Posted By Ariel & Dave Lindorff June 28, 2008
Now that the primary season is over, we can see that the
clear winner was Hillary Clinton.
Oh, I know. Barack Obama got the most votes and the most
delegates, and he’ll be the Democratic presidential nominee this
August, but increasingly, it’s becoming obvious that he’s just a
pretty wrapper. Sneak a peak inside the wrapper and you’ll find
Hillary Clinton inside.
Look at the facts.
No sooner did the last votes get counted in Montana, than
Obama hied himself off to Washington to show his fealty to the
America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), where he
promised to do whatever Israel wanted. You would have thought he
was Bush or Hillary, so fulsome was his promise to
unquestioningly back the worst policies and actions of Israel’s
criminally insane right-wing government. Claim all of Jerusalem
for the Jewish state? Fine by him. Starve and terrorize a
million people in Gaza? No problemo. Attack Iran to prevent a
merely suspected nuclear program from eventually producing a
possible bomb? Okay. Negotiate with Hamas? Never.
Then there was the FISA and Fourth Amendment-violating
campaign of spying by the National Security Agency. Some members
of Congress and the courts have been trying for years to find
out what Bush and Cheney have really been up to with this
program, but they’ve been stymied by the administration’s
insistence that the phone companies, who enabled most of the
spying, are immune from prosecution and don’t have to surrender
records of, or talk about what they actually did. Congress, with
the help of a spineless Democratic majority in both houses, came
up in June with a bill that endorses the spying and gives
retroactive immunity to the phone companies. 15 Senators—all
Democrats-- opposed that wretched sell-out of the Constitution
and the American people. Sen. Obama supported it, just like
Clinton.
When the Supreme Court, in a rare exception to a rash of
reactionary rulings in the past few weeks, overturned a state
law authorizing the death penalty for the rape of a child, Obama
stood up for the death penalty, saying that he thought states
should have the right to kill anyone who would sexually abuse a
child. I guess he must think the states should be able to kill
people convicted of killing someone too, since murder has to be
at least as nasty as child rape. Another Clinton position. Never
mind that most of the people who get the death penalty are
persons of color, and that almost all the 4000 people on
America’s bulging death rows are either poor, desperately poor,
retarded or simply insane. Never mind that rape is one of the
most likely crimes to lead to wrongful convictions.
Barack was out there dissing black dads, too, charging them,
as a class, with abandonment of their children, even though
studies show that black fathers are no less likely to abandon
their kids than are white dads. Okay, that’s not really a
Hillary position. It’s more akin to Bill Clinton’s attacks on
prominent blacks like Jesse Jackson or Sister Soulja during his
campaigns for higher office.
It’s getting harder and harder to see any light between
Obama’s and Hillary’s positions on the Iraq War too, what with
Obama backing away from his earlier campaign pledge to end the
war within 16 months of taking office and saying instead that he
would “listen to the generals” and that withdrawal would depend
upon the situation on the ground.
Finally, Obama, after showing a remarkable ability to inspire
tons of small donations and support from individuals, and to
fund a huge national campaign without much in the way of
corporate support, is greedily slurping from Hillary’s cesspool
of corporate backers, now that she’s out of the way. Soon, he’ll
be wallowing in tainted cash from Wall Street commercial and
investment banks and hedge funds, telecom companies, defense
contractors, Big Pharma companies, the HMO industry, and the
entertainment industry. He’ll be owned like just about every
other politician in Washington.
The transmogrification of an upstart people’s candidate for
“change” into just another front man for the corporatocracy will
be complete.
Hillary will have won, but in the corporal form of Barack
Obama.
The joke, of course, is that this evocation by Obama of his
inner Clinton is not going to win him many votes, and may in
fact lose him far more than he gains. Being Clinton, after all,
didn’t win it for Hillary Clinton. It was Obama’s
differences from Clinton that won him the primary votes.
Clintonian positions didn’t really win the presidency for
Bill Clinton either. It was Ross Perot who won the 1992 election
for Clinton, by stealing enough votes from George Bush Sr. to
let Clinton win with a mere plurality of the votes cast. There
won’t be any Ross Perot this year, though, so Obama can’t hope
to squeak by with a minority of the votes cast the way Bill did.
In fact there will be at least two candidates—a Green Party one
and Ralph Nader--who will be picking off some of the people
Obama’s imitation of Clinton will turn off sufficiently for them
to abandon him. There will also be a Libertarian candidate
running, whose outspoken opposition to the war will attract
disillusioned erstwhile Obama backers. Many more voters may just
stay home in disgust. (It was also Al Gore's decision to run a
Clintonesque campaign of triangulation and pursuit of those
elusive "mainstream" voters that made his run against Bush in
2000 close enough for the election to be stolen.)
Meanwhile, those Hillary primary voters Obama seems so intent
on pursuing at the expense of the progressive vote—the
pro-Israel hawks in New York and Florida, the “hard-working
whites” of the West Virginia hollers, the Pennsylvania hills and
the flatlands of Ohio and Indiana—aren’t going to vote for him
just because he adopts Hillary’s positions. They’ll want the
real deal, not just a front man posing as a front woman, so
they’ll go for John McCain (just as they would have in November
had Hillary won the nomination).
You gotta ask why a guy who had it all going for him is
suddenly making such incredibly bad strategic decisions.
It has to be either that he’s brought on board too many
Clinton backers, or that his own strategists have lost
confidence in their own game plan. In his bid for Democratic
Party “unity” Obama has sold whatever soul he once had.
He has met the enemy, and he has become her. |