Back in the last Century, when Bill Clinton was running for
re-election in the "permanent campaign" he, with the advice of the
smarmy Dick Morris chose to co-opt Republican positions to pre-empt
their using them against him.It was called "triangulation" but also
disguised a clear strategic shift to the right that has now surfaced in
the Obama campaign. It appears that Team Obama does not take the
concerns or values of its liberal support base seriously. They think
they can be mesmerized by selective symbolic stands and they have
nowhere else to go.
The Black Community has pledged itself to his re-election despite
criticisms by black leaders who privately feel abandoned by him.
Robert Scheer, who edits Truthdig, says liberals will have to embrace
Obama by "default". "The Republicans are a sick joke and their narrow
ideological stupidity has left rational voters no choice in the coming
presidential election but Barack Obama," he writes.
He also recognizes that Obama has now "backed Republican
initiatives", calling the president the "moderate" choice in the coming
election, "defending centrist programs that Republicans in the past
helped originate".
'Hopey to mopey'
Van Jones, who Obama appointed to a job advocating green energy
solutions until attacks by the right led to his dumping him, calls his
former boss a "post-hope" candidate. He said in an interview on MSNBC:
We went from 'hopey' to mopey… I saw the misfires:
how the White House didn't really understand the grassroots movement;
the grassroots movement certainly didn't understand the grassroots
movement…and there was this 'hope' bubble that collapsed. (with) both
sides not understanding each other.
For years now, the president, in what some analysts say is a deeply
engrained fear/reaction to a total assault by Fox News, has sought to
keep the messengers of patriotically correct banalities off guard with a
slew of hawkish/hardline foreign policy initiatives.
He escalated the two big wars he inherited with "surges" in Iraq and
Afghanistan as well as drone offensive associated with continuing
collateral damage, i.e, civilian deaths. He turned General Petraeus from
his counter-insurgency specialist into a hero spymaster and gave him
more and more power, perhaps to prevent his running against him. He
turned the covert-action Seals units into a Presidential-sanctioned
assassination squad and, then, practically went steady with the
Pentagon. The flag pin he avoided as a candidate is now a staple of his
"uniform".
You can understand why: he can't really run on domestic issues. His
economic policies have failed to create jobs or a recovery because he
banked on the banks. Despite all the Republican banter about his alleged
socialism, he's given the capitalists just about everything they want,
including the new JOBS bill that will erode financial reform rules and
open the door to more fraud. His Justice Department has not waged a
jihad to put financial criminals in jail. They've settled complaints
with major mortgage fraudsters paying fines instead being locked up.
Promises abandoned
His "so-called" Obamacare is a law embraced by the healthcare
industry which will profit from it. Advocates of Medicare for All were
stabbed in the back early on in the process.
So, now the president, who aroused so many hopes for a more just
America, has abandoned most of his promises from shutting down
Guantanamo to prosecuting Bradley Manning.
He has decided to be born again as a hawk in sheep's clothing.
Stealing George W Bush's playbook, he has decided to repackage
himself as a tough guy in the war against terror after signing the new
NDAA law in the middle of the night. His criticisms of Israel's rhetoric
about bombing Iran is to caution them against being too hasty,
promising that he has their "back" and that the US would act. Many of
the harsh sanctions he imposed on that country can be considered acts of
war, (like many sanctions, they hurt the people, not just their
government!)
All of a sudden, war talk is surfacing to take our minds off the
economic collapse, and Obama will soon show us the electorate how tough
he is by going after Iran even as the right and the Israelis portray him
as a softee on the Ayatollahs.
He claims to support negotiations, but his conditions demanding Iran
shut down its nuclear enrichment facility first is an inflexible demand
that they know the Iranians will consider an ultimatum, and have to
reject, setting up a scenario for a war of aggression. "That negotiating
position will be the opening move (emphasis mine) in what President
Obama has called Iran's "last chance" to resolve its nuclear
confrontation with the United Nations and the West diplomatically,"
reports the New York Times.
"The hard-line approach would require the country's military
leadership to give up the Fordo enrichment plant outside the holy city
of Qum, and with it a huge investment in the one facility that is most
hardened against air-strikes."
Global drone warfare
He's also stepped up the use of global drone warfare with one report
suggesting drones may soon go nuclear. More telling now that what's been
covert is becoming more overt, as the New York Times reports with the
headline, "Obama Embraces National Security as Campaign Issue":
With a Republican opponent all but chosen and
the general election campaign about to start, President Obama is
preparing to emphasize an issue that few Democratic candidates have
embraced in the past: national security, long the domain of the
Republican Party.
At the same time, the Obama campaign is
seeking to portray Mitt Romney, the likely Republican nominee, as a
national security neophyte whose best ideas are simply retreads of what
the president is already doing, and whose worst instincts would take the
country back to the days of President George W Bush: cowboy diplomacy,
the Iraq war and America's lowest standing on the international stage.
In the coming weeks, Obama advisers plan to
release a list of national security "surrogates" - high-profile
Democrats like former Secretary of State Madeleine K Albright and Wesley
K Clark, a retired general - who will write newspaper op-ed articles,
give speeches and take Mr Romney to task every time he opens his mouth
about foreign policy, Obama advisers said.
The plan is to draw a contrast between Mr
Obama - who, his advisers say, kept his word on ending the Iraq war,
going aggressively after al-Qaeda and restoring alliances around the
world - and Mr Romney, who will be portrayed as playing both sides of
numerous issues.
"He was for and against the removal of
Gaddafi, for and against setting a timetable to withdraw our troops from
Afghanistan, for and against enforcing trade laws against China, and
while he once said he would not move heaven and earth to get Osama bin
Laden, he later claimed that any president would have authorized the
mission to do so," said Ben LaBolt, press secretary for the Obama
campaign.
Playing the war card
He's planning to do to Romney what McCain's marauders tried to do to
him by playing the war card. And the media keeps carrying stories urging
him to be even tougher.
Two examples:
AP - The brother of a US soldier who was among three central Ohioans
killed in an Afghan suicide bombing says Americans shouldn't forget "we
are a nation at war".
Fox News is running the latest sermon on the mount by convicted Iran
contra conspirator Colonel North who writes, "According to Matthew's
Gospel, Judas Iscariot sold out Jesus of Nazareth for 30 pieces of
silver. What is Barack Obama's fee for selling out Christians and
Israelis?"
All of this sniping is unlikely to lead the president to pick a fight
with the right even if a recent poll showed 69 per cent of all
Americans want the US out of Afghanistan. The criticisms are just likely
to encourage him to move further right to show his mettle and a posture
that says he's ready to fight as a commander and chief who won't back
down.
Haven't we heard all this before?
Mediachannel’s News Dissector Danny Schechter investigates the origins of the economic crisis in his book
Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity and the Subprime Scandal
(Cosimo Books via Amazon). Schechter has been covering the Occupy
movement for his News Dissector.com blog and other websites including Al
Jazeera. He has collected his reporting into a new book, available next
week, with a preface by writer Greg Palast.
Comments to
dissector@mediachannel.org
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