress and compensation from misbehaving corporations

THE NATION - John Edwards and Hillary Clinton are pledging substantial federal resources to stabilize the mortgage market and intervene on behalf of borrowers. Barack Obama's proposal is tepid by comparison, short on aggressive government involvement and infused with conservative rhetoric about fiscal responsibility. As he has done on domestic issues like healthcare, job creation and energy policy, Obama is staking out a position to the right of not only populist Edwards but Clinton as well. . . Though he has been a proponent of mortgage fraud legislation in the Senate, he has remained silent on further financial regulations. And much like his broader economic stimulus package, Obama's foreclosure plan mostly avoids direct government spending in favor of a tax credit for homeowners, which amounts to about $500 on average, beyond which only certain borrowers would be eligible for help from an additional fund. . .

Obama's disappointing foreclosure plan stems from the centrist politics of his three chief economic advisers and his campaign's ties to Wall Street institutions opposed to increased financial regulation. David Cutler and Jeffrey Liebman are both Harvard economists who served in the Clinton Administration, and they work on market-oriented solutions to social welfare issues. Cutler advocates improving healthcare through financial incentives; Liebman, the partial privatization of Social Security.

Austan Goolsbee, an economist at the University of Chicago who calls himself a "centrist market economist," has been most directly involved with crafting Obama's subprime agenda. . . Robert Pollin, an economist at the University of Massachussets, believes "these three advisers generally reflect Obama's very moderate economic program, similar to Clintonism." Wall Street apparently has come to a similar conclusion. Obama had received nearly $10 million in contributions from the finance, insurance and real estate sector through October, and he's second among presidential candidates of either party in money raised from commercial banks, trailing only Clinton. Goldman Sachs, which made $6 billion from devalued mortgage securities in the first nine months of 2007, is Obama's top contributor. When asked if Obama would hold these financial institutions accountable for losses incurred by homeowners and investors, his campaign refused to comment.

PAUL STREET - Obama has lent his support to the aptly named Hamilton Project, formed by corporate-neoliberal Citigroup chair Robert Rubin and "other Wall Street Democrats" to counter populist rebellion against corporatist tendencies within the Democratic Party.

IDEOLOGY

PAUL STREET - Obama was recently hailed as a "Hamiltonian" believer in "limited government" and "free trade" by Republican New York Times columnist David Brooks, who praises Obama for having "a mentality formed by globalization, not the SDS." . . .

POLITICS

PAUL STREET - He had to be shamed off the "New Democrat Directory" of the corporate-right Democratic Leadership Council by the popular left black Internet magazine Black Commentator.

The list was compiled by the DLC and Obama asked to be removed after he began getting flack about it - TPR

He lent his politically influential and financially rewarding assistance to neoconservative pro-war Senator Joe Lieberman's struggle against the Democratic antiwar insurgent Ned Lamont. Obama has supported other "mainstream Democrats" fighting antiwar progressives in primary races

Obama later reversed his position and supported Lamont in the general election - TPR

He criticized efforts to enact filibuster proceedings against reactionary Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.

Obama "dismissively" referred-in a "tone laced with contempt"-to the late progressive and populist U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone as "something of a gadfly."

He opposed an amendment to the Bankruptcy Act that would have capped credit card interest rates at 30 percent.

WASHINGTON TIMES - Barack Obama, the senatorial candidate of 2004, might have a bone to pick with Barack Obama, the presidential candidate of 2008. Videotapes of debates and speeches that were obtained by The Washington Times show that Mr. Obama took positions during his Senate campaign on nearly a half-dozen issues ranging from the Cuba embargo to health care for illegal aliens that conflict with statements that he has made during his run for the White House.

FOREIGN AFFAIRS

Obama voted to make John Negroponte the National Intelligence Director.

PAUL STREET - He voted for the appointment of the war criminal Condaleeza Rice to Secretary of State.

He refuses to foreswear the use of first-strike nuclear weapons against Iran.

WASHINGTON TIMES - In 2004, Mr. Obama told an audience at Southern Illinois University, "I think it's time for us to end the embargo with Cuba. . . It's time for us to acknowledge that that particular policy has failed." However, he stopped short of calling for an end to the embargo in a Miami Herald op-ed in August. He said he would rely on diplomacy, with a message that if a post-Fidel Castro government made democratic changes, the U.S. "is prepared to take steps to normalize relations and ease the embargo."

NEDRA PICKLER, ASSOCIATED PRESS - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama said Wednesday that he would possibly send troops into Pakistan to hunt down terrorists. . .

BUSH REGIME

AP- Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama laid out list of political shortcomings he sees in the Bush administration but said he opposes impeachment for either President George W. Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney. . . "I think you reserve impeachment for grave, grave breeches, and intentional breeches of the president's authority," he said.

HEALTH

PAUL STREET - Obama claims to oppose the introduction of single-payer national health insurance on the grounds that such a widely supported social-democratic change would lead to employment difficulties for workers in the private insurance industry-at places like Kaiser and Blue Cross Blue Shield. Does Obama support the American scourge of racially disparate mass incarceration on the grounds that it provides work for tens of thousands of prison guards?

WASHINGTON TIMES - Mr. Obama told an AFL-CIO group in June 2003: "I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer, universal health care plan." But in a recent debate he said he has never endorsed such a plan. "Senator Obama has always said that single-payer universal care is a good idea because it would increase efficiency in the system, but the problem is that it's not achievable," Mr. Vietor said.

CIVIL LIBERTIES

He voted to confirm Michael Chertoff as head of HSA

PAUL STREET - Obama voted to re-authorize the repressive PATRIOT Act.

He opposed Senator Russ Feingold's (D-WI) move to censure the Bush administration after the president was found to have illegally wiretapped U.S. citizens.

WASHINGTON TIMES - In an October 2003 NAACP debate, Mr. Obama said he would "vote to abolish" mandatory minimum sentences. "The mandatory minimums take too much discretion away from judges," he said. Mr. Obama now says on his web site that he would "immediately review sentences to see where we can be smarter on crime and reduce the ineffective warehousing of nonviolent drug offenders."

WHAT OTHERS SAY

WASHINGTON LOBBYIST - Big donors would not be helping out Obama if they didn't see him as a ‘player'. . . What's the dollar value of a starry-eyed idealist?

ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT

PAUL STREET - Obama assiduously supported the ethanol-promoting objectives of the Illinois-based firm Archer-Daniels Midland, which has provided him with private jets on at least two occasions. He has also defended the interests of Illinois' gigantic electrical firm Exelon, America's leading nuclear plant operator and a company that has given more than $74,000 to his campaigns.

NUCLEAR ENERGY

Obama voted for a nuclear energy bill that included money for bunker buster bombs and full funding for Yucca Mountain.

DALLAS NEWS - Barack Obama says nuclear power should be explored as an energy option. Hillary Rodham Clinton says she's "agnostic" on whether more nuclear plants should be built. . . "They've gone from 'no' to 'yes, but,' and some even describe themselves as agnostics, and that's a big improvement," said Derrick Freeman, senior director of legislative programs for the Nuclear Energy Institute, which supports the nuclear industry. . .

SOURCES OF FUNDING

PAUL STREET - His top career sponsors include Goldman Sachs, Exelon (a leading Midwestern utility and the world's leading nuclear plant operator), Soros Fund Management, J.P Morgan Chase & Co., a number of leading corporate law and lobbying firms (including Kirkland & Ellis, Skadden Arps, and Sidley Austin LLP), top Chicago investment interests (including Henry Crown & Co and Aerial Capital Management) and the like.

HIS BOOK

PAUL STREET - Obama relates youthful discomfort with his college roommates' "irresponsible" criticism of "capitalism" and then confesses respect for Ronald Reagan's supposed success in embodying what Obama calls "American's longing for order" (p. 31)

Obama commends "the need to raise money from economic elites to finance elections" for "prevent[ing] Democrats...from straying too far from the center" and for marginalizing "those within the Democratic Party who tend toward zealotry" (p. 38) and "radical ideas"

Obama praises fellow centrist Senators John F. Kerry (D-MA) and Hilary Clinton (D-NY) for "believing in maintaining the superiority of the U.S. military" and embracing "the virtues of capitalism" (p. 38). He applauds his "recognizably progressive" Third Way hero Bill Clinton for showing that "markets and fiscal discipline" and "personal responsibility [are] needed to combat poverty" (pp. 34-35).

Obama contends that defense of New Deal and Great Society programs is contrary to "the changing circumstances of globalization" (p.38).

Obama claims that the 1960s New Left expressed the same self-indulgent "more absolutism" (pp. 26-33) that animated the New Right.

The American people, Obama argues, harbor only modest expectation of their government (p.7), reflecting little concern (by Obama's account) with traditional left goals of social justice and equality.

In Obama's brand of "progressivism," serious concern over the nation's harsh disparities is consigned to leftist "cranks" and other assorted "unreasonable zealots" – people walking in the "absolutist" footsteps of Marx, the New Left, and (though Obama would never acknowledge this) the democratic socialist Martin Luther King, Jr.

Obama praises the United States' founders for "recognize[ing] that there were seeds of anarchy in the idea of individual freedom, an intoxicating danger in the idea of equality." If "everybody is truly free, without the constraints of birth or rank and an inherited social order," Obama asks, then "how can we ever hope to form a society that coheres?" (pp. 86-87)

The Bush-Cheney gang-bangers are "possessed," Obama says, "of the same mix of virtues and vices, insecurities and long-buried injuries as the rest of us."

Obama roots the greatness of America in its "free market" capitalist system and "business culture."

It is left to alienated carpers, "cranks" and "moral absolutists" of the "unreasonable" left (Obama's basic understanding of radicals) to observe the terrible outcomes of "our" distinctively anti-social (and incidentally heavily state-protected) "market system."

Obama criticizes "left-leaning populists" like "Venezuela's Hugo Chavez" for daring to think that developing nations "should resist America's efforts to expand its hegemony" and for trying to "follow their own path to development." Such dysfunctional "reject[ion] [of] the ideals of free markets and liberal democracy" will only worsen the situation of the global poor, Obama claims (p. 315).

THE MESSIAH AND HIS GROUPIES

I've been following politics since I was about 5. I've never seen anything like this. This is bigger than Kennedy. [Obama] comes along, and he seems to have the answers. This is the New Testament. - Chris Matthews

It's almost like the Messiah, you know? - Jan Young

He looked at me, and the look in his eyes was worth 1,000 words - Field worker

You don't need to debate policy or discuss the day's headlines. You have a very personal reason for investing your time and energy in this campaign – that is the most compelling story you can tell. - Obama site

The New Kennedy - Morgenpost, Berlin

"Obama's finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don't even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. The other great leaders I've heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence. - Ezra Klein

When you listen to Barack Obama, when you really hear him, you witness a very rare thing. You witness a politician who has an ear for eloquence and a tongue dipped in the unvarnished truth - Oprah Winfrey

HERETICS AND ATHEISTS

OBAMA MESSIAH

JOE KLEIN: INSPIRATION VS. SUBSTANCE

GLEN FORD: THE MANIA AND THE MIRAGE

BARACK OBAMA IS NOT JESUS

JAKE TAPPER: AND OBAMA WEPT

PAUL STREET ARTICLE MORE MORE