GETTING OBAMA RIGHT

By Andrew W Taylor
The campaign of Barack Obama has been treated by the Candidate and by the world's corporate media sources as a Novum in global history, the emergence of the historic nodal moment in US and international history. This interpretation of the rise to power of the junior Senator from Illinois is both a masterful political spin-job and a dangerously deluded fable. Mythic profiles of change, hope and newness have been spun around US presidential campaigns in past changings of the guard. Progressives must keep their heads and recall the sort of media power-system they are dealing with. We are in the hands of marketing gurus who have turned image-crafting into a polled science. Technology hypes, refines, and selectively spins loops of tape. Only the heroes of and for the Corporate capitalist system can vie for the big prizes, and only the fiercely ambitious company-men win .

Getting Obama's candidacy as president of America is only possible for those who get the fact that he is a centrist US imperialist who accepts the ideological and economic trade arrangements of LBJ, Nixon,Clinton and the Bush pere et fils . Those on the US Left who belief Barack is a latter day Eugene Debs should watch tapes of Obama's speech at the conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac), the Zionist advocacy organ. Obama had already presented his Zionist bona fides, but on 4 June of this year went the second mile. He told the power-brokers attending that he would recognise an "undivided Jerusalem" as Israel's capital. Nevermind that the Israeli annexation of all Jerusalem is deemed illicit by all other nations and by the Bush Whitehouse. What do the Lefties south of the border make of the Change candidates' snotting of the UN resolution designating Jerusalem an international city? What do they make of his knee-capping of Alice Palmer's candidacy (http://nz.youtube.com/watch?v=bZnlKC5vpyY), his support for FISA, NAFTA, or the plan "B" Wall Street Bailout?

It is probably a good thing that progressives in swing-states vote for Barack Obama as the lesser of two evils. But the Left must re-think their investment in the messianic ideal of Obama the Just. Such hopes belong to swooning adolescents and True Believers. The US Presidency is not a suitable structure for current levels of progressive self-investment. The main fight remains the rents, lay-offs, hiring freezes, and repossessions in the economic and social plight of the streets of the cities and towns.