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Obama - From the vantage point of November '08

 
Ewart 2016-12-22 22:26:59 

As President Obama nears the end of his presidential road, and assessments are being made, it is perhaps worthwhile to look back at the monstrous neo-con mountains that he faced...

“America has come to its senses”
Oh yes, we can!

by Ewart Walters Nov. 2008

In the sweet, oh so sweet, afterglow of America’s monumental achievement on November 4, 2008, a song came to mind. It was a song by the great soul singer Sam Cooke, a song of the aspirations of the US civil rights movement of the mid 1960s. A song of hope and faith.

“I was born by the river in a little tent
Oh and just like the river I been a runnin' ever since
It's been a long, a long time coming but I know
A change gon' come oh yes it will.”
The title? “A change is gonna come.”

The song has been covered by more than two dozen artistes including Aretha Franklin, Patti Labelle, Seal, Al Green, Prince Buster and Tina Turner. But none of them quite evokes the deep soulful yearning of Sam Cooke, the yearning of a people for freedom, for equality, for justice, and the certain knowing that a change is going to come.

That change was launched by Barack Hussein Obama in the summer of 2004 with his speech at the Democratic National Convention. And then, with audacious hope and more than a little faith in people, he launched his campaign for the presidency in sub-zero temperatures on February 10, 2007, pledging to "build a more hopeful America." As his campaign took off the theme became crystallised in one word – CHANGE.

Who would have thought the yearning for change was so deep, so worldwide? From Alaska to Australia, from Bangalore to Rio de Janeiro, from Negril to Edinburgh, from Johannesburg through New Delhi to Osaka and Obama (Japan), a Niagara of tears was unleashed. Tears of moment, tears of relief, tears of joy.

New York Times columnist Frank Rich noted, “On the morning after a Black man won the White House, America's tears of catharsis gave way to unadulterated joy.” And another, Judith Warner, said, “The election brought the return of a country we’d lost for so long that it was almost forgotten under the accumulated scar tissue of accommodation and acceptance.”

But what are we changing from? The answer is Reaganomics and the Bush Doctrine that have held sway these past 28 years.
In his latest book, Free Lunch: How the Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense and Stick You With the Bill, former New York Times reporter David Cay Johnston explains that the trend of government policies favoring the super-rich began when Ronald Reagan became president and continued through the Clinton and Bush administrations.

One analyst describes it as “an era of unbridled deregulation, wealth-enhancing perks for the already well-off and miserly indifference to the poor and middle class; of the recasting of greed as goodness, the equation of bellicose provincialism with patriotism, the reframing of bigotry as small-town decency.”

Another, Mark Weisbrot, says, “Reagan decimated organized labor and cut taxes – for the rich. He … succeeded in drastically changing the ideological climate on economic issues. By the end of the Reagan (and George H.W. Bush) administrations in 1993, the typical Democratic member of Congress was far to the right of Richard Nixon on most economic policy.

“The impact of this … on the living standards of the majority of Americans can hardly be over-emphasized. Prior to the Reagan years, the United States was on its way to becoming more like Europe, with a welfare state and social safety net that would allow the vast majority of its citizens to enjoy the benefits of a developed, high-income economy. When Medicare and Medicaid were enacted in 1965, it was widely believed that insuring the elderly and the poor, respectively, were just the first steps toward universal health insurance. The assault that began with Ronald Reagan's firing of 12,000 striking air traffic controllers in 1981 set the nation on a very different path.”

Indeed, this was when we discovered that a new class of people had been created. This was “the underclass,” a dismissive term that was a life sentence to permanent detention in poverty and the nation’s privatized jails. This was the first act in the creation of hopelessness and despair. And that despair is what Judith Warner cited with her brilliant comment about “the accumulated scar tissue of accommodation and acceptance.” Numbed into silence by the incessant drumming that ascribed deity to privatisation, unregulated free market policies and its war on terror approach, people simply lost hope and muted their better judgement.

The last act in this immorality play was the eight dark years of Dick Cheney and George W. Bush and their co-conspirators of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) – Donald Rumsfeld, Richard “Prince of Darkness” Perle, Bill Kristol, Elliot Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, “Scooter” Libby and others. Eight years of secrecy, dishonesty and illegality: renditions, water-boarding, murder and mayhem, pre-emptive attacks, expansion of the military industrial complex, and, as one vivid example of domestic callousness, the shameful mistreatment of the victims of Katrina.

Having pushed the country, and much of the world, so far over to the right, they left the Democrats – including Bill Clinton – confused and searching blindly for a middle ground that itself had shifted way over into Conservative if not neo-con territory.
And then, along came Obama.

Perhaps the first point to be made is that this man whose presidency will mark the real beginning of the 21st Century, is one who, unlike most presidents, came up from poverty. Here is a man who went to college on scholarship, whose mother survived on food stamps while she went to school, who on his departure from a brilliant performance at Harvard Law School thought it important to go and work with members of “the underclass” on the streets of Chicago, men and women who had nothing. Men and women who were forgotten, discarded by the system that had embraced and lionized the trickle-down myth of deregulation by “small government,” privatisation and free-market economics.

Obama paid his dues. Black by the American “one drop rule,” he never wore blackness on his sleeve. What is more, he is a product of “the browning of America,” the explosion of citizens who are at once both Black and White and neither Black nor White.

But beyond that he is gifted. Gifted, with a high intelligence. Gifted, with a persuasiveness that brought hope and belief back into the souls of people that were long hardened by the privation of privatization. Gifted, with passion and a golden tongue that echoes Martin Luther King Jr. And this was a characteristic that drew hundreds of thousands to hear him – in sleet and rain, in sub-zero temperatures, in Germany, in St. Louis, in Denver, in Pennsylvania, in New York, in St, Petersburg, in Miami, in parks and churches, in school halls and community centres, in lunch rooms and restaurants.

Obama’s work as a community organiser and his grasp of the task before him led to the creation of a campaign organisation such as we have never seen before. If it was the technology of television that brought the savage racism of the southern whites against the leaders of the civil rights movement into the living rooms and the consciousness of America and the world, it was now the technology of the computer, the cell-phone and I-Pod that rocketed the Obama campaign. The campaign's mastery of the information revolution and its use of social-networking tools brought into the political process millions of young Americans and new voters.

But none of this would have worked if there had not been an articulation of a vision combined with that most sought-after, most elusive quality – charisma. (Charisma: n. 1 personal magnetism: the ability to inspire enthusiasm, interest, or affection in others by means of personal charm or influence. 2. Divine gift: a gift or power believed to be divinely bestowed).

Never before has one person drawn so many. Tall, athletic, handsome young father with a megawatt smile, and compellingly articulate, Barack Obama is the very definition of charisma. And yet, he was most persuasive when he presented the task not as his but as the property of all who would hear him. He spoke to them as they had never been spoken to before. He spoke their language, their issues.

People who could not get their insurance companies to pay their health claims, those who could not put gas in their cars to look for a job, those who had their mortgages foreclosed, those who were in jail because of poverty, those who could not pay the ever-increasing college fees, those who had lost all hope and were wallowing in the slough of despair – they all could understand him. And so they slammed the brakes on decades of ever-increasing despair and turned in hope to Barack Obama.
The Guardian’s Jonathan Raban saw it this way:

“We’ve elected as president someone who is empirical, cautious, conservative with a small “c,” yet unusually sure of his own judgment… He's sure to disappoint those of his supporters who believe he can raise the dead, turn water into wine, and walk on water. But he has rescued the White House from the besotted rationalists of PNAC with their Platonist designs on the world, and restored it to the realm of common reason. It's a measure of the madness of the last eight years that, for this seemingly modest contribution to the nation's welfare (and not just this nation's), grown men and women wept in gratitude on Tuesday night. ‘Thank God, thank God, thank God, thank God,’ spoken by four devout atheists. There was little triumph in our emotion, only an overpowering wave of relief that, after eight years of manic derangement, America had at last come to its senses.”

And the rest of us? Well, we can sing again – with Sam Cooke “It’s been a long time comin’ but I know a change is gonna come.” And, yes, we can sing along with the High Priestess of Soul, Nina Simone, her 1969 song:

“Oh but my joy of today
Is that we can all be proud to say
To be young, gifted and Black
Is where it's at!”


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