Obama: Failure, Fraud, or Just Playing his Role?

GUEST COMMENTARY

Boyd R. Collins September 13th, 2009
If only it were just a matter of a squandered summer. Rich focuses on the tactical and strategic errors of the Obama administration, but a shift of perspective quickly unblurs the actual scenery and highlights the superb successes Obama has achieved this summer. Obama needs to be placed in relation to the economic forces that are pushing him in the direction of a particular strategy. His behavior this summer appears incompetent only if one assumes that his goal was to get a health care package that addressed the needs of ordinary Americans. If, on the other hand, he was merely responding to the economic powers that control the pharmaceutical and health insurance industries, then his strategy has been a model for others to emulate.

Writers who are given a national stage usually reinforce the notion that presidents are primary actors within the drama of national politics, that their decisions and tactics are decisive factors guiding the development of the historical moment. This meta-message is far more important that the well-wrought details of their critiques. As long as we focus on personality and style, the real forces behind the health care debacle can be safely ignored. But what if we take a step back and see how this administration fits into the larger array of social and economic forces?

It would quickly become obvious that Obama is carrying out the interests of his class, conveniently masked by his progressive image. He is serving the interests of the health insurance industry because they are representative of those who have advanced his career and who will support his continued advancement as long as he is useful to them. Public opinion counts for nothing in this realm.

"Obama is a master when it comes to embodying what the formerly left Christopher Hitchens once (in a book about the Clintons) called 'the essence of American politics' - 'the manipulation of populism by elitism.' The president is a maestro at executing what former Clinton administration official David Rothokopf calls 'the violin model,' under which 'you hold power with the left hand and you play the music with the right.' In other words, 'you' gain and keep office with populace-pleasing progressive-sounding rhetoric but govern in standard service to existing dominant corporate and military institutions." - Paul Street, "They Employ a Lot of Our Friends: Left Reflections on Obama's Corporatist Health Care Speech", Sept. 12, 2009.

What's sad is that it is so much more difficult to make this as entertaining as "Obama's Squandered Summer".

Yes, I have to agree with you. Obama is only a fraud and a political loser from the perspective of classical, traditional political analysis. Given the revised political paradigm needed in the "all right wing, all the time" country the US has become, Obama is playing his role all too well.

His role is to continue the total domination of right wing ideology and policy in the US, an extreme domination that has been going on for 30 years. (In the 30 years prior to the most recent 30 years, which is 1950-1980, the right was relatively dominant, but not totally dominant.) Obama is fulfilling his role in exactly the skillful way you describe.

Anyone living in the US is part of a radical experiment, historically and globally speaking. What happens when you run every important aspect of society exclusively using right wing ideology? Only in the US, which was already solidy right wing prior to 1980, would it be possible for the money and power elite of the world to run experiments on various far right policies, and the overall experiment on society as a whole.

Note that the proposed health reform is one of the most notable such experiments.

In this "laboratory," ordinary people are nothing more than guinea pigs who, being non-human, don't need and are not going to receive any real health care or other forms of assistance.

[The above was in response to this article.]