by GARY OLSON
President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, expected to cost more than $1 billion, is underway. Given incumbency and likely opponents, he’ll probably win. Of course ZNet readers understand that won’t make a whit of difference for most Americans. But if you know someone still slumbering in an Obamamania-induced trance, I have a guaranteed spell breaker. Paul Street’s book, The Empire’s New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2010, paperback) demolishes any remaining misapprehension that Obama is anything other than a Wall Street/military-friendly, seductive-sounding servant of concentrated wealth and power. I assigned it as a text this term in my course “U.S. Workers in the Global Economy” and for many students it was a game changer.
This week, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman expressed deep disappointment in the president and asserted that “Mr. Obama is still clearly clinging to his vision of himself as a figure who can transcend America’s partisan differences” (April 11, 2011). Perhaps, but given the facts, Obama’s record as president shouldn’t come as a surprise: Recycling discredited economic advisors like Rubin and Geithner, rescuing ruthless Wall Street speculators, extending the Bush-era tax cuts for the super-rich, abandoning his healthcare “public option” and quickly selling out to private insurers, going back on his pledge to close GITMO, maintaining 50,000 troops in Iraq while substituting mercenaries for others, a pitifully inadequate stimulus package, doing virtually nothing about the real unemployment rate of 18 percent and shrinking paychecks, a record-setting Pentagon budget, pushing anti-labor trade deals, reneging on his campaign promise to reform management-friendly labor laws and reducing payments to social security. Finally, in Obama’s Vietnam, the disastrous and immoral Afghanistan War which costs taxpayers $2 billion per month, 98,000 U.S. troops remain on the ground. In 2010 alone, 499 U.S. soldiers died there and 440 Afghan civilians were killed by U.S. led forces. Last year, U.S. troops in Afghanistan suffered a tripling of amputations of more than one limb. And this is only a short list from Obama’s first term which feels more like Bush’s third term.
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After two U.S. image staining Bush-Cheney terms, worried elites undertook an “Orwellian rebranding project” and Brand Obama was their choice for this public relations overhaul. This would be Bush without the baggage but with attractive packaging and major style points. The essence of this Obama rebranding venture was that policies and practices seen as “noxious under the perceived rule of a boorish white Republican from Texas (George W. Bush) become perversely acceptable for many ‘progressive’ and other citizens when carried out by an eloquent and urban black Democrat from Chicago (Barack Obama).”
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