“The Meaning Of Obama”?

During the recent election the Right was often accused of waging a campaign of unmitigated hate against Obama. Whether hateful or not, I certainly posted a good deal of criticism of Obama here. Thus I thought it might be useful (even fair and balanced) to listen in for a moment on what the Left is saying. Here’s are some excerpts from a good example by Michael Lind, who discusses “the meaning of Obama” as he explains to a British audience how and why “[t]he new president has a chance to redefine American liberalism”:

• His election was “an example of colour-blind democracy,” although setting that example was not the reason whites voted for him.

• If Bush’s presidency was an aberration, then Obama’s election can be seen as a restoration. On the other hand, if Bush’s presidency was typical of an earlier pattern, then Obama’s election can be viewed as a novel departure.

  … Obama’s election was a restoration, not a transformation.

• Obama, the product of left-wing Chicago activism, moved to the centre by brutally repudiating his mentor, the radical black preacher Jeremiah Wright, denouncing the Supreme Court for restricting the death penalty, musing about invading Pakistan to hunt down al Qaeda and preaching nearly universal tax cuts like a Republican, all the while making “change” his mantra.
• During the campaign he aptly compared himself to a Rorschach test, in which people saw what they wanted to see.
• Obama has authored two autobiographies but still seems sphinxlike. In part this is the result of successful dissimulation; though he was hardly the “pal of terrorists” the right made him out to be on the basis of his association with a former Weatherman radical, Obama was quite left-wing in his earlier career. But there seems to be a genuine indeterminacy, a certain chameleon quality, in the “Barry” Obama who reverted to “Barack.”
• Opportunism can be a virtue in a statesman. And Obama’s opportunism is breathtaking.
• Opportunism can be a virtue in a statesman. And Obama’s opportunism is breathtaking. When his long association with the black nationalist Wright became an issue, Obama gave a televised address in which he said he could no more disown Wright than his own white grandmother. Garry Wills declared in The New York Review of Books that Obama’s “speech about race,” defending his association with Wright, was at the level of Lincoln’s second inaugural address in 1860. Within weeks, to the discomfort of his sycophants in the press, Obama had publicly disowned Wright, tossing him aside as an obstacle to his campaign. [Ed: He, of course, also tossed aside his “typical white person” grandmother.]
• One of the character flaws of George W Bush was his inability to sacrifice friendship to statesmanship…. This is not how Obama will go about staffing or running his administration.
• If the left stands for equality, in what sense are the Democrats a party of the left? Obama showed his contempt for the white working class when, in what he thought was a secret meeting with rich donors in San Francisco, he said white working-class voters who favoured Hillary Clinton were “bitter” people who “cling to guns, or religion,” or their antipathy to people unlike themselves…. Like every Democrat since George McGovern in 1972, Obama won the votes of an affluent white minority, plus solid non-white majorities, while losing the white working class. It is a very strange party of the left that combines the enlightened rich with the unskilled servants who work for them against a native majority working class. But then, a similar mutation of the left seems to be occurring in Europe.
• So, after a generation in which they denounced any deviation from free-market orthodoxy as the kind of old thinking that had marginalised the party, the Clintonian New Democrats are almost as clueless as the Republicans…. With all the talk of a new New Deal under Obama, you might think there would be neo-New Dealers waiting in the wings with volumes of plans. But the New Deal strain of liberalism is all but extinct in progressive think tanks and university faculties…. In their purge, the neoliberal thought police successfully limited the socially acceptable left in the US to a combination of support for free markets with support for public goods like universal health care plus mildly redistributive tax credits for the losers from globalisation.
• The Democratic party is in equally bad shape when it comes to thinking about foreign policy. The few ideas it has are those of the Clinton years, and most are now irrelevant.
• Obama’s movement has so far been a personality cult, not a true movement with a substantive agenda. He is the leader of a party dominated by ideas about domestic policy that now seem trivial in their incrementalism, a party whose ideas about muscular US interventionism have been doomed by the costs of the Iraq quagmire.

If this is what Obama’s supporters think of him, what’s left for the rest of us to say?