John R. McArthur of Harper’s Magazine reminds us that, aside from the war, the growing class divide in American society is the most important issue facing the country. And while Barack Obama has made some noise about it, his track record should not delude us into thinking he will lead the lower classes in class war.
Obama’s campaign autobiography, The Audacity of Hope, is stunningly frank about his affinity with wealthy donors during his Senate campaign in 2004: “Increasingly I found myself spending time with people of means—law firm partners and investment bankers, hedge fund managers, and venture capitalists. As a rule, they were smart, interesting people, knowledgeable about public policy, liberal in their politics, expecting nothing more than a hearing of their opinions in exchange for their checks.”
If you think that this passage is merely foolish, you’re missing the point. The Audacity of Hope is carefully calculated to present Obama as a non-threat to the big-money interests that pay for campaigns. Even so, Obama tries to have it both ways: “On core issues,” he writes, “I was candid; I had no problem telling well-heeled supporters that the tax cuts they’d received from George Bush should be reversed.”
But it’s easy to be candid when you’re talking about proportionately so little money: a 4.6 percentage-point increase in an investment banker’s income tax to a hardly confiscatory 39.6 percent (the top marginal rate remained over 90 percent until 1964) won’t make much of a dent. As Obama notes, “My own worldview and theirs corresponded in many ways—I had gone to the same schools, after all, had read the same books, and worried about my kids in many of the same ways.” Thus, “I know as a consequence of my fund-raising I became more like the wealthy donors I met, in the very particular sense that I spent more and more of my time above the fray, outside the world of immediate hunger, disappointment, fear, irrationality, and frequent hardship of the other 99 percent of the population.”
That’s Obama in his own words — leaving the junior senator from Illinois open to the charge that he has nothing in common with the workers he’s courting (not that McCain has anything in common with them, either, but for some reason GOP elitism doesn’t seem to resonate).
Meanwhile, Obama has stopped talking about making hedge-fund managers pay income tax on their partnership income at the same time as he proposes to increase the capital-gains rate to 25 percent. This is tactically clever, since it sends a friendly signal to the hedge-funders, while suggesting to progressives that he’s no pushover for Wall Street. At 25 percent, those “smart” and “interesting” financial touts would still be paying far less tax on their hedge-fund income than if they had to pay the top income-tax rate. So far, Obama has outraised John McCain among employees of hedge funds $822,000 to $348,000—this although John McCain wants to leave the capital-gains rate at 15 percent and opposes treating hedge-fund partner income as personal income. But there’s a money logic to this seeming incongruity: Hedge-funders specialize in predicting winning investments, and the accommodating Obama looks like a better bet than the more honestly pro-plutocrat McCain.
Progressives need to be wary. While Obama is the better candidate by a wide margin, but his instincts are not automatically progressive. The left needs to keep Obama’s feet to the fire. Hence, this open letter from The Nation:
We urge you, then, to listen to the voices of the people who can lift you to the presidency and beyond.
Since your historic victory in the primary, there have been troubling signs that you are moving away from the core commitments shared by many who have supported your campaign, toward a more cautious and centrist stance–including, most notably, your vote for the FISA legislation granting telecom companies immunity from prosecution for illegal wiretapping, which angered and dismayed so many of your supporters.
We recognize that compromise is necessary in any democracy. We understand that the pressures brought to bear on those seeking the highest office are intense. But retreating from the stands that have been the signature of your campaign will weaken the movement whose vigorous backing you need in order to win and then deliver the change you have promised.
And we need.
Hank Kalet 