...but I told you so. Less than 24 hours after becoming the president-elect, Obama was already swinging to the right. His appointment of Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff should speak for itself, but since most people don't seem to know who he is, I guess I'll do a little speaking on the subject, myself. Perhaps this puts a damper on everyone's juvenile joy in their belief that Obama's election is suddenly going to bring peace to the world, but sorry. Emanuel, a rabidly pro-Israel, free-trade-happy, militaristic individual, will soon be filling what is arguably the most powerful position in the White House, aside from the President.
This is the man who wrote a letter to President Bush saying that Israel's policy of assassinating Palestinian political leaders "was clearly justified as an application of Israel's right to self-defense" ("Pelosi supports Israel's attacks on Hamas group," San Francisco Chronicle, 14 June 2003). The man who eagerly supports NAFTA, the World Bank, and increased corporate globalization. The man who, as Chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, halted all funding for openly anti-war Democrats running for the House, and even supported more centrist candidates in the primaries, in an effort to defeat those anti-war candidates. The man who served on the board of the mortgage giant Freddie Mac, which had to be nationalized in the bailout this year, due to its utter financial failure.
This is the man who will have the ear of the President for the next four years. Hooray. So if you went into the November 4th election dreaming of change on the foreign policy front, the economic front, the "Party Politics" front, or really any front at all... I'm sorry, but I doubt you're going to get it. Change we can believe in, my ass.
And this, by the way, is why I voted for Cynthia McKinney. Just saying.
2 comments:
Dude, I agree with you that Obama has moved (and will continue to move) toward the political center, that's just his nature. BHO isn't extreme in his political views and his writings have shown a tremendous amount of balance between competing left and right ideologies.
When serving as the Editor of the Harvard Law Review he went to great pains to appoint students from the Federalist Society (the conservative folks) and when he did, many a liberal student was dismayed.
That said, I admire Obama's politics of inclusion. After 8 years of seeing Bush rule with zero ideological flexibility, I am stoked to have a President who will try and listen to all sides of a political debate.
At the 2004 Convention, Barack gave a speech about looking forward to a future not of red and blue states, but a future of one United States.
His record has been one of inclusion triumphing over radicalism ... of deep analysis trumping knee-jerk ideological reaction.
As such, I say we now rally around our President Elect ... Maybe in this one administration all Americans can try and come together and find some common ground: SF liberals and Appalachian Evangelists ... Utah Mormons and NY Hipsters. Why not, yeah know?
We have been so viciously divided for the past 8 years ... let us now try and begin the healing process.
What you say is true, and I completely agree that it's time to end the bi-partisan backstabbing, but that won't be possible until the majority of Obama's maniacal followers calm down and learn to take a balanced view of the situation. They are nearly as rabid as the Christian Right in their constant preaching of an imperfect president-elect's "perfection," making it hard for any point from either side of the debate to penetrate their excitement.
When campaigning for Cindy, I was dismayed by how many Obama followers claimed that a) they didn't know anything about his politics other than that he supported "change" or b) that they didn't have to pay attention to other political issues anymore because Obama was going to fix it all. It's refreshing to see people actually enthusiastic about a president-elect, but I think this hero worship will actually severely hinder the work of other political movements, since everyone thinks that we can all just go to sleep happy, now that Obama's been elected. So long as we keep a critical eye on him, and hold his feet to the fire, I think he could be an admirable president. But I really am worried that everyone who was so eager to elect him is just going to stop paying attention.
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