The election of Barack Obama as president brings a tremendous, historic moment for this country. His rise profoundly rebuffed a widely perceived paradigm that America as a whole will reject based on his complexion. On Nov. 4, and the following day, I saw so many smiles beaming across Boston, as people everywhere looked at the US in a brand new way. Throughout the city, in the centers of Mission Hill and Roxbury, bright T-shirts were sold during the campaign season; portraits of Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X cropped alongside Obama. And during his acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination he invoked the legacy of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. But while Obama does bring a victory for black people in this way, he has done so while entrenched in moderate, mainstream politics – unlike the aforementioned civil rights leaders. And he is a centrist. Some liberal folk around here don’t understand this. In the run-up to voting day, at each step of the way, doe-eyed supporters looked on with gleeful anticipation and faithful admiration. Their assumptions, however, sometimes fell flat of Obama’s stances. One extreme example: Wanna-be radicals supporting the campaign at its Houston office as volunteers hung a Cuban flag superimposed with the image of Che Guevera on the wall. Obama was quick to condemn the adornment of a Marxist revolutionary in his domain. I observed self-proclaimed leftists lapping him with praise since the start and it drove me insane. Obama first popped onto the national scene with his appearance at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Less than two years earlier, he made a fiery speech at an antiwar rally – one he pointedly preceded by declaring himself “not opposed to war in all circumstances” – during a re-election campaign for the state senate in Illinois’ most liberal district. He said the invasion of Iraq was “dumb.” In July 2004, days before the convention, Obama told the Chicago Tribune about his changing stance on Iraq: “There’s not much of a difference between my position and George Bush’s position at this stage.” While mounting a presidential campaign, Obama made plenty of other statements that excited young voters. He told college students in January 2004 that he supported eliminating criminal penalties for marijuana use. In the same month he said it was about time to “end the embargo with Cuba” because it failed. But once Obama realized that he had a substantial chunk of the progressive vote under his belt, there was a big shift to the center on all these issues. In an October 2007 presidential debate, Obama meekly followed fellow Democrats in opposing the decriminalization of pot. In August 2007, he said he would not allow trade with Cuba as president because the ban is “an important inducement for change.” And Obama parted ways with Russ Feingold and Chris Dodd last June when revisiting the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act issue, completely flip-flopping on immunity for private interests who spied on US citizens, like AT’T, a big company that largely sponsored the 2008 Democratic National Convention. Notice how Obama is now stacking his executive branch with hawkish Clinton-era politicians and other facilitators of this disastrous war? It’s unnerving. Obama’s murky plan for Iraq entails a re-branded, indefinite occupation featuring residual forces and a strike force. Obama has always called for an escalation of war in Afghanistan. He has even repeated cries for unilateral force to bomb Pakistan to defend US interests. We can’t become complacent. Put pressure on Obama so that, once in office, his coined phrases – “Yes we can!” – can be reimplemented urging him to do the right thing and “change” his positions, but, this time, for the best.
– Marc Larocque can be reached at [email protected]
