what are barack obama's flaws?

ilikewherethisisgoing.jpg

history mayne OTM

An interesting dissection of the Afghanistan situation by Rory Stewart is in the NY Review of Books this week. He finds grounds for hope in Obama's announcement of the troop increase:

I felt as though I had come to hear a fifteenth-century scholastic and found myself suddenly encountering Erasmus: someone not quite free of the peculiarities of the old way, and therefore haunted by its elisions, omissions, and contradictions; but already anticipating a reformation. Obama's central—and revolutionary—claim is that our responsibility, our means, and our interests are finite in Afghanistan. As he says, "we can't simply afford to ignore the price of these wars." Instead of pursuing an Afghan policy for existential reasons - doing "whatever it takes" and "whatever it costs" — we should accept that there is a limit on what we can do. And we don't have a moral obligation to do what we cannot do.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23562

Offered without comment.

http://www.villagevoice.com/2010-01-12/columns/george-w-obama/

Dr Morbius could not be reached for comment

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/31378.html

(we're running on two threads here, but)

look i don't take politico when it runs cheney copy and i don't buy that shit either

"Common Cause, Democracy 21, the League of Women Voters and U.S. PIRG"

none of these are civil liberties-oriented groups, really

sorry that link was totally unrelated to Morbs, in case that wasn't obvious by the fact that those are not civil liberties groups

here's a much better takedown of one of obama's recurring rhetorical tropes:

http://whoisioz.blogspot.com/2010/01/one-of-these-things-just-doesnt-belong.html

"better" as in "makes sense as an argument" not "is true" necessarily

william greider:
Obama's style became an inadvertent formula for sapping the life out of the political majority that elected him, deflating the reach of reform and turning off the electoral base that came together in 2008. Democrats are being told (and telling themselves) that they over-reached, but what became clear as the months dragged on is the Democratic party under-achieved, and so did its president.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100201/greider

As I posted on a friend's fb status a little while ago: "Seriously, shoot everyone in the Senate in the face and make BO do a nationwide tour in the nude in a popemobile just to prove that he's actually got a pair of testicles, because I don't believe it."

Obama's style became an inadvertent formula for sapping the life out of the political majority that elected him, deflating the reach of reform and turning off the electoral base that came together in 2008.

This sentence is a very special mix of disingenuousness, hysteria, and ugly bitterness. Sorry, but cry me a fuckin' river. And stop blaming Obama. Even his nastiest critics will admit that the whole party is to blame. Which is how our government is set up. We don't elect kings, ppl.

I tend to fall on Morbs' side lately re:what he's not getting done. Oddly, none of those things are what motivated the voters of the creamy white rural center of Massachusetts to vote for a man who, the more I know about him, the more I consider him beneath contempt. He's about as far to the right as you can be without crossing the International Date Line, really. He's a Southern Baptist Cracker Asshole Republican, all the way home. Did Massachusetts know that? Did they care? One answer is as disturbing as the next. There's no good news on this front.

But that is no reflection on what I expected Obama to be doing in the past or future. I still think the Onion had a better point with "Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job".

hendrik hertzberg:
That Obama let the “outside game” part of the health-care drama get away from him, so focussed was he on the “inside game” of trying to force the legislative elephant through the Congressional keyhole, can no longer be denied. He and his team can also be faulted for the political (and perhaps substantive) inattention that has allowed the right to profit handsomely from the economic disaster that their policies, not Obama’s, brought about.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/hendrikhertzberg/2010/01/one-year-beware-of-sudden-downdrafts.html

He's about as far to the right as you can be without crossing the International Date Line, really. He's a Southern Baptist Cracker Asshole Republican, all the way home. Did Massachusetts know that? Did they care? One answer is as disturbing as the next. There's no good news on this front.

...but he's pretty indifferent about abortion.

Adolph Reed Jr., Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania:

In January 1996 I wrote the following about Barack Obama in my Village Voice column: "In Chicago, we've gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program--the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics."

...The only surprise about his presidency is how many ersatz leftists cling to the fiction that he's anything other than a superficially articulate neoliberal Democrat in the Clinton mold and that his administration would act in any other way.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20100201/forum/2

that paragraph is pretty vague huh. 'form' vs. 'substance' -- MEANINGFUL

http://www.progressive.org/mag_reed0508

similar claims about obama. and some really bad calls.

oh, "calls" as in 'predictions.' BAD political sportswiter.

Fuck us all.

Morbs can I get you a T-shirt that says that

for a political science prof, he totally misread the underlying situation. that was the whole story of 08, it didn't matter, really, whether HRC of BHO won, either of them was going to be president. it's not calls about the future, but about the then-present that he got wrong. about BHO's status as an ambitious black bourgeois liberal, of course!

this is an interesting claim:

2) his horribly opportunistic approach to the issues bearing on inequality—in which he tosses behaviorist rhetoric to the right and little more than calls to celebrate his success to blacks—stands to pollute debate about racial injustice whether he wins or loses the Presidency

i don't know what to make of it, or how to evaluate it now. has the debate about racial injustice been polluted by obama's rhetoric? not trying to be snide here, it really is a possibility, but i can't tell exactly what reed means. which debate, for instance?

but this?

3) he can’t beat McCain in November... there’s no way that Obama will carry most of the states in November that he’s won in the primaries and caucuses... Obama’s style of being all things to all people threatens to melt under the inescapable spotlight of a national campaign against a Republican... Obama’s campaign has been very clever in carving out a strategy to amass Democratic delegate votes, but its momentum is in some ways a Potemkin construction—built largely on victories in states that no Democrat will win in November—that will fall apart under Republican pressure.

this is channeled right from mark penn

i don't know if he is a vacuous neoliberal or not but i'd like to see him run some more offense against supply-side economics. the sotu the other night could have used more of it

otm

also more owl city references

TH, my "Fucked" t shirt isnt worn out yet

times was you just notched your bedpost

neoliberal

Not quite sure what this means. Unless it is 'convenient political boogeyman for neocons that under pressure doesn't really pose the threat of promoting truly progressive legislation'.

"Neoliberal" = "triangulating" Democrat.

talks a lot, does shit

*talks a lot, does shit*

Maybe someday, calling a black man a 'smooth talker' in print won't seem racist or patronizing to me, but I doubt it.

how disingenuous can you get, you don't know what neoliberal is?

suzy, how about if you're a black writer like Adolph Reed Jr? I guess you made an assumption.

neoliberal is a slippery term, but it doesn't exactly mean "triangulating democrat" although plenty of the latter are the former

liberal as in 19th cent liberal not US liberal

^^^yes

neoliberal predates neocon

(at least, the terminology does afaict)

it means a belief in the market, deregulatin' and privatizin' shit imo. so the clints was a neoliberal.

Really? I first saw it used by The New Republic in the eighties about Gary Hart types.

neoliberal like that accomodationist sellout booker t washington?

neoliberal predates neocon

neocon is a sort of bewildering term, the way its used. but i think they happened almost simultaneously, from the late 1960s. neocons are guys like podhoretz and kristol. neoliberals are like milton friedman and hayek. i guess they'd existed before then, but so had strauss. they began to catch impt ppl's ears in the 1970s -- thatcher, pinochet, reagan's guys.

yeah that might be coincidental! xp to alfred

i always thought neo-liberal meant the modern strain of Liberalism, with laissez faire free market connotations. not like clintonian dems.

all the words "neoliberal" and stuff--they basically just mean "political view i dont agree with" right?

Long before Hitchens left the reservation he derided "neoliberalism" as the thinking of exhausted sixties pols who couldn't figure out how to beat the Reagan Revolution, so they supported "national defense," public anti-Soviet belligerence, and tax relief.

no! it's like neocon, there is a precise meaning. or a few of them. xp

i always thought neo-liberal meant the modern strain of Liberalism, with laissez faire free market connotations. not like clintonian dems.

― u b ilxin' (Hunt3r), Friday, January 29, 2010 4:43 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

clinton believed in laissez faire economics tho. maybe a bit less rabidly than reagan, but still.

all the words "neoliberal" and stuff--they basically just mean "political view i dont agree with" right?

― max, Friday, January 29, 2010 4:44 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

up to a point, but they have some irl meaning.

i mean i know there is some kind of "dictionary definition" but

yall i did graduate from college

people using them sloppily is a problem.