Column No. 197
by Steven Jonas, MD, MPH –
July 02, 2008
Since he secured the Democratic nomination for President and
secured Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s withdrawal from the campaign, Sen. Obama
has been moving rapidly to organize, re-organize, and expand both his policy
and operational staffs. One feature at both levels has been the
increasing presence of “Clinton people,” both from the William Jefferson
Clinton Administration and the HRC campaign, in the Obama orbit.
For example, Patti Solis Doyle (who happens to
be a long-time associate of Obama chief campaign strategist David Axelrod) was
HRC’s former campaign director. Fired several months ago from that job,
she has been brought on by the Obama campaign to be the
chief-of-staff-designate for the Vice-Presidential candidate (whoever that
might be). (Since the blood between Doyle and HRC and her remaining staff
is not exactly warm, I do think that this designation is a very good indication
that HRC will not be offered the VP slot on the Obama ticket. There are
some other observers who do think the opposite. I must say that for the
sake both of his chances of winning the general election and of the
governmental and political effectiveness of an Obama Administration, I
fervently hope that I am right and they are wrong.) On the policy side,
Clintonistas from Robert Rubin to Madeleine Albright have been brought into
active roles.
The response to all of this from an increasing
number of progressives and leftists (and yes, Virginia, there is a difference)
has been ranging from raising caution flags to expressing outright horror:
“what’s he doing on Israel?” “what’s he doing on FISA?” “what’s he doing
on ethanol?” “what’s he doing on campaign finance reform?” “what’s he
doing on ‘free trade’?” “what’s he doing on the US Muslim population?” And so
on and so forth. There are three principal issues to consider here.
First, do these appointments indicate any major changes in Sen. Obama’s
principal campaign theme of “Change We Can Believe In?” Second, whether
yes or no, were they predictable? Third, what should the
progressive/leftist response be?
In my view, there was a huge amount of “reading
in” done with Obama during the primary campaign. (Full disclosure: I fell
into that trap too.) He is very, very smart. (When he was at
Harvard Law School, a tenured professor there pronounced him the “smartest
student we have ever had.”) He is literally African-American. He is
the child of a teen-age mother who became a single Mom not too long after his
birth, and was primarily brought up by her mother. He somehow made
it to Columbia College (and as a Columbia College graduate myself, 1958, I wish
that that fact were mentioned more frequently, by his campaign as well as
others!)
Graduating from Harvard Law School, where he
was President of the Law Review (a very prestigious and much sought-after
position), he decided against taking a high-paying corporate law firm job, very
possibly with an eye towards a career in politics from the very
beginning. And who knows? Maybe he really did set his sights on the
Presidency in Kindergarten. Hillary apparently set her sights on it only
when she was working as a young adult in the McGovern campaign. However,
he has never been a radical in any sense of the word, no matter how hard
O’RHannibaugh and the Fox”News”Channel and their new Pundit-in-Chief Karl Rove
(obviously moon-lighting from his real job as [still] master Republican
election strategist) try to convince their viewers/listeners that he is or at
least was. And using guilt-by-association they are trying ever-so-hard to
do that.
Contrary to both Republican and Clintonian propaganda
during the primaries, he offered tons of detailed positions on a variety of
issues, from early on, on his website and more recently in his speeches.
In fact for several months now, he has been giving Hillary Clinton-like
speeches with laundry lists of proposals. (Admittedly his sound so much
better than hers because he reads so much better than she does.)
Radical? Hardly. His health care proposal does as much to
maintain the role of the profit-makers in the health insurance and pharmaceutical
industries as does Clinton’s. (Of course McCain’s would make both
industries even more profitable.) He calls for a relatively swift
withdrawal from Iraq, that is, just what was called for by the Jim Baker-lead
Iraq Study Group which was so studiously ignored by CheneyBush.
One of Obama’s major foreign policy advisors from the
beginning has been Mika’s (MSNBC) Dad, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s
relatively right-wing National Security Advisor. One of his major
“accomplishments” was to convince Carter to organize a strong response to the
Soviet intervention in Afghanistan which was designed to bolster a new
anti-monarchical, anti-Islamist, Communist government there. (No.
Hollywood to the contrary notwithstanding, it wasn’t “Charlie Wilson’s War,”
except in public.) Brzezinski correctly predicted if the US were able to
arrange for the Soviet Union to get bogged down there, it could become their
“Vietnam,” and speed the long-impending collapse of the pseudo-Communist Soviet
government. That it did. Another outcome of that intervention was
the subsequent training, under the CIA of Ronald Reagan and William Casey, of a
scion of a wealthy Saudi family with close, long-time connections to the Bush
family, of a future ultra-right Islamist leader named Osama bin Laden.
Obama has advocated talking with Syria and Iran about
arranging an overall Middle East settlement which could, with suitable
guarantees of non-aggression from the US/Israeli side, include the permanent
end of the Iranian drive towards developing nuclear weapons (viz. the
agreements with North Korea, even under the Georgites). (Over three years
ago in this space, March 3, 2005 "Iranian Nukes", I said that if I
were Iran, facing the Georgite/Israeli-Right alliance, I would surely want to
have nuclear weapons). Obama has also advocated taking Saudi Arabia up on
its offer, which dates back to 2002, to formally recognize Israel in the context
of an overall two-state Israel/Palestine solution based on the relevant UN
resolutions. Both of these positions were taken by the Iraq Study
Group. As for economic policy, Obama does advocate a return to
pre-Clintonian caution on globalization and the free export of capital.
He also advocates a recognition that the WJ Clinton declaration that “the days
of big government are over” in terms of economic, regulatory and
infra-structure policy are in urgent need of revision. Nothing radical
here in either of those positions, if one takes seriously the Preamble to the
Constitution.
Were these changes predictable? In my view, for
the most part yes, even though in the midst of the primaries, listening to his
speeches, I didn’t think so. With the appointment of Robert Rubin and one
or more of his protégés to high positions on economic policy, Obama seems to be
veering more towards DLC positions than in recent months I recently had thought
he would. However, last November, on these pages I did say that I thought
that Senator Obama and Sen. Clinton comprised a DLC “entry” in the race for the
nomination. As I put it then (TPJ, Dec. 5, 2007, “The Presidential
Election, 2008: Democratic Considerations”):
“As they have done in the past, the center-right Democratic Leadership
Council is this time around running what in Standard-Breed (trotters and
pacers) horse racing terminology is known as an ‘entry.’ In these races,
one owner can enter two horses and bettors can bet on the ‘entry,’ so that if
either one of the horses wins, places, or shows, the bettor collects. In
2004 the DLC “entry” was John Edwards and Richard Gephardt. The latter
was one of the founders of the DLC (although in the 2004 primaries he did
wander off the reservation on the so-called “free trade” [otherwise known as
the free export of capital] issue). John Edwards was a rather different
person and politician back then than he is now. I remember back in 2002
or so when he got a Sunday New York Times Magazine cover story, and was
hailed as the fair-haired boy of the Democratic “middle” (really
center-right). Neither won, of course, but the DLC was able to project
the perennial loser Bob Shrum into the Kerry Campaign and we all know what
happened.
“This time the DLC
has an entry as well, but Edwards ain’t part of it. [Full disclosure:
this time around I supported Edwards for the nomination until he dropped
out.] He has grown as a person and a politician and is now much more of
an old-style Democrat in the Roosevelt-Truman-Johnson (before Vietnam) tradition.
The DLC entry is ---- yes, indeed, Clinton and Obama. They don’t like
each other much, and each does indeed want to be President. But their
central philosophy is much the same and many of their policies are rather
similar too. The philosophy is better articulated by Obama. But
functionally, even though her rhetoric may be a bit harsher, Clinton is woven
from the same fabric.”
So let us not be surprised. Next week, we shall look further
at the likely causes of the apparent coming together of the Clinton and Obama
campaigns (which would have been in the cards all along if my earlier
supposition about their being an “entry” is correct). We shall also look
at why it is in any case absolutely essential that all anti-Georgite forces of
whatever stripe rally behind Obama.