Barack
Obama: The Mania
And The Mirage
By Glen Ford
20 January, 2007
Black
Agenda Report
“Mirage” is the best
metaphor for Barack Obama. He shimmers on the horizon, a promise of…something.
But as one draws closer, Obama dissipates into nothingness – which
is his purpose.
Like a mirage, Obama floats
as an illusion in the political intersections between hot and cool air.
It is the place he seeks: the deliberately chosen – yet ever-shifting
– layer between other forces that are themselves constantly moving
across the landscape. As the Illinois Senator this weekend announced
his intention to create a presidential “exploratory committee,”
corporate pundits pegged him as nestled in the Democratic niche between
Hillary Clinton, to his right – based her relatively “hot”
air on Iraq – and the much cooler, if not frigid, temperatures
at the base of the party. That’s Obama’s intermediary comfort
zone – a place of ever-interpretable impressions.
"I've been struck by
how hungry we all are for a different kind of politics,” said
Obama in a video posted on his website. “So I spent some time
thinking about how I could best advance the cause of change and progress
we so desperately need.” Ahh, so that’s what the period
between now and February 10, when he will make his presidential intentions
official, is all about: thinking time.
Obama is known for choosing
his words very carefully. His admirers say that’s a sign of his
conscientious nature, that he doesn’t want to inadvertently say
the wrong thing, to speak irresponsibly. The truth is, Obama is determined
to say next to nothing substantive at all, unless it is designed to
position himself in some mellow region between opposing forces.
“Obama is determined
to say next to nothing substantive at all.”
Obama claims, "I didn't
expect to find myself in this position a year ago.” Amazing. I
suppose that’s why he has been so careful to navigate to the right
of his fellow Democratic senator from Illinois, Dick Durbin; why he
spent 2005 and 2006 mouthing
“mush” on the Iraq war, and still continues
to do so; why he told me point-blank, three weeks before being sworn
in as U.S. senator, that he would not push for universal health care
– the very issue that had made him a darling of progressives as
a state senator, but which had burned Hillary Clinton when she was First
Lady. Obama runs from even the flicker of a flame.
"The decisions that
have been made in the past six years have put our country in a precarious
place," he said. What the hell does that mean? Exactly what it
is supposed to: next to nothing. By February 10, Obama will have crafted
a catch-phrase that captures some vague mood of distress among the electorate.
But he needs the time to measure the barometer, temperature and wind
flow, and situate himself accordingly – the perfect mirage.
Barack Obama is a lawyer
by training, but could easily have made a career on Madison Avenue,
where “impressions” are the holy grail. The most effective
commercials are those that provoke the consumer to provide her own impressions
of the product, through word and image association. Obama’s special
genius is to elicit self-generated positive impressions from a wide
range of consumers/observers – most dramatically, from consumers
across the color line – while saying nothing of substance.
“Obama could
easily have made a career on Madison Avenue.”
Corporate media, an extension
of Madison Avenue, eats this crap up. Barack Obama has “wide appeal”
and is, therefore, a “saleable” product. But what are they
selling, and to whom? They (and Obama) are certainly not selling an
end to U.S. wars of aggression, or universal health care, or the right
to housing, education, and a minimal standard of income. Most insidiously,
Obama-mania does not even market substantive measures toward racial
justice. Quite the opposite: it presents an Obama presidential candidacy
as a palliative – a soothing potion – that on its face serves
as an historical benchmark showing how far “America” –
meaning white America – has come.
Such is Obama’s carefully
orchestrated message: Vote for me, and I’ll set you free –
free like me! – from any obligation to reverse centuries of past
wrongs or current crimes against African Americans; free to abandon
universal health care as a national priority; free to warn Iraqis that
there will be “no
more coddling” of them, as if 600,000 Iraqis have
died from excess coddling; free to threaten “surgical missile
strikes” against Iran in early 2006, and free to later back away
from the warmongers’ bully pulpit when the political winds changed.
Free!
Commercialization is the
great diversion in U.S. society: the creation of false realities that
are “sold” far beyond conventional points-of-purchase. For
decades corporations (and their two political parties) have been marketing
an empty package labeled “new, improved America,” a product
that miraculously cures the nation’s ills without the trauma of
relinquishing white privilege and forging a real social compact among
Americans, or of abandoning an imperial foreign policy. Barack Obama
has cynically signed on as the beaming face on the package of that product.
In Obama’s mind, the
game is all about “impressions” – ephemeral things
that are very much like mirages. Having no substance – poof! –
in a minute, they are gone, leaving us to anxiously await the appearance
of the next illusions of light and temperature, or messages that seem
to solve ancient ills, but actually promise…nothing.
Barack Obama has methodically
created the impression that he feels no special obligation to African
Americans (“There's
not a black America and white America and Latino America
and Asian America; there's the United States of America.”) –
the source of his meteoric rise. It matters not what he feels inside,
or what he wrote in a decade-old biography. Obama has eagerly signed
on as a candidate of the center-right of the Democratic Party –
a hair’s-breadth from Hillary Clinton, with whom I suspect he
will eventually team-up.
And what do African Americans
get out of the deal? Far less than nothing. By assisting white Americans
to believe that painless absolution of collective responsibility for
the past and current national sins can be achieved by looking kindly
on an ingratiating Black man’s presidential candidacy, Obama has
become an active participant in the Great Diversion. He repeatedly reinforces
the notion that noisy “partisan politics” is what’s
wrong with America, rather than rapacious corporations, structural and
overt racism, and rampaging militarism.
“He has eagerly
signed on as a candidate of the center-right of the Democratic Party.”
As BAR Managing Editor Bruce
Dixon has written, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), the announced presidential
contender whose name is seldom uttered in the corporate media, is the
“blackest
candidate in the ring.” Kucinich’s voting record
“matches the best of the Congressional Black Caucus across the
board” and is far more in tune with the historical Black Consensus
on issues of peace and social justice than Sen. Obama’s over the
past two years.
However, African Americans
will certainly flock to Obama’s candidacy, both emotionally and
– if he doesn’t shift his weight to the Clintons before
the primaries – with their votes. Despite the passage of four
decades since the Black Freedom Movement defeated official apartheid,
a Jim Crow mentality continues to haunt Black politics, one that celebrates
every prospect of a Black face in a high place. The presidency is, of
course, the ultimate brass ring. African Americans yearn to vicariously
grasp it – even if the candidate has labored mightily to distance
himself from them.
It is true, as Francis
Kornegay wrote in the January 10 issue of BAR, that Black
(and white) progressives must come to grips with “the unfolding
Obama-mania.” In many ways, the Black aspect of Obama-mania is
as caught up in historical contradictions as is the white side of the
phenomenon. We will have to wrestle with both.
BAR Executive Editor Glen
Ford can be contacted at [email protected]This
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