http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23643866-5013948,00.html
The illusion that is Barack Obama
by Fred Siegel
POLITICAL campaigning necessarily produces a wide gap between words
and deeds. This is the price of bringing together a broad coalition
with disparate interests. All effective politicians are at times
authentically insincere or sincerely inauthentic. Exaggeration,
embellishment, overstatement, doubletalk, deception and lies presented
as metaphorical truths are the order of the day.
So, of course, Barack Obama is no different. He exaggerates the credit
he deserves for a limited piece of ethics-reform legislation. He
embellishes when he presents himself as having had a consistent record
on the Iraq war when in fact he's done a fair amount of zigzagging.
He engages in doubletalk when, on free trade and Iraq, he tells the
yokels one thing and the policy people another. He overstates when he
presents his minimal accomplishments in the Illinois Senate as proof
of his stature. He engages in systematic deception when he says he
doesn't take money from lobbyists.
He presents a lie as metaphorical truth when he says it was the 1965
bloody Sunday attacks on peaceful civil rights protesters in Selma,
Alabama, that inspired his parents to marry. (They had been married
for years already.)
All of this is unappealing, but also unexceptional. What makes it
different is that there's not just a gap but a chasm between his
actions and his professed principles, which would normally kill a
candidacy. And because his deeds are so few, the disparity is all the
more salient.
Obama, far more than the others, is the "judge me by what I say and
not what I do" candidate. He wants to be the conscience of the country
without necessarily having one himself.
The disparity between Obama's rhetoric of transcendence and his
conventional Chicago racial and patronage politics is a leitmotiv of
his political career. In New York, politicians (Al Sharpton excepted)
are usually forced to pay at least passing tribute to universal
principles and the ideal of clean government.
But Chicago, until recently a city of Lithuanians, blacks and Poles
governed by Irishmen on the patronage model of the Italian Christian
Democrats, is the city of political and cultural tribalism.
Blacks adapted to the tribalism and the corrupt patronage politics
that accompanied it. Historically, one of the ironies of Chicago
politics is that the clean-government candidates have been the most
racist, while those most open to black aspirations have been the most
corrupt. When the young Jesse Jackson received his first audience with
then mayor Richard Daley Sr - impervious to the universalism of the
civil rights movement in its glory - offered him a job as a toll-
taker. Jackson thought the offer demeaning but in time adapted.
In Chicago, racial reform has meant that the in***bent mayor, Richard
M. Daley, has been cutting blacks in on the loot. Louis Farrakhan,
Jackson, Jeremiah Wright and Obama are all, in part, the expression of
that politics. It hasn't always worked for Chicago, which, under the
pressure of increasing taxes to pay for bloated government, is losing
its middle class. But it has served the city's political class
admirably.
For all his Camelot-like rhetoric, Obama is a product, in significant
measure, of the political culture that Chicago Tribune columnist John
Kass described: "We've had our chief of detectives sent to prison for
running the Outfit's (the mob's) jewellery-heist ring. And we've had
white guys with Outfit connections get $100 million in affirmative
action contracts from their drinking buddy, Mayor Richard Daley ...
That's the Chicago way."
At no point did Obama, the would-be saviour of US politics, challenge
this corruption, except for face-saving gestures as a legislator. He
was, in his own Harvard law way, a product of it.
Why, you may ask, did the operators of Chicago's political machine
sup****t Obama? Part of the answer was given long ago by the then boss
of Chicago, Jake Arvey.
When asked why he made Adlai Stevenson - a man, as with Obama, more
famous for speeches than for accomplishments - his party's
gubernatorial candidate in 1948, Arvey is said to have replied that he
needed to "perfume the ticket".
Obama first played a perfuming role as a state senator. His mentor,
Emil Jones, the machine-made president of the Senate, allowed him to
sponsor a minor ethics bill. In return, Obama made sure to send plenty
of ****k to Jones's district. When asked about ****k-barrel spending,
Jones famously replied: "Some call it ****k; I call it steak."
Obama repaid the generosity. When he had a chance to back clean
Democratic candidates for president of the Cook County board of
supervisors and Illinois governor, he stayed with the allies of the
Outfit. The gubernatorial candidate he backed, Rod Blagojevich, is
under federal investigation, in part because of his relation****p with
Tony Rezko, the man who helped Obama buy his house.
The Chicago way has delivered politically for Obama even this year.
Ninety per cent of his popular-vote lead over Hillary Clinton comes
from Illinois, and two-thirds of that 90 per cent comes just from Cook
County.
Some of this advantage came from the efforts of Obama's political
ally, the flame-throwing reverend James Meeks, a political force in
his own right. Meeks, who mocks black moderates as "niggers", is an
Illinois state senator, the pastor of a mega-church and a strong
sup****ter of Jackson's powerful political operation, which has put its
vote-pulling muscle squarely behind the Obama campaign. It was only
with Obama's remark about bitter, white, working-class, small-town
voters that we saw his difficulties appealing beyond the machine's
reach. He won his US Senate race in 2004 not only because his
opponents self-destructed but also because of the machine's ability to
deliver votes.
In Pennsylvania, he has lacked such assistance and the campaigning has
not gone nearly so well. First, Obama pretended to be a tenpin bowler
and scored a 37. Then, appearing before a supposedly closed San
Francisco audience, he complained that small-town Pennsylvanians
"cling to guns or religion or antipathy towards people who aren't like
them, or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment, as a way to
explain their frustrations". This is the man who belongs to a church
built on bitterness, rancour and conspiratorial fear. During the
Wright affair, Obama not only repeatedly lied about what he knew and
when but violated the spirit of the civil rights movement in its
mid-1960s glory.
When, as a young man, I was on the periphery of the movement, there
was an unwritten rule that if people told racist jokes or speakers
engaged in defamatory rhetoric, you needed to register your immediate
disapproval by confronting the speaker or ostentatiously walking out.
Wright's "black theology" is essentially a Christianised version of
Malcolm X's ideology of hate.
But for 20 years, Obama, who had planned to run for mayor of Chicago,
kept silent about the close, if at times competitive, relation****p
between Wright, whose 8000-member mega-church gave him his political
base, and Farrakhan. His ambition overrode his moral integrity.
As part of his "black value system", Wright attacked whites for their
"middle classism", materialism, and "greed in a world of need". Obama
sounded similar notes in his recent address at the Cooper Union for
the Advancement of Science and Art in New York, in which he laid the
blame for the sub-prime mortgage crisis on those who had "embraced an
ethic of greed, corner cutting and inside dealing".
But that's exactly what Obama did in buying his luxurious house. Given
the choice of purchasing a less expensive home or getting into bed
with his fundraiser-***-slumlord-***-fixer Rezko, Obama chose the
latter. Then again, the oppressed of Trinity United Church of Christ
are building Wright a $US1.6 million ($1.7million), 960sqm home
complete with four-car garage, whirlpool and butler's pantry. This
house, which backs on to a golf course, is to sit in Tinley Park, a
gated community in southwest Chicago that is 93 per cent white.
The Obamas' charitable giving is consistent with Wright's talking Left
while living Right. Obama and his wife are quite well off. They had an
estimated income of $US1.2 million from 2000 to 2004. But the man who
preaches compassion and mutuality gave all of 1 per cent of that
income to charity during those years. Most of that went to Wright's
church.
There is a similar chasm when it comes to Obama's claim to post-
partisan****p. His achievements in reaching out to moderate voters are
largely proleptic. But words are not deeds and, although Obama has few
concrete achievements to his name, his voting record hardly suggests
an ability to rise above Left v Right.
In the Illinois Senate, he made a specialty of voting present, but
after his first two years in the US Senate, National Journal's
analysis of rollcall votes found that he was more liberal than 86 per
cent of his colleagues. His voting record has only moved further Left
since then. The liberal Americans for Democratic Action gives him a
97.5 per cent rating, while National Journal ranks him the most
liberal member of the Senate. By comparison, Clinton, who occasionally
votes with the Republicans, ranks 16th.
Obama is such a down-the-line partisan that, according to
Congressional Quarterly, in the past two years he has voted with the
Democrats more often than did the party's majority leader, Harry
Reid.
Likewise, for all his talk of post-racialism, Obama has played, with
the contrivance of the press, traditional South Side Chicago racial
politics. The day after his surprise loss in New Hamp****re, and in
anticipation of the South Carolina primary, with its heavily black
electorate, South Side congressman Jesse Jackson Jr - Obama's national
co-chairman - appeared on MSNBC to argue, in a prepared statement,
that Clinton's teary moment on the campaign trail reflected her deep-
seated racism.
"Those tears," said Jackson, "have to be analysed ... They have to be
looked at very, very carefully in light of Katrina, in light of other
things that Mrs Clinton did not cry for, particularly as we head to
South Carolina, where 45 per cent of African-Americans will
participate in the Democratic contest ... We saw tears in response to
her appearance, so that her appearance brought her to tears, but not
hurricane Katrina, not other issues."
In other words, whites who are at odds with, or who haven't delivered
for, Chicago politicians can be obliquely accused of racism on the
flimsiest basis, but pillars of local black politics such as Wright,
with his exclusivist racial theology, are beyond criticism.
Liberals love Obama's talk of taking on powerful financial interests.
But here , too, he is rather slippery. In his Cooper Union speech, he
denounced in no uncertain terms the "special interests" of people on
Wall Street (who are well represented among his campaign donors).
He, of course, had an op****tunity to push for repealing the privileged
tax treatment of private equity firms when that question was before
Charles Grassley's Senate subcommittee - but he simply made a pro-
forma statement in favour of doing so and disappeared.
Nationally, as in Chicago, Obama the self-styled reformer never
crosses swords with any of his putative foes. To pick another example,
he has attacked "predatory" sub-prime lenders while taking roughly
$US1.3 million in contributions from companies in that line of
business.
Obama is the internationalist opposed to free trade. He is the friend
of race-baiters who thinks Don Imus deserved to be fired. He is the
proponent of courage in the face of powerful interests who lacked the
courage to break with Wright (until Wednesday). He is the man who
would lead our efforts against terrorism yet was friendly with Bill
Ayers, the unrepentant 1960s terrorist. He is the post-racialist
sup****ter of affirmative action. He is the enemy of Big Oil who takes
money from executives at Exxon-Mobil, Shell and British Petroleum.
Obama has, in a sense, represented a new version of the invisible man,
a candidate whose colour obscures his failings.
But so far, the wild discrepancy between Obama's words and his deeds,
and between his enormous ambitions and his minimal accomplishments,
doesn't seem to have fazed his core sup****ters, who apparently suffer
from a severe case of cognitive dissonance. Like cultists who
rededicate themselves when the cult's prophecies have been falsified,
his fans redouble their delusions in the face of his obvious
hypocrisy.
That is because Obama, in the imagination of many of his fans in the
public and the press, is both a deduction from what was - the failures
of the Bush administration and the scandals of the Clintons - and an
expression of what should be.
The ideal, the aspiration, is so rhetorically appealing that it has
been assumed to be true. They remind one of Woodrow Wilson's answer
when asked if his plan for a League of Nations was practicable: "If it
won't work, it must be made to work."
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Fred Siegel is a contributing editor of City Journal. He teaches at
the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.
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