[Marxism] Why Obama will likely lose to McCain

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, April 19, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Road Map to Defeat
By BOB HERBERT

So what are the Democrats doing? The Clintons are running around with 
flamethrowers, gleefully trying to incinerate the prospects of the 
party's leading candidate, Barack Obama. As Bill Clinton put it last 
month: "If a politician doesn't want to get beat up, he shouldn't run 
for office."

Senator Obama, for his part, seems to have lost sight of the unifying 
message that proved so compelling early in his campaign and has 
stumbled into weird cultural predicaments that have caused some 
people to rethink his candidacy.

While some of those predicaments raise legitimate concerns (his 
former pastor, his comments in San Francisco) and some do not (stupid 
questions about wearing a flag pin), he has allowed them to fester 
unnecessarily. The way for a candidate to eventually change the 
subject is to offer policy prescriptions so creative and compelling 
that they generate excitement among the electorate and can't be 
ignored by the press.

Voters want more from Senator Obama. He's given a series of wonderful 
speeches, but he has to add more meat to those rhetorical bones. He 
needs to be clear about where he wants to lead this country and how 
he plans to do it. That's how a candidate defines himself or herself.

Instead, Mr. Obama is allowing the Clintons and the news media to 
craft a damaging persona of him as some kind of weak-kneed brother 
from another planet, out of touch with mainstream America, and perhaps a loser.

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/19/opinion/19herbert.html

---

I would agree with everything that Bob Herbert is saying, but would 
add that he is wrong to think that Obama is somehow holding back on 
some kind of message that will stir working people and the poor into 
electoral action. Obama, like the Democrats who preceded him in 
recent elections (Carter, Mondale, Clinton, Gore, Kerry) are not 
really Democrats--at least in the way that the party is understood in 
the pages of the Nation Magazine or among good liberals like Bob 
Herbert. They are *Eisenhower Republicans*. The Republican Party 
morphed into the hard right and the Democrats filled the political 
vacuum left by the ditching of the Nelson Rockefeller wing. With the 
Democrats moving to the center, there has been no political 
expression at the highest level for even the sort of tepid welfare 
state egalitarianism found in LBJ's "Great Society" type programs.

To run on New Deal type politics would require a confrontation with 
the big money that rules the DP. There is about as much interest in 
restructuring the American economy as there is in removing US 
military bases from around the world. Even when the fat cat donors, 
like George Soros, make New Deal type utterances in the editorial 
pages, they lack the spine to drive them forward which would require 
genuine militancy at the grass roots level.

Furthermore, one of the reasons that they make sure to not promise 
any ambitious New Deal type programs is that this would raise the 
expectations of working people who might decide to take matters into 
their own hands if they are frustrated at the polls.

When asked by the cretinous George Stephanopolous how he would "use" 
a former President, Obama answered:

"Well, you know, I think that having the advice and counsel of all 
former presidents is important. I'm probably more likely to ask 
advice of the current president's father than president himself 
because I think that when you look back at George H.W. Bush's foreign 
policy, it was a wise foreign policy.

"And how we executed the Gulf War, how we managed the transition out 
of the Cold War, I think, is an example of how we can get bipartisan 
agreement. I don't think the Democrats have a monopoly on good ideas. 
I think that there are a lot of thoughtful Republicans out there."

It is exactly this kind of evenhandedness that keeps losing elections 
for the Democrats. With all proportions guarded, fascism became 
victorious in the 1930s because the Social Democrats fought with one 
hand tied behind their back. And, if the economy continues to weaken, 
there certainly will be 1930s type polarizations once again. If that 
is the case, the workers need a political party that will not only 
fight with both hands but to the finish.


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