Bird that Sings

1/09/08

Some years ago a friend of mine moved from Philadelphia out to the Bay Area. A mutual friend of ours had died in tragic circumstances several months before at the age of 21 and my friend, who we will call KC, felt he had to get away from Philly. In the Seventies, before gentrification and the exploding, prohibitive cost of housing kicked in, the Bay Area was a destination for black artist types, something like Paris must have been in the Forties, Fifties and early Sixties.

KC, who is a poet, said he felt the difference between Philly and the Bay Area almost immediately. In Philly, if you weren’t ready to fight when you left the house in the morning, it was probably best not to leave the house. In California, KC said, everyone was nice, or at least they were back then. The only problem was that sometimes they were too nice. He mentioned some young white people he had met who wanted him to be their black friend. Sometimes, he said, they seemed to want an excuse to shake his hand or even. . . touch him, and as you can imagine, it was weirding him out a little.

I can’t help noticing that since the Iowa caucuses, White America seems to want Barack Obama to be their black friend. I made this observation to my wife as we were watching the Democratic debate from New Hampshire Saturday night. She agreed but asked, “what’s wrong with that?” And I had to admit, there’s nothing really wrong with it, but it is weirding me out a little.

The problem with Barack Obama’s candidacy is not necessarily Barack Obama. Watching the debate the other night it struck me both how far Obama’s come in the course of the campaign as well as how unique and talented a politician he is. Apart from any policy or ideological considerations, Obama clearly appeared to be the most Presidential of the four candidates on the podium. Even besides the stentorian voice, it’s an unquantifiable thing Obama’s got. I think it was Norman Mailer in his famous “Superman goes to the Supermarket” piece about JFK who brought back the old Max Weber term “charisma” to describe Kennedy, and it certainly fits Obama as well.

You can see why people got so excited about Obama after his keynote speech at the Democratic Convention in 2004 and how that excitement has sort of fed on itself ever since.

I get it, but I just can’t get with it. God knows I’d prefer not to be a player hater, but it appears fate has fingered me for that role.

Which is to say that from where I sit, no matter how talented Obama is—and how smart David Axelrod and Obama’s handlers are—Obama is almost by definition a media candidate. The genius of Obama’s candidacy is supposed to be that Obama is not just talking about change, but symbolizing it. Obama is actually supposed to be the change everybody else is talking about. But to me, this is not really politics; this is a PR campaign.

Since Obama announced, the pundits have been talking about the “Rock star” quotient Obama brings to the table, but Obama is not the politician as a Rock star, Obama is the Pop star as a politician. Obama is not here to entertain or edify us; he’s here to be consumed, like the wine and the wafer. “Change” is Obama’s “brand.” It really doesn’t matter what kind of change he’s talking about.

When viewed in this context, Barack Obama, no matter what his actual politics are, can be seen to be the very antithesis of a “change candidate.” Obama is the ultimate cog in the corporate system’s machine, like a widget or an I-phone; a stylish accouterment of consumption.

Since Obama is not actually running as a politician but as a Pop Star, it might be instructive to compare him to the other current favorite, deep pop star, on college campuses and post collegiate scenes around the country. That would be the late reggae superstar, Bob Marley.

Recently, a college student stunned me with the remark that Bob Marley could be elected President of the United States on the strength of the youth vote if he was running today. After recovering myself, I replied that one, Marley was born in Jamaica, disqualifying him from ever being President of the US, and that two, he is dead, further disqualifying him.

I also offered my opinion that the reason Marley is so popular among youth is precisely because he is dead, because kids can make an icon of Marley, independent of who he actually he was and what he represented. Nevertheless the conversation got me thinking.

As it happens I think the thing I liked best about Marley when he was alive was his ability to symbolize the change he was singing about. Yes, the very thing that Obama is attempting. The differences are that one, Marley wasn’t running for President, and two he was attempting to negotiate the inherent conflict between being a pop star and an agent of change, not pretending it didn’t exist. And finally, there was the content of Marley’s songs themselves. Here’s the first verse of “Babylon System.”

“We refuse to be what you wanted us to be
We are what we are
That’s the way it’s going to be.
You can’t educate us, for no equal opportunity
Talkin’ bout my freedom, talkin’ bout my freedom,
People, freedom and liberty . .”

If there was ever a more stark expression of both the black cultural nationalist and the anti-colonial mindset, I haven’t heard it. Even in death, Bob Marley cannot be consumed whole by the Babylon System he both reviled and was attracted to.

Barack Obama on the other hand, has more in common with Michael Jordan than Martin Luther King and from my point of view that’s a real shame. Obama is as naturally gifted a politician as we’ve seen in this country in a long time, and while his instincts may be suspect, I suspect his intelligence is not.

Hillary Clinton’s not right about much, but she is right about the problem with Obama; he is too inexperienced to be President. You could make the case that John Kennedy was about Obama’s age when he ran for President, but Kennedy had already been in the Senate for eight years and the House for six years when he was elected. He had also clearly been planning a run for the Presidency since at least the mid Fifties, and at the ’56 Democratic Convention, had launched an unsuccessful campaign to get himself on the ticket as Adlai Stevenson’s Vice Presidential running mate.

Obama by contrast, was not planning on running until he was more or less shanghaied into it by popular demand a year and half ago. It’s almost absurd that Obama’s running and that’s why he has to run this kind of pop campaign, reminiscent of the title character in VS Naipaul’s first novel, “The Mystic Masseur.” Obama simply doesn’t have another choice.

At this point the best argument for Obama is one he’s not making, that he’s all that stands between Hillary Clinton and the nomination. I still wouldn’t waste my vote on Obama in a primary (though I would of course vote for him in a general) but it’s a pretty good argument.

For one night in New Hampshire though, the argument was different, and not in a way anyone would have predicted. Like the women of New Hampshire I found myself rooting for Hillary, but not for the same reason. I was hoping Hillary would stop Obama; women in New Hampshire, incredibly enough, voted for Hillary because they felt sorry for her. For one night, Sisterhood was indeed powerful. I’m not a Hillary hater so much as I am a Clinton hater, but you can’t help thinking that’s a beautiful thing—as long as it stays in New Hampshire.

The truth about Hillary, as Obama said, is she’s not so bad. Hillary is obviously very smart and capable. It’s the company she keeps that’s the problem. If Hillary were not running explicitly (though my guess is the Clintonites have learned their tactical lesson in this regard) as an agent of the Clinton restoration, she might be able to see what’s happened in this country over the past twenty five years with fresh eyes. She might be able to take an honest look at the role of the Clinton administration in bringing to us to this desperate pass, instead blaming it all on Bush. She might be able to see things as her supposed hero Eleanor Roosevelt would have.

For now though, John Edwards is right, and Hillary is wrong. Hillary claims she is doer, not a talker, but what we see from the Clintons is that they talk like populists and do like corporate democrats. As Edwards says, no matter what the corporate Democrats say to get elected, once in power there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between them and the corporate Republicans.

All the pundits of course tell us that Edwards is finished, and frankly on Tuesday morning, I kind of thought so myself. I thought Obama was going to take New Hampshire and sweep to the nomination. Ironically, now Obama needs Edwards in the race to keep all the hard core, white working class Democrats from going to Clinton. And Edwards probably should stay in the race, to deny Hillary the nomination if nothing else, even while hoping for lightning to strike with his own candidacy.

Whatever the case, it’s hard to say what will happen the rest of this political season. Already there is a witchy feeling to this year that reminds me somehow of 1968, and not necessarily in a good way.

All the candidates of both parties seem to be presupposing that the status quo; economic, social, political, even environmental will maintain from now through the election. I’m not sure of much, but I’m pretty sure that the status quo is not going to make it ‘til spring, let alone fall, and that the politics of the moment are going to radically shift because of it.

There is the sense that we are at the end of something, and perhaps about to experience the violent pangs attendant at the birth of something new. One thing we know about this year already; lightning will strike. Anything could happen.

Hillary Clinton: Center-leftist?

In its recent Election ’08 issue, The Nation magazine offers this assessment, “Hillary Clinton has proven herself a dedicated centrist and when the center moves left, she has shown she can move too.”

The Nation is certainly not wrong about Hillary, but their evaluation brought to mind an encounter of my own from thirty-five years before.

I was sitting at a McDonald’s—eating a fish fillet—when a friend and fellow activist proposed “a game.” He wanted to create an absolute political scale from left to right and place various national and local political figures ideologically along its’ grid. The point of the game, according to my friend Roger, was to determine who was the most liberal politician, with the unspoken implication being, that the most liberal politician was “the best” politician. For those of you who didn’t live it, this was a real early 70’s state of mind.

I was about seventeen at the time but even then there was something about this exercise that struck me as wrongheaded. I may have even told my friend Roger, the erstwhile President of the University of Pennsylvania Graduate Students Association, that I thought he was barking up the wrong tree.

I might have told him that there was no absolute political scale of Right to Left, and that “who was the most liberal” was the wrong question to ask. The better question, then as now, would have been “Which side are you on?”

It’s been a long time since this question has been relevant to any American election cycle, but remarkably, with so many candidates claiming the mantle of change, it has become so in this one. However, to understand who is the real candidate of change, it’s necessary to understand just what needs changing.

Ronald Reagan was elected President in 1980, as a new kind of Conservative, one who turned liberal politics on its head by proclaiming himself the heir of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. In Reagan’s world it was the Democrats who had betrayed FDR’s legacy, turning the latter’s party into a haven for appeasers, druggies and perhaps most damningly, elitists, out of touch with the lives and concerns of every day Americans.

The attack on the supposedly liberal elites, echoing older Republican attacks on the so-called “pointy headed liberals,” was the opening salvo of a broader attack in what came to be known as the culture wars.

In the Reagan years we got the War on Drugs and the rising influence of evangelical Christianity on American politics. We got Lynne Cheney, in her role as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, attacking new history textbooks of the period for supposedly over emphasizing slavery and genocide against Native Americans, while not sufficiently emphasizing “what was good about America.” We got the War against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the arming of death squads all through Central America as a bulwark against communist subversion in our hemisphere.

However perhaps more important than the cultural and political Reaction of the Reagan years was the rediscovery and aggressive application of the free market economic theories of University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman.

It was Friedman’s contention that if the government would just take the shackles (excessive regulation, trade protectionism, worker and union rights etc) off industry and business, then the gusher of ensuing economic growth would lift all of society’s boats together.

Under Reagan, Friedman’s principles were applied not just domestically, leading to the loosening or abandonment of regulation in most sectors of the economy, but internationally.
US development agencies together with the US controlled International Monetary Fund and World Bank began to link promises of aid with demands for the nation-states of the developing world to convert to Free Market principles. This forced economic conversion of the developing world, eerily paralleling the rise of Islam a millennium before, was called “structural adjustment.”

The application of Friedmanomics also coincided with the long-term decline of American manufacturing. With the rationalization of the world economy, it no longer made economic sense for manufacturing to be done in the high wage, developed world when it could be done more cheaply elsewhere.

The new economy of the developed world was instead supposed to be based on brains rather than brawn. The West and America in particular were now to be powered by the new technology revolution and by the rise of Wall Street and the Financial Markets, by the business of Money itself.

The totality and seamlessness of the Reagan Revolution led some exultant neo-right wingers to proclaim, and not for the last time, the beginning of a thousand year Republican Reich. However it was not to be.

It turned out that there was a key political contradiction between the Reaganite emphasis on values and its rationalizing economic engine. The decline of manufacturing was felt disproportionately by the “Reagan Democrats,” mostly blue collar and working class whites who had cheered on Reagan’s appropriation of the cultural mantle of FDR. These Democrats, the ones who had responded to Reagan’s evocation of the optimism of post World War II America, of the shining “city on the hill,” now saw their jobs being shipped overseas. They saw themselves being phased out, marginalized by the rise of the new technological and financial elites.

By 1988 the table had clearly been set for a Democrat to address the rising political- economic dislocation and inequality of Reagan’s America. Almost any Democrat could have won that election, but especially a Democrat with working class roots, who addressed the epic political-economic hypocrisy and dishonesty of the Reagan regime.

Instead we got Michael Dukakis who stressed “leadership and management.”

When a Democrat finally was elected in 1992, in response to the economic failures of the first Bush administration, there was hope that there might finally be a pushback, politically, economically and culturally, against the excesses of what still was (and truthfully, still is) the Reagan era.

Instead we got William Jefferson Clinton, a sort of Rabellaisian figure, Michael Dukakis on steroids.

Chief among the failures of the Clinton years, beyond his seeming inability to keep his thing in his pants, was the failure to address the legacy of Reagan and Reaganism. Rather, in the economic sphere, Clinton, through his extraordinarily able Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, furthered the Reagonian rationalization of the economy. The success of the Clinton era economy is often looked back on now as his great achievement but its long-term consequences for the country and the world have proved disastrous.

The difference between Clinton, Reagan and for that matter, the Bushes, was that under Clinton, we were actually told us that yes, we were going to lose our manufacturing jobs, but it was going to be alright. In the future, they told us, we would all be going to college to get better jobs in the new economy, and jobs that paid more to boot.

A full economic cycle later we can see that this was not the case. The jobs that replaced the lost manufacturing work were largely service jobs, shit jobs, non-union jobs. We see that the only way many Americans are able to keep their heads above water is by going so deeply into debt they never expect to get out of it. And we begin to sense that Ross Perot was right and Robert Rubin was wrong, that a great power cannot survive the loss of it’s manufacturing base.

Meanwhile the financial, business and tech sectors of the economy continue to boom, creating not only a two-tier economy, but a level of class stratification previously unknown in modern America.

The failure of the Clintonites to address the rise of debt as the engine of American prosperity set the template for the speculative frenzy that has ultimately led the country and the world to the brink of a catastrophic financial collapse. Further, their inclination to allow Wall Street financial empires to dictate government economic policy has created a de-facto permanent government; an interface of the large Investment houses and the State complete with a well known cast of characters—like Robert Rubin and Henry Paulson—continually passing through the revolving door from one branch of the permanent government to the other.

The final failure of the Clintonites to roll back the Reagan legacy is perhaps the most damning. It was the acceptance of the commodification of every day life; what the kids see when they watch “The Matrix.” It’s what happened to us in the 70’s and 80’s when the market realized it could sell anything to anyone; that the only bad drugs were the ones that made us not want to shop. It was and remains the real deal death of values that the Christian value voters never seem to address: the concept that nothing has an inherent value of its own, only what it can fetch on the market. It’s the primacy of style over content where all the best stuff has a continual if impermanent sheen.

It is within this world without memory that the current election cycle takes place. In this world we are told that all the problems of America are the fault of the second George Bush, the stupid one, who actually believed that Jesus was going to bail out his sorry ass.

This is certainly the dominant narrative of Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Get rid of Bush, we get rid of the plague that is sickening America and we can all go back to business as usual. And Bush has been the worst President that I can remember, probably the worst of the modern era. But Bush didn’t create the current structural problems of the country.

Getting rid of Bush will be a good and great thing, but it doesn’t make the case for Hillary Clinton as President. The problem with Hillary is that she doesn’t really fit the political moment. Hillary’s politics are essentially an enlightened business-as-usual and it’s not clear the world can survive too much more of that. It also appears as though Hillary feels she is the carrier of her husband’s legacy and as we have seen, that legacy is part of the problem.

The final element of “the problem with Hillary” is that, as many others have said, she might not be electable, even against a Republican field that ranges from laughable to delusional. Can a Batman villain like Rudy Giuliani actually get elected? Can a John McCain, who thinks we are winning the war in Iraq—a war that wouldn’t exist if we weren’t in it—actually get a day pass out of the asylum where he must spend the nights? It’s hard to say, but certainly any Republican’s chances—or for that matter Michael Bloomberg’s chances—are greatly enhanced by a projected match up against Hillary.

As contrasted to Hillary, Barack Obama does fit the political moment but not in a good way. The problem with Obama’s politics is that they are, like the culture, cosmetic. Rather than run as an actual change candidate, Obama has chosen to run as a symbolic change candidate, a charismatic young bi-racial man as a symbol of change. However it’s hard to say what change Obama actually represents beyond his assurances of it.

And then there’s John Edwards. Edwards is not a perfect candidate, but Edwards is running a transformational political campaign, and in doing so, is addressing the real issues and challenges we face as a people and a species. Edwards is attacking the collusion of the investment banks, the insurance companies and your government. He’s calling those trade deals rammed through by the last Democratic President what they are, a sell out of the American working class to international Capital. Edwards is naming the system, the first viable Democrat in a Presidential campaign to do so in a long, long time.

If this election is really to be about change, the question for Hillary, Obama and Edwards becomes, who’s willing to take a stand against the system? Who’s willing to take a risk on behalf of people who’ve been locked out or left behind; people without influence, people who might not even show up to vote? If this election is really to be about change, the question for Hillary, Obama and Edwards is “Which side are you on?” By that measure, I think the candidate of change is fairly obvious.

Dear John,

I’ve been waiting over the past months for your campaign to take off and I can’t help noticing it’s not.
This is upsetting to those of us who fear a Clinton vs. Obama race for the Democratic nomination. Personally I don’t think this country can take another day of a Clinton presidency, let alone four more years. I’ve held my nose and voted for every Democratic Presidential candidate since I was 18 and a Democratic Ward committeeman in my hometown of Philadelphia, but I cannot vote for Hillary Clinton, even in a general election. I know the stakes are high in this election but Hillary’s candidacy just smells too damn bad.

Meanwhile Obama reminds one of Bill Clinton, with his claims of being beyond partisanship and his winks and nods to the base of the party, implying that once in office he’ll do the right thing. Bill Clinton also campaigned on every side of every issue but got elected anyway because he was obviously the smartest and most capable guy in the field.

In my view at least, Clinton was also a terrible President, picking all the wrong battles, and losing the ones he picked; a man with a big stomach for politics but no heart for the good fight. Clinton talked like a populist but chose not to address the rise of greed as the engine of American prosperity; rather he subtly encouraged it.

Obama handlers are right to cast him as the charismatic conciliator because frankly, that’s the only way a black man’s going to get elected President this side of the Jordan. But in the miraculous event that Obama actually got elected, the malefactors of great wealth and their smooth operators would do such a number on him, Obama would end up making Bill Clinton look like Eugene Debs by comparison.

We live in a time of incipient financial collapse, class stratification unseen since before the rise of the modern labor movement and impending ecological catastrophe. We need change, and a candidate of change. By all rights, you should be that candidate.

Personally, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with your message. I think that many Democrats, especially those that vote in primaries, like your message. There is the sense though of a certain dissonance between the message and the messenger, plus the feeling that you’re just trying too hard to connect.

I don’t think you’re going to be able to ignore this disconnect and still win in Iowa, but like Bob Marley once sang, “when one door is closed, another is open.”

In one of the Democratic debates, a questioner asked if you believed in a personal God that intervenes in human affairs, or something to that effect. You answered that no, with all that’s happened to you and your loved ones in this life, you just couldn’t believe in that.

I think the nature of your belief is the key for you in this campaign. If one doesn’t believe in a personal God who intervenes in human affairs, what does a person have to believe in? The answer quite simply, is hope itself. Hope is the face of God in this world.

You know this of course. You campaigned on it in 2004. In fact let me quote from the end of your Vice Presidential acceptance speech at the Democratic Convention of that year.

You said, “Like all of us, I have learned a lot of lessons in my life. Two of the most important are that first, there will always be heartache and struggle–you can’t make it go away. But the other lesson is that people of good and strong will can make a difference . . .
. . . We choose hope over despair, possibilities over problems, optimism over cynicism. We choose to do what’s right even when those around us say “You can’t do that.” We choose to be inspired because we know that we can do better–because this is America where everything is still possible.”

Every great populist campaign has had as its’ underpinning the implicit religious belief that in serving justice and the cause of the common people, we are doing the work of God in this world.

If I were you, I would take those two paragraphs from late in your 2004 nomination speech and make both a thirty second spot and a sixty second spot out of them. The thirty-second spot would essentially just record that moment in time.

The Sixty-second spot would begin with you on the podium at the convention in front of the cheering delegates. In a voice over, behind the visuals, we would hear a short–compatible– snippet of your current message, that “our society is being undermined by the growing gulf between the elites and the rest of us. Goldman-Sachs and the permanent government have Henry Paulsons and Robert Rubins to fight for them but who will fight for “everyday people” against a corrupt system rigged on behalf of the rich and the powerful?

Then we would see and hear that same excerpt from the speech in 2004. (Forgive me if I got a little specific here, but I’ve been making documentaries for the past twenty or so years and got carried away)

Beyond the two spots, I would–if I were you– sit down and write another stump speech. It would encompass the transcendental themes of the 2004 excerpt, the more pointed themes of today and make the connection between the two.

The speech would say something like, that when confronted with the almost impossible odds against social justice and social equity, hope is God’s way of getting us up each day to fight for a world worth living in. This fight is not just for the sake of the poor and the oppressed, but for the sake of humanity itself.

The stakes have never been higher. More than ever, here on spaceship earth, we’re all in this together. . . Something like that.

It is a bit late in the primary day, Senator Edwards, but like some prophet or other must have said once, where there’s life, there’s hope.

I would seriously consider using that before David Axelrod steals it for Obama.

As they say down in New Orleans, bon chance, bon courage. Hope is on the way.

Best,
Larry