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  • Why Labor's Soldiering for the Democrats is a Losing Battle
  • Adolph Reed (bio)

The question whether an Obama-era Democratic Party may offer opportunities for labor and left-of-center political interests presumes that Obama's Democratic Party offers potential for significant departure from the rightward tacking we've seen since Bill Clinton's presidency. There is little in anything Obama's said or done to warrant such a presumption.

Throughout his career, Obama has been able to assume left support while never seriously committing to any actually left policies. In fact, in his books and speeches he has frequently invoked stereotypical images of left dogmatism, intemperateness, or folly, often as asides that seem intended mainly to reassure conservative sensibilities about his judiciousness.1 This inclination to toss off casual references to the Left's "excesses" or socialism's "failure" has been a defining feature of Brand Obama and supports the claim that he is a new kind of pragmatic progressive, singularly able to bridge—or rise above—left and right, and appeal across ideological divisions.2

Rather than a departure, however, Obama's political style presumes and consolidates Clintonism's ideological and programmatic victory. Obama could not have sold his liberal-conservative "bipartisan" transcendence so successfully to leftists/progressives if Clinton had not already moved the boundaries of liberalism rightward enough to incorporate key elements of the Reaganite agenda and worldview. Clinton's presidency articulated a Democratic version of neoliberalism that abjures commitment to the public sector's role in mitigating inequalities produced through market processes. This is the substantive foundation of Obama's political vision. His posture of judiciousness and transcendence of left-right division, for example, depends partly on ritual [End Page 9] validation of bromides about "big government," which he can evoke through nods to resonant phrases, without needing affirmative arguments that might disconcert his left constituents.

In a similar vein, Obama's reliance on nasty, victim-blaming stereotypes about black poor people to convey tough-minded honesty about race and poverty also presumes victorious Clintonism. Clinton's rhetoric of "ending welfare as we know it," his division of the poor into those who "play by the rules" and those who presumably do not, his Orwellian recasting of the destruction of low-income housing and forced displacement of poor people as "moving to opportunity" and "HOPE," and (most of all) his debacle of "welfare reform" already had helped effect liberal Democrats' accommodation to underclass ideology that construes behavior modification as the fundamental objective of anti-poverty policy. Obama's nefarious "Popeyes chicken" speech and his Father's Day excoriation merely rehearsed, albeit more effectively, Clinton's well-known stratagem of disparaging poor black people in speeches to black audiences.3

Neither Obama's deep and tight connections to investor class interests (no candidate received more in financial sector campaign contributions, as is reflected in his list of economic appointments) nor his commitment to a militarist foreign policy has differed substantially from Clinton's, Gore's, Kerry's or others' in the Democratic leadership. So why, then, have so many politically savvy people assumed—both during his presidential campaign and since his inauguration—that an Obama-led Democratic Party would mark a progressive departure from its predecessors?

This assumption stems largely from his racial classification and the complex imagery and claims associated with the prospect of his becoming the first president publicly recognized as black. That imagery encouraged characterizing the implications of Obama's election for American racial politics as lying in a different, and perhaps normatively precedent, dimension from his substantive vision and programmatic agenda. From that perspective, the symbolic significance of the opportunity to elect a black president could mystify, or even outweigh, the candidate's actual politics.

In this view, Obama's victory and presidency are progressive because he is black. Obama receives a pass from progressives because the election of a black president is by definition a progressive accomplishment. Whatever advances and supports this president's election and administration must be progressive, even when he explicitly and preemptively rejects left options for conservative ones. Tellingly, Obama himself has sought to deflect criticism by adducing who he is—elements of his biography, his...

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