Barack Obama is the Real Thing, but the Real Thing for What?

Not since John F. Kennedy burst onto the stage of U.S. presidential politics in 1960 has there been a candidate who could match the excitement and hope for the future that has been generated by Barack Obama.

The Illinois Senator’s convincing victory in the Iowa Democratic caucuses has seemingly transformed the calculus of American politics. What was unthinkable---the election of an African American president---now has become possible. The most enduring division in American life---the division that gave the lie to the Jeffersonian claim that America stood for the proposition that “all men are created equal” is being addressed in unprecedented fashion.

Symbolically, the candidacy of Barack Obama is enormously important. But does the candidate espouse a political program whose realization would be genuinely transformative for Americans and for humanity as a whole?

I was eighteen years old when JFK ran for president. For the young, not only in the U.S. but in much of the world, the Massachusetts senator represented the promise that the old ways of the past would be swept away. A new generation would take power, the best and the brightest would be at the helm. For those who wanted to participate the door was open, anything was possible.

Domestically, the achievements of the Kennedy administration were modest. But following the assassination of JFK, Lyndon Johnson his successor, did succeed in pushing fundamental reforms through Congress, reforms that guaranteed the vote to African Americans, banned housing discrimination on the basis of race, declared war on poverty and addressed the educational problems of minorities through the establishment of Head Start and other programs. The results of the reforms were uneven, especially the so-called war on poverty, but LBJ’s reforms did extend political rights and civil rights to African Americans who had effectively been denied those rights in the South for a full century after the slaves were freed as a consequence of the Civil War.

Beyond the borders of the United States, despite the rhetoric that invited humanity as a whole to pursue an agenda of freedom---“My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man”---the Kennedy administration pursued the geo-politics of Cold War and American Empire.

In 1961, the administration masterminded and funded the disastrous assault of anti-Castro Cubans on the Bay of Pigs. For the rest of his life, JFK remained obsessed with Fidel Castro and Attorney General Robert Kennedy brought great pressure to bear on the CIA to achieve the assassination of the Cuban leader. In 1961, the White House tried to block Canada’s Diefenbaker government from selling wheat to China---JFK considered the sale to be “trading with the enemy.” In 1963, the administration meddled in the affairs of South Vietnam and helped push it toward the coup in early November that led to the murder of the country’s autocratic president, Ngo Dinh Diem.
Camelot, as it turned out, delivered much less social reform, than did the Roosevelt administration in the Great Depression, and on the world stage, the Kennedy administration was as avaricious in the pursuit of empire as other administrations.

What would Obama do as president to promote social reform at home and a better world abroad?

The truth is that we don’t really know much on either score. The Illinois Senator, like other Democratic candidates for their party’s nomination, is committed to ensuring that all Americans would have health insurance. In practice, his proposals are rather vague, amounting to a patchwork of reforms that falls far short of Canadian medicare. The sketchiness of his position has left him open to the charge from rival candidates that his proposals would still leave an enormous number of Americans without health insurance.

While Obama talks about a better deal for working people in America and is critical of NAFTA, his ideas come nowhere near to challenging the essential assumptions of the free market capitalism, with minimal government, that is the essence of his country’s socio-economic system.

As far as the rest of the world is concerned, Obama wants to bring American troops home from Iraq----exactly how is unclear---and he believes in talking to leaders of countries that have differences with the U.S., without pre-conditions. In a stunning display of militarist bravado, however, he said that if the intelligence pointed to significant opportunities to go after the top leaders of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, he would dispatch American forces to border regions of Pakistan, if necessary without the permission of the government of Pakistan. That stance, with its blatant disregard for the sovereign rights of other countries, is what got the Americans into Iraq and a host of other messy foreign entanglements in the first place.

It should come as no surprise that Barack Obama conceives of freedom very much in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King. What he excites in the American soul is the prospect of fulfilling the promise of America as set out in the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, the Gettysburg Address and King’s “I have a dream” oration.

That is no mean or shabby thing. But it is very much an American thing, conceived in nationalist American terms, the assumption being that when the American house is no longer divided that will be a boon to the whole world.

That remains to be seen.