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<\/a><\/p>\nThis is why it is fair to say that, for all practical purposes, there is no Obama apart from the positions he takes.<\/p>\n
The man is not like a sub-atomic particle or, for that matter, a progressive Democrat. He is more like a ghost, a figure with no real substance.<\/p>\n
To understand his presidency therefore, there is only one way: forget about trying to figure out what he is, and look just at what he does.<\/p>\n
Obama apologists, the ones who blame Republicans for everything and insist that their man is the best of all possible Presidents, would disagree.<\/p>\n
They still hang on to the persona that many voters in 2008 inferred from what is known about Obama\u2019s intelligence, education, and experience of the world. Perhaps they also bolster their illusions with selective readings of what he wrote and said before he entered national politics and while running for office in 2008.<\/p>\n
In any case, by 2012, full-fledged Obama apologists had become a vanishing breed. Fortunately for Obama, Lesser Evilists rose up in their stead. For that, Obama will be forever in Mitt Romney\u2019s debt.<\/p>\n
Were they not mindless ingrates, the grandees of the Grand Old Party would also now be thanking Romney for being such a bust. Of course, they would prefer to have one of their own running the show; in high capitalist circles, class solidarity generally trumps enlightened self-interest.<\/p>\n
But with a Democrat in the White House, especially one whose base routinely cuts him endless slack, they have less reason to fear a revival of social movements that would challenge their power and privileges.<\/p>\n
Such a revival is long overdue. Only two years ago, the Occupy movements seemed to portend its emergence. Wise capitalists would take heed and be grateful that they have Obama, not Romney, for a protector. But wisdom these days is in short supply in capitalist quarters.<\/p>\n
Be that as it may, we have the President we have.<\/p>\n
Perhaps he is conflicted as a person; perhaps he has misgivings about the killing his minions do and about the mayhem his policies stir up. Perhaps he regrets his government\u2019s violations of basic rights and liberties, and the impunity it grants to war criminals and banksters who are too big to fail. \u00a0Perhaps it sickens him to toady up to the worst of the worst, the fraction of the one percent who are leading the country and the world to ruin.<\/p>\n
But it doesn\u2019t matter. As a public figure, Obama is what he does. And so we can only look to what he does, to the positions he takes, to see what would make sense for him to do in the circumstances he has helped to fashion.<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
When we do, several themes emerge.<\/p>\n
An unflinching devotion to \u201cbipartisanship\u201d is one.<\/p>\n
The idea is not to find common ground between Democrats and Republicans. That would be pointless because there already is a far-reaching consensus at the level of basic ideological commitments. \u00a0Both parties are in thrall to corporate America, and both see the world the same way.<\/p>\n
What Obama wants is cooperation in advancing the objectives Democrats and Republicans share. \u00a0There has never been less of that than there now is.<\/p>\n
In view of how much harm those shared objectives do \u2014 domestically, internationally and environmentally \u2013 this is not an altogether bad thing. But the government\u2019s dysfunctionality has gotten so out of hand that the socially useful things it does are in jeopardy. This is a problem that must be addressed.<\/p>\n
For this sorry state of affairs, we have mainly the obstinacy of Republican legislators, and the mischievous connivance of their party\u2019s leadership, to thank.<\/p>\n
Obama is right; this has to change. But his determination to turn the situation around by anticipating every Republican desire \u2014 only to be rebuffed, over and over again \u2013 borders on the pathological.<\/p>\n
He takes for granted the constituencies that support him, not bothering even to toss an occasional crumb their way. \u00a0The labor movement gets the brunt of his malign neglect, but they all do to some extent. It is the other face of the contempt for him evinced by those for whose approval he yearns.<\/p>\n
Obama-style bipartisanship is only indirectly about changing the way Washington works, and only incidentally about deflecting criticism as he advances policies only Republicans could love.<\/p>\n
It isn\u2019t even about ingratiating himself and his party with the pillars of American capitalism, the dream of many a Democrat since the Clinton days.<\/p>\n
That would be a fool\u2019s errand because Republicans are not about to lose their sugar daddies. They would sooner bring the entire government to a halt than let Democrats take their place.<\/p>\n
Yet, like Charlie Brown, Obama keeps trying. In the comics, it is funny; in the real world, it is only pathetic.<\/p>\n
Then there is Obama\u2019s commitment to what people nowadays euphemistically call \u201cthe private sector.\u201d That means facilitating the predations of banksters and corporate moguls and imposing austerity on everyone else, ninety-nine percent or more of us.<\/p>\n
It means privatizing and outsourcing and reckless disregard of the public good. Anything to keep profits up, including the timeworn way \u2014 keeping wages down.<\/p>\n
In saner times, President Eisenhower\u2019s nominee for Secretary of Defense, General Motors CEO Charlie \u201cEngine\u201d Wilson got into trouble when he said that what is good for General Motors is good for the country as a whole \u2014 and vice versa.<\/p>\n
If we substitute \u201ccorporate America generally\u201d for General Motors \u2013 and if we understand \u201cgood for\u201d to mean not literally<\/i> good for but believed to be<\/i> good for by the greediest of our capitalists and their ideological flacks \u2013 we have Obama\u2019s position to a tee.<\/p>\n
Needless to say, Obama is all for enriching the rich. But, for him, insofar as we can infer a him from the positions he takes, bolstering a sense of the legitimacy of the economic system that makes the rich richer is an even higher priority.<\/p>\n
The evils of capitalism have been evident from the moment of its inception. But the system\u2019s irrationality, its inability to translate the enormous wealth it produces into corresponding improvements in peoples\u2019 lives, though long evident, has by now become so thoroughly transparent that not all the ideologues in the world can keep this reality from being widely acknowledged.<\/p>\n
Hence the need to make it seem that capitalists still do something useful, that they are, in the current phrase, \u201cjob creators.\u201d Of course, they are, if there are no alternatives. But governments create jobs too \u2014 better ones, in many circumstances.<\/p>\n
Were that fact to take hold of peoples\u2019 consciousness, the obvious question would be: \u00a0who needs capitalists anyway?<\/p>\n
And so, the threat of a good example must be beaten down. To that end, the hope and change President is there \u2014 making sure that government does no more job creation than is strictly necessary for keeping the private sector afloat.<\/p>\n
This is not a stance that serves him well, especially with the economy still in a wretched state. But Obama has backed himself into a corner, and there is no clear way out.<\/p>\n
Then there is Obama\u2019s fascination with high tech killing and daring-do killers.<\/p>\n
The Nobel laureate seldom passes up opportunities to \u201csupport the troops,\u201d and he speaks eloquently of America\u2019s \u201cwarrior heroes.\u201d But it is plain that he has no special fondness for GI Joes or their beleaguered female equivalents.<\/p>\n
He prefers weaponized drones, Navy Seals, and other special ops forces.<\/p>\n
The man has his very own Murder Incorporated, and he seems to enjoy putting it to use. \u00a0\u00a0Traditional warfare may be necessary from time to time, to keep the empire in line. But that is so twentieth century. How much cooler is it to set flesh and blood action figures loose upon the world, and have them do the empire\u2019s business!<\/p>\n
Unfortunately, though, Obama isn\u2019t just playing games. The friends and families of dead Afghanis, Pakistanis, Yemenis, Somalis and others can testify to that. The families and friends of at least four American citizens can testify as well.<\/p>\n
Obama\u2019s self-proclaimed \u00a0\u201cbalancing\u201d of \u201csecurity concerns\u201d with Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures and First Amendment defenses of free speech and freedom of the press is of a piece with his general disregard of the rule of law.<\/p>\n
Indeed, the surveillance state he has helped fashion is in plain violation not just of Constitutional protections, but also of the spirit behind them.<\/p>\n
The authors of our Constitution were supremely aware of the close relation between democratic governance and governmental transparency. This is why they accorded pride of place to the free flow of information. \u00a0It may have been an accident, but it is nevertheless revealing that they put the First Amendment first. They understood that, without its protections, a democratic state cannot endure.<\/p>\n
Who knows, or cares, what the Constitutional scholar, Professor Obama, thinks about that. What matters is that when he does his balancing, their concerns hardly register.<\/p>\n
And so, he punishes whistle blowers, encouraging a compliant media to vilify and mock them. He treats a free and open media as if it were an enemy waiting to pounce.<\/p>\n
The official rationale is that national security requires no less.<\/p>\n
Leave aside the obvious point that the main threat to national security these days does not, and could not possibly, come from the \u201cterrorists\u201d whom the Bush and Obama Administrations use as pretexts. \u00a0It comes from impending ecological catastrophes.<\/p>\n
Precious little is being done to guard against, much less hold off, those threats.<\/p>\n
This is wildly irrational, just as it is wildly irrational to turn the world upside down to fight Bin Laden\u2019s ghost. But that, at least, does make some sense once we realize that the surveillance state Obama et. al<\/i>. have concocted is directed more towards protecting the authorities from embarrassment than towards protecting the people they purport to serve from political violence.<\/p>\n
* * *<\/p>\n
Obama\u2019s 2012 victory restored some of the political capital he squandered after 2008, but this time only for a few weeks. Practiced now in the art of obstinacy, Republicans took immediate aim \u2014 and brought his presidency to the brink of ruin.<\/p>\n
In Obama\u2019s first two years, when Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate, he did manage to get some significant legislation passed. His signal achievement was the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare.<\/p>\n
It was, in the main, contrived, years earlier, in right-wing think tanks in an effort to stave off genuine health care reform, and it bore an uncanny resemblance to the Massachusetts plan put in place by his rival in 2012, Governor Mitt Romney.<\/p>\n
It was a milquetoast insurance reform \u2014 beneficial, but insurance industry and health-care profiteer friendly, and calculated to set back the cause of genuine health care reform for yet another generation.<\/p>\n
But those were Obama\u2019s salad days. The first two years of his second term are unlikely to produce anything comparable \u2014 not even a pale semblance of needed immigration reform, notwithstanding a vaunted bipartisan \u201ccompromise\u201d designed to feather the nests of those who stand to benefit from an increasingly militarized border.<\/p>\n
Still, Obama\u2019s presidency is not a lost cause. A powerful dose of prosperity could turn it around.<\/p>\n
However to get from here to there, he needs a serious job program, and that much \u201cbig government\u201d is anathema to the Obama we have come to know from the positions he takes.<\/p>\n
A jobs program that was far too small for the situation it addressed was acceptable in 2009, when the economy was on the brink of catastrophe, and when Democrats and Republicans still cooperated a little. But that was then.<\/p>\n
The situation now is more hopeless, and so is Obama \u2014 now that his deficit hawk persona has crystalized along with his determination to give the private sector pretty much everything it wants.<\/p>\n
If he is to salvage anything from his second term, the time is therefore past due for him to pull the proverbial rabbit out of the proverbial hat. What better way could there be than to deputize everybody to snoop on everything?<\/p>\n
Since mining meta-data can be more revealing than outright listening in, this would be something of a make-work project.<\/p>\n
But, again, the point is not so much to bolster national security as national passivity, the kind that comes naturally to a dumbed down public obsessed with gossip and titillation.<\/p>\n
Because the plan Obama should launch is so vile, Republicans would have to go along; they have a reputation for vileness to maintain. \u00a0How could a Lindsey Graham object, and he isn\u2019t even the worst of them? And how could Obama not salivate at the prospect, at last, of a real bipartisan consensus?<\/p>\n
Moreover, the proposal is high-tech enough too to be enthralling, and mind numbing enough to be truly useful. \u00a0The media have been dumbing down public discourse with intrusive, titillating gossip from time immemorial. Why not make what is already a national pass time an official national priority?<\/p>\n
Best of all, this is a jobs program that no one can fault; because, in a perpetual war regime like ours, national emergencies trump all. And who knows \u2014 maybe Obama\u2019s economic team can figure out a way to privatize it as well.<\/p>\n
Vile, capitalist friendly, techie, intrusive and moronizing \u2014 the perfect Obama plan. What is he waiting for? What more could he want?<\/p>\n
<\/em>ANDREW LEVINE<\/strong>\u00a0is a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, the author most recently of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY (Routledge) and\u00a0POLITICAL KEY WORDS<\/a>\u00a0(Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in political philosophy. His most recent book is\u00a0In Bad Faith: What\u2019s Wrong With the Opium of the People<\/a>. He was a Professor (philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor (philosophy) at the University of Maryland-College Park. \u00a0<\/em>He is a contributor to\u00a0Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion<\/a>\u00a0(AK Press).<\/em><\/p>\n