Pushing Obama to the leftand keeping him there

I’ve been having an interesting conversation — via e-mail — with Seth Goldberg, a Cranbury resident who seems to share my political views and who like me was slow to jump on the Obama bandwagon. Readers of this blog know that, through much of the early going of the 2008 presidential race, I had been looking at Dennis Kucinich and John Edwards, preferring the Ohio congressman but viewing Edwards and his antipoverty agenda as someone more likely to alter the Democratic debate. I viewed Obama as a decent third or fourth choice, having started to read The Audacity of Hope, getting a couple of chapters in and then tossing it aside in frustration at its flaccid unwillingness to actually offer anything of political substance.

I felt that the presidential primary here in New Jersey in February, when I outlined my reasons for backing Obama over Hillary Clinton, which came down to this:

In the end, I’ll be voting for Obama for two reason: Iraq and Iran. While both Obama and Clinton promise to end the war, only one has been right on the war from the beginning — Obama. Clinton voted to authorize the war with Iraq and, no matter how much she tries to explain it away, I can only view it as either a lack of judgment or a vote of political calculation, neither of which speak well for a candidate who repeatedly says she is the one who will be ready on day one to be president and commander-in-chief.

Her rhetoric on Iran raises some concerns, as well. While she is committed to diplomacy (as is Obama), she has no intention of sitting down with Iranian leaders — which would appear to make diplomacy impossible. Obama is prepared to meet face to face, a willingness that could be likened to Nixon’s opening to China or Reagan’s face-to-face meetings with Gorbachev. Iran is the United States’ chief rival in the Middle East; it is irresponsible not to talk.

I am more comfortable with that decision now than at any time since this seemingly endless presidential race began, my trepidation fading as Obama has weathered the standard political nonsense — Bill Ayres, the Rev. Wright — and shown himself to have a fairly strong grasp of what ails the economy and a real sense of who is hurting most.

While the punditocrisy tends to dismiss left-leaning economic populism as an unwinnable position in presidential politics, Obama has pushed hard in that direction since tying up the nomination and especially over the last two months as the economy has tanked big time.

And, as Matthew Yglesias pointed out earlier today, Obama is

running on a platform that promises universal preschool, dramatic cuts in carbon emissions and investments in clean energy infrastructure, health insurance that would be affordable for all, comprehensive immigration reform, substantial labor law reform, large new spending on K-12 initiatives, and tax reform to make the federal code much more progressive overall. Is it as left-wing as what John Edwards ran on in the primaries in 2008? No. But it’s much more robustly progressive than what John Kerry offered in 2004, what Al Gore offered in 2000, or what Bill Clinton offered in 1996, and somewhat more ambitious than the Clinton ‘92 program. Presumably, that entire agenda won’t actually be enacted.

But if it were enacted, it would be the most dramatic shift in national policy since the high tide of the Great Society.

I was late coming to Obama too. I thought too many progressives viewed him as a human Rorschak, reading into him their own desires and transforming him into something that he isn’t. He is, for the most part, a cautious, somewhat moderately liberal politician with good instincts who I think can be turned by more progressive factions and made to do what’s right. I worry, though, that he might just as easily be influenced by the people who had surrounded Clinton and the conventional wisdom people who always argue that things cannot be done. So we will see. That said, I will be voting for him without reservations knowing that he probably is the first major-party candidate in my voting lifetime (going back to Carter-Reagan) that I feel I can truly be supportive of and feel good about voting for.

Seth offered this response:

I gave Kucinich a few bucks after he wrote up articles of impeachment for Cheney and then a few more bucks when he announced that he had seen flying saucers (or some such) while at a party at Shirley MaClaine’s home. That second donation wasn’t really made to help keep his campaign going as much as it was intended as a small reward. Sort of like a prize for just being Dennis Kucinich. So I was pretty lonely until I overheard Sean Hannity going on about Reverend Wright and how no one could seriously argue that Obama could have sat and listened to his sermons for the better part of twenty years unless he was essentially at peace with the leftist
politics of the Black Church. Pretty soon I found myself sneaking into the other room to listen to Hannity’s radio show and in a matter of days he had me convinced that underneath Obama’s cool and hopeful charm there was hiding a genuine lefty like no other in the Democratic party. The son of a bitch might be right! Well, I never looked back. So when Obama caved on the FISA bill I shrugged it off. When he
says he plans to expand the army and get tough with Pakistan I Ignore it. When he supported the bailout I accepted it as politically expedient. So here I am for the first time in my political life suspending my usual critique of the Democratic Party’s long-running capitulation with the Right and fully expecting that the real Obama will emerge on January 20th to the horror of everyone else in Cranbury just as Sean Hannity has predicted. Desperate times….

What does all of this mean? well, I think Norman Solomon sums it up in a column on Alternet, in which he says that an Obama victory would be “a clear national rejection of the extreme right-wing brew that has saturated the executive branch for nearly eight years.”

What’s emerging for Election Day is a common front against the dumbed-down demagoguery that’s now epitomized and led by John McCain and Sarah Palin.

That said, progressives — those on the left side of the political spectrum — cannot sit on their hands and assume that an Obama presidency will magically transform the world, that it won’t bring us a repeat of the Clinton years and their capitulation and triangulation, their promise and disappointment.

Progressives are mostly on board with the Obama campaign, even though — on paper, with his name removed — few of his positions deserve the “progressive” label. We shouldn’t deceive ourselves into seeing Obama as someone he’s not. Yet an Obama presidency offers the possibilities that persistent organizing and coalition-building at the grassroots could be effective at moving national policy in a progressive direction.

Progressives need to remember, he says, that there will be just as much work to do after the election as there has been up until this point. The left needs

to mobilize for a comprehensive agenda including economic justice, guaranteed healthcare for all, civil liberties, environmental protection and demilitarization.

The forces arrayed against far-reaching progressive change are massive and unrelenting. If an Obama victory is declared next week, those forces will be regrouping in front of our eyes — with right-wing elements looking for backup from corporate and pro-war Democrats. How much leverage these forces exercise on an Obama presidency would heavily depend on the extent to which progressives are willing and able to put up a fight.

So, for those of us who view Solomon’s laundry of progressive goals — “economic justice, guaranteed healthcare for all, civil liberties, environmental protection and demilitarization” — as the key to our future, to a better future, then fight we must.

Obama has joked that he wasn’t born in a manger. He’s right. He can only be as successful at making positive change as we let him be. It is up to us as much as it is to him and to the people in Congress. We have to keep the pressure on, keep pushing, keep fighting. It is our only hope.