Barack
Obama: The New Jimmy Carter
By Greg Guma
28 July,
2008
Countercurrents.org
Since Barack Obama emerged
as the Democrat’s choice for president, the national mood has
frequently been compared to the late 1960s, another time when an unpopular
war polarized the nation. A recent ad for Republican candidate John
McCain makes this explicit, starting off with clips of 60s protesters
and “flower” children before warning that hope can be
a slippery slope. But the dynamics in 2008 may have more in common
with 1976, when a GOP discredited by Watergate, Richard Nixon’s
resignation (under the threat of impeachment) and his pardon by Gerald
Ford was defeated by a newcomer to national politics, Jimmy Carter.
Carter, an obscure but charming agribusinessman, became Georgia’s
governor in 1970 with the support of an Atlanta establishment in need
of someone who could talk populism while remaining in tune with corporate
interests. Similarly, Obama looks like an “anti-establishment”
politician but has played ball during most of his career with the
Chicago political establishment. He ran for the state and US Senate
as an outsider while operating like an insider, supported by Mayor
Richard Daley and the city’s wealthy Gold Coast.
By the mid-70s, Carter was the darling of Eastern opinion-makers,
meeting with David Rockefeller and lauded as a leader of the “New
South.” In 1973, he was recommended for membership in the newly
formed Trilateral Commission, a private international group that brought
together leaders from the North America, Western Europe and Japan.
Joining Carter on the North American section of the Commission were
Rockefeller, Time Magazine Editor Hedley Donovan, corporate lawyers
Cyrus Vance and Warren Christopher, Bendix Corporation chairman W.
Michael Blumenthal, IBM20director Harold Brown, UAW president Leonard
Woodcock, and eight other business, union, and political figures.
Zbigniew Brzezinski, a close friend of Rockefeller, became director
of the Commission.
Carter subsequently used Commission sources for much of his presidential
campaign strategy. A key document produced during this period was
The Crisis of Democracy, co-authored by Brzezinski associate Samuel
Huntington, who advised Carter during the campaign and subsequently
coordinated security planning for Carter’s National Security
Council. Brzezinski became National Security Advisor.
Huntington advised that a successful Democratic candidate for president
would have to emphasize energy, decisiveness, and sincerity while
coming across as an outsider. But the real lesson of the 1960s, he
added, was that political parties “could be easily penetrated,
and even captured, by highly motivated and well-organized groups with
a cause and a candidate.”
The appeal of Carter to the establishment was a combination of charm,
an “interesting” family, traditional values, and his outsider
image. But they knew he was essentially a “centrist” eager
to be all things to all people, as Laurence Shoup explained in The
Carter Presidency and Beyond. The same can be said of Obama.
Like Obama, Carter went from local curiosity to national phenomenon
in less than four years, during a period when the public lost faith
in the presidency and other national institutions. By 1975 The New
York Times was regularly publishing pro-Carter editorials, articles
and columns. Time Magazine was even more enthusiastic, in one feature
describing him as looking “eerily like John Kennedy from certain
angles” – and hammering the point home with a cover rendering.
The drumbeat continued right through primary season with coverage
that belittled competitors like Fred Harris, a real populist, with
headlines like “Radicalism in a Camper.” Carter meanwhile
received cover hypes like “Taking Jimmy Seriously.” The
rest of the mainstream media soon came on board.
Why was it happening? As Brzezinski recently noted in an interview,
there is no need to believe in hidden conspiracies. Groups like the
Trilateral Commission and Council on Foreign Relations don’t
conceal their intentions, he noted; you can easily find out what they
hope to see happen. Huntington’s diagnosis and prescriptions
were blunt, and remain relevant. The authority of government depends
on confidence and trust, he explained, and when these decline both
participation and polarization increase. “If the institutional
balance is to be redressed between government and opposition, the
decline in presidential power has to be reversed…”
Describing the surge in democratic aspirations as a form of “distemper,”
Huntington=2 0advised that some of the problems “stem from an
excess of democracy.” It’s just one way to exert authority,
he argued, and sometimes should be overridden by “expertise,
seniority, experience and special talents.” He also explained
that “the effective operation of a democratic political system
usually requires some measure of apathy and noninvolvement on the
part of some individuals and groups.” People sometimes make
too many demands, thus making democracy a threat to itself, he wrote.
The basic prescription was to restore respect for authority, particularly
in the presidency as an institution, and lower the general level of
expectations about what government can do.
When Carter became president, he packed his administration with members
of the center and liberal wings of the Eastern establishment. At least
27 high level officials were members of the Trilateral Commission
and Council on Foreign Relations, including Vice President Walter
Mondale, Vance, Brzezinski, Blumenthal, Christopher, Brown, and Donovan.
Pointing to an “alarming deterioration” in international
relations and the threat of “long-term disaster,” Brown
– as Secretary of Defense – prescribed leadership that
would persuade people “to make sacrifices of individual and
group advantages in order to produce long-term benefits of international
economic and political partnership abroad.” Carter’s job
was to restore trust and “renovate” the domestic and international
system while leaving its basic structure intact. The fact that he
failed in many respects is beside the point.
Now that Obama is the presumptive Democratic nominee, it’s becoming
apparent that his administration would have many things in common
with Carter’s. The leader of his foreign policy team is Susan
Rice, an assistant Secretary of State for African affairs in the Clinton
administration and, more to the point, a current member of the Trilateral
Commission’s North American Group. Until recently, Trilaterial
member James Johnson was on Obama’s vice presidential vetting
team. He stepped down after questions surfaced about loans he received
from Countrywide Financial Corp., a key player in the U.S. housing
crisis.
Other North American Trilateral members in Obama’s inner circle
include Brzezinski, former Clinton Secretary of State Madeleine Albright,
Michael Froman of Citigroup, and former Congressman Dick Gephardt,
along with Dennis Ross, Middle East envoy for Clinton and the first
President Bush, and James Steinberg. Additional Trilateral members
of team Obama include Warren Christopher and Clinton National Security
Advisor Anthony Lake.
According to a recent New York Times article, Ross, who accompanied
Obama to the Middle East in July, is often asked by Rice and Lake
for help in framing Obama’s comments on Iran and Israel. Steinberg,
a Dean at the University of Texas and member of both the Commission
and CFR, authored a white-paper titled, “Preventive War, A Useful
Tool.” In this telling essay, he wrote, “Unilateralism
is not the only alternative… regional organizations and a new
coalition of democratic states offer ways to legitimize the use of
force when the council fails to meet its responsibilities.”
The problem, he says, isn’t the Bush doctrine of “preventive
force but that it too narrowly conceives of its use.”
The renewed prominence of Brzezinski – architect of the “secret”
war in Afghanistan three decades ago – along with the appointment
of James Rodney Schlesinger, CIA director and Secretary of Defense
during the 1970s, to lead a senior-level task force on nuclear weapons
suggests that the process of moving from a neo-con to a Trilateral
approach is already underway. The prospect of a military showdown
with Iran would decrease during an Obama presidency, but confrontations
with Pakistan, China and Russia become more likely.
Faced with such harsh realities, some conclude that an Obama presidency
is still preferable to the disaster that is likely with John McCain.
O thers contend that the evidence reinforces the need for a third
party alternative. Both arguments have merit. Despite Carter’s
surrender to Trilateral logic, his presidency was a necessary reprieve
from morally and ideologically bankrupt Republican rule. And it’s
certainly vital to look beyond the two-party monopoly, however long
the road may be. But the truth is that, in Obama, a worried establishment
has found the vessel through which they hope to restore international
and domestic stability.
What do they hope to accomplish? Part of the agenda was revealed during
an April meeting of the Trilateral Commission in Washington, DC. During
panel discussions, the “suggestions” included increased
foreign aid – especially for Africa, paying back UN dues, intervention
on behalf of “financial institutions under stress,” and
a more liberal immigration approach. On the other hand, there was
much rationalizing about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And what does Obama say? While he pledges to end the war in Iraq,
he wants to leave behind a “residual” force of about 50,000
troops. He says his administration will emphasize diplomacy, yet describes
Iran as a terrorist state and pledges to use “all elements of
American power” to deal with it. “If we must use military
force,” Obama told the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee
(AIPAC), “we are more likely to succeed, and will have far greater
support at home and abroad, if we have exhausted our diplomatic efforts.”
As far as Afghanistan and Pakistan are concerned, he wants to send
at least 10,000 more U.S. troops to reinforce the 36,000 already there,
taking unilateral military action inside Pakistan if necessary, whether
its government agrees or not. “This is a war that we have to
win,” Obama explains. In Berlin last week, he called on Europe
to provide more troops to defeat the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The size
of the US military is likely to grow during an Obama presidency, and
the projection of US force, combined with diplomatic carrots and sticks,
will certainly continue.
Still, Obama’s Trilateral-influenced vision embraces reforms
that may bring some relief from the theocratically-infused Bush approach.
Supreme Court appointments will be more centrist, the health care
system may improve, and some of the worst abuses of the Bush years
could be rolled back. These are not insignificant changes, and the
pragmatic wing of the establishment, rapidly shifting in Obama’s
direction, seems to recognize that relief is essential if trust in
government is to be restored.
As Huntington noted more than 30 years ago, “democratic distemper”
makes allies nervous and enemies adventurous. “If American citizens
challenge the authority of the American government, why shouldn’t
unfriendly governments?” So, Obama – like Carter –
can be useful in calming things down and re-establishing confidence
in the legitimacy of the current political order. In short, he can
reinforce the argument that “the system” still works.
For those who want real change, he’s bound to be a disappointment.
But perhaps, along the road to inevitable disillusionment, at least
he may do a bit to ease the pain.
Greg Guma is an author and journalist living in Burlington.
He writes about media and politics on his website, Maverick Media
(http://muckraker-gg.blogspot.com/).
