Statehouse Days: The Myth of Barack Obama’s “True Progressive” Past

Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary.  Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them.

 

- Ryan Lizza, July 21 2008

 

 

In Chicago, for instance, we've gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices: one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable credentials and vacuous to repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program - the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle class reform in favoring form over substances. 

 

- Adolph Reed, Jr., 1996

 

  

 

The extent to which many "liberal left" Democrats and hard-right Republicans will go to convince themselves and/or others that Barack Obama is really a left progressive is quite remarkable. "Oh sure," they say when you point out that Obama is a corporate-sponsored centrist and cite any of number of facts from his U.S. Senate career and presidential campaign to support that elementary observation. "But that's just a façade he has to put on to get elected. He's really a left-leaning political actor" - what some liberal leftists will call "a true progressive" and what Obama's hard-right critics call "a dangerous leftist" and even a "socialist."

 

Never mind that Obama' s policy positions during the Democratic primary "were often to the right of his rivals" [1]. Forget that he has refused to embrace the obvious and widely supported (for decades) progressive health care solution - national single-payer insurance - and that he has failed to advance universal mandates even within the corporate-managed system that he prefers [2]. 

 

Forget his mealy-mouthed and ever-shifting positions on Iraq, clearly (however) indicating that an Obama White House will maintain the criminal imperial occupation of oil-rich Mesopotamia for an indefinite period of time [3].

 

Discount the business-friendly nature of neoliberal "Obamanomics," crafted by Wal-Mart-friendly economists like the University of Chicago's Austan Goolsbee and the Hamilton Project's Jason Furman [4].

 

Ignore his brazenly imperial positions on Israel/Palestine, Columbia, Cuba,  Afghanistan, Iran, the "defense" (Empire) budget, and the broad role of the United States (which Obama absurdly calls the "last and best hope of the world") in the world, summarized nicely by Obama's statement that "the America moment is not over" but must be "seized anew"[5].

 

Take no notice of his repeated praise of American capitalism, imperialism, and the corporate elite [6] or of his support for the Patriot Act and the wiretapping of U.S. citizens or his vote to limit working Americans' ability to recover significant damages from misbehaving corporations or his coolness to gun control or his support for the death penalty or of the disingenuous claims behind his decision to become the first presidential candidate to bypass the public presidential financing system. 

 

No, forget all that - or put it aside - and more, and realize that that's just what he has to do to get elected." Because, you see, Barack Obama is a stealth progressive - an actually transformative (or Manchurian) left candidate behind the conservative "front" he has to put up to make it into the White House.

 

That is the curious belief of many of his ostensibly left supporters and many of his right enemies.

 

"AN EAGERNESS TO ACCOMMODATE HIMSELF TO EXISTING INSTITUTIONS"

 

The claim that Obama is a closeted "true progressive" who has been playing the right-leaning game of U.S. politics in order to reach the White House (where he will come out of his left closet) and then spring actually left-leaning values on America and the world seems highly questionable for at least three reasons. First, very few if any people in key positions in the "radically centrist" [7] Obama campaign seem remotely predisposed to following such a path.

 

Second, it must have take practically super-human "eyes on the White House prize" restraint for a "truly progressive" U.S. Senator Obama not to have used his already considerable power and notoriety (after 2004) to become a leader (in the Paul Wellstone mode) of left-liberal opposition to the Bush agenda at home and abroad.  Instead he did things like:

 

* vote with Republicans to cap consumer legal damages ("tort reform").

 

* confirm the war criminal Condoleezaa Rice as (of all things) Secretary of State.

 

* lecture "bloggers" (Obama's new code name for the growing number of activists and voters who dare to openly disagree with Him from the left) on their need to show proper respect for U.S. Senators who approved the appointment of arch-reactionary opponents of womens' and civil rights to the rule-for-life Supreme Court.

 

* distance himself from Rep. John Murtha's (D-PA)call for early withdrawal from Iraq and from his fellow Illinois U.S. Senator Dick Durbin's courageous criticism of American Gestapo-like practices in Guantanamo.

 

* lend his campaign support to pro-war against antiwar candidates in the Democratic congressional primaries of 2006 and otherwise distance himself from the movement against the Iraq War. 

 

* advance the energy agenda of the nuclear and ethanol industries. 

 

Third, Obama's career prior to his emergence as a national celebrity and politician does not jibe particularly well with the "stealth progressive" hypothesis. During his seven years in the Illinois Senate between 1997 and 2004, Obama developed strong and interrelated reputations for limitless personal aspiration, for working closely with Republicans, for "pragmatic" compromise, and for staying close to the great  hidden secret to success under the rules of American "market democracy" - corporate money [8]. As Ryan Lizza notes in an important recent New Yorker sketch of Obama's early political career, "Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary.  Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them" [9].

 

"EYES ON THE PRIZE": "OBAMA BELIEVES IN OBAMA"

 

This "eagerness to accommodate" concentrated power is consistent with two core aspects of Obama's character.  The first trait here is his "deeply conservative" (journalist Larissa MacFarquhar's supposedly flattering description) "respect for tradition" and his "skepticism that the world can be changed any way but very, very slowly" [10].  The second trait is his preternatural personal ambition, which has led him to attaching himself to dominant elites and doctrines within the reigning power structure. 

 

According to his longtime close personal friend and top advisor Valerie Jarrett, in early 2007, Obama "always wanted to be president.  He didn't always admit it, but, oh, absolutely. The first time he said it," Jarrett told MacFarquhar, "he said ‘I just think I have some special qualities and wouldn't it be a shame to waste them...you know, I just think I have something'"[11].

 

During the mid-1990s, Obama participated in a leadership seminar put together by the Harvard professor Robert Putnam to gather young, "civic-minded" intellectuals, activists, and officeholders.  By Putnam's recollection, Obama "talked so openly about his political future that the group began referring to him, teasingly, as ‘Governor' and once gathered around him to ask, ‘when are you running for president?'"[12]

 

In the early 1990s, Obama told Craig Robinson, his future brother-in-law, the following (in Robinson's words): "I'd like to teach at some point and maybe run for office..no at some point I'd like to run for the U.S. Semate....possibly even run for president at some point"[13]. According to U.S. Representative Bobby Rush (D-IL), reflecting on Obama's rash effort to unseat the senior politician from the U.S. Congress in 2000: "He was blinded by his ambition. Obama has never suffered from a lack of believing that he can accomplish whatever it is he decides to try.  Obama believes in Obama.  And, frankly, that has its good side but it also has its negative side." Obama's early state legislative rival and occasional enemy Rickey Hendon once said that Obama would "run for king of the world" if he thought that job was open for election [14].

 

Consistent with these reflections, longtime Illinois state senator Steven Rauschenberger recalled in 2007 that state senator Obama was "a very bright but very ambitious person who had his eyes on the prize and it wasn't Springfield" [15]. An extensive Chicago Tribune feature on Obama's statehouse career bore the interesting title, "Careful Steps, Looking Ahead."  The feature's authors Rick Pearson and Ray Long learned that "from the moment he arrived in the Illinois Senate it was clear to many that he didn't intend to stay."  After just two months in Springfield. Pearson and Long found,  Obama met with the Illinois Senate Democrats' chief of staff Mike Hoffman to discuss "how Obama's name might play with Downstate voters in a statewide race."  According to Hoffman, "Obama wanted me to know that he had other ambitions" [16].

 

South Side Chicago Alderman Toni Preckwinkle, an early Obama ally, recently had this to say about Obama to Lizza: "I think he was very strategic in his choice of friends and mentors.  I spent ten years of my adult life working to be alderman.  I finally got elected.  This is a job I love.  And I'm perfectly happy with it.  I'm not sure that's the way he approached his public life - that he was going to try for a job and stay there fore one period of time.  In retrospect, I think he saw the positions he held as stepping stones to other things and therefore approached his public life differently than other people might have"[17].

 

Obama's desire for personal advancement and power was already apparent to many simply by the way he attained state senate seat.  He won an easy victory after essentially forcing all other Democratic contenders off the ballot by challenging their signature petitions - a classic street tactic in Chicago politics. Among the people he pushed out of contention on technical grounds was none other than the actually progressive state senator Alice Palmer, who had initially invited to Obama to run for her seat after deciding to try for the U.S. Congress in 1996 [18].

 

Consistent with Rush, Rauschenberger, and Preckwinkle's take on him, Obama began scheming about running for Republican Peter Fitzgerald's U.S. Senate seat within at least a year of his drubbing by Bobby Rush. When Democrats won control of the Illinois legislature in 2003, Obama went to his political mentor and key Richard M. Daley ally and new Illinois Senate Leader Emil Jones to obtain his support for a U.S. Senate campaign [19]. 

 

One pivotal set of state-legislative votes suggests the correctness of Rauschenberger's perspective.  As a U.S. Senator and presidential candidate, Obama has claimed to be a staunch champion of abortion rights.  He has strongly criticized a U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding a controversial ban on a late-term abortion procedure.  In the Illinois Senate, however, Obama voted "present" instead of "no" on seven bills restricting abortion.  He has subsequently claimed that these noncommittal "present" votes were part of a "progressive" political strategy worked out with liberal groups like Planned Parenthood and designed to provide political "cover" for legislators who could not afford to appear to be "pro-abortion."  But state legislators interviewed by the Chicago Tribune last year recalled no such strategy and noted that Obama needed no such "cover" in his mostly liberal and predominantly black legislative district on the South Side of Chicago.

 

Obama did think he required "cover," however, for his "higher ambitions" for running a statewide or even national campaign someday. As his good friend and former state legislator Terry Link (D-Waukeagan IL) noted, "a ‘present' vote helped if you had had aspirations of doing something else in politics.  I think Obama looked at it in that regard" [20].

 

Obama's much-ballyhooed decision to work after college as a community organizer - a three-year effort to mobilize the political power of black churches (it accomplished next to nothing) in the late 1980s - was hardly inconsistent with his long-term political ambitions.  The road to higher office is more effectively paved with a resume emphasizing public service than the pursuit of wealth. At the same time, the prestigious Harvard Law education that came between Obama's community organizing and state-legislative careers was consistent with the goal of making the elite connections that are required to make a serious run for higher elected office. It would prove very useful in the fall of 2003 and early 2004, when Obama received an early "audition" with the national power elite of election investors - a critical prelude to his more well-known and spectacular introduction to the country as a whole on the night of instantly famous Keynote Address to the 2004 Democratic Convention.

 

"A STUDY IN CAUTION AND CALCULATION"

 

Intimately related to pre-Rock Star Obama's powerful ambition was a pronounced tendency to temper his supposed strong "progressive" impulses.  According to some left and liberal observers, the future presidential candidate is a onetime "true progressive" who compromised his initial leftward instincts under the pressure of his need to appeal to the conservative forces of money and media consultants.  By In These Times writer Salim Muwakkil's account in the summer of 2007, the earlier Obama was "an indelible progressive" whose "magic" went "missing" as a U.S. Senator.  Muwakkil blamed "the cut-and-parse political calibrations employed by his by Obama's campaign staff" for having "devalued enchantment and put a premium on marketing. His political masterminds have transformed Obama from a political visionary into an electoral product (with demographically designed components) just like every other presidential aspirant." In Muwakkil's view, Obama's presidential campaign handlers were excising and "squandering" the "magic ingredient" in "Obama mania" - the fact that Obama was a longstanding "true progressive who would use his extraordinary time in the limelight to speak unpopular truths about U.S. foreign and domestic policy while unflinchingly reminded the nation of its racial obligations" [21]. 

 

There was some basis for this angle on Obama's trajectory. As Ken Silverstein noted in late 2006:

 

"During his first year in the state senate—1997—he helped lead a laudable if quixotic crusade that would have amended the state constitution to define health care as a basic right and would have required the Illinois General Assembly to ensure that all the state's citizens could get health insurance within five years. He led initiatives to aid the poor, including campaigns that resulted in an earned-income tax credit and the expansion of early-childhood- education programs. In 2001, reacting to a surge in home foreclosures in Chicago, he helped push for a measure that cracked down on predatory lenders that peddled high-interest, high-fee mortgages to lower-end homebuyers. Obama was also the driving force behind legislation, passed in 2003, that made Illinois the first state to require law-enforcement agencies to tape interrogations and confessions of murder suspects. Throughout his campaign for the U.S. Senate, Obama called for social justice, promised to "stand up to the powerful drug and insurance lobbies" that block health-care reform, and denounced the war in Iraq and the Bush White House."

 

Reflecting back on this record and Obama's move "toward the center" while and since running for the U.S. Senate, Obama's biographer David Mendell wondered at how his "growing legion of followers" could ignore the contrast between the formerly "progressive" state legislator and the "new" Obama who announced his quest for the presidency in Springfield in February of 2007:

 

"For them, it didn't seem to matter that since the aggressively liberal state lawmaker had gone to Washington he had taken a dramatic turn toward calculation  and caution, or that he had yet to propose anything philosophically new, or that Obama was, in his own words, "a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views," or that the higher he soared, the more this politician spoke in well-worn platitudes and the more he offered warm, feel-good sentiments lacking a precise framework.  It also didn't seem to matter that in his first two years....he avoided conflict at all costs, spending none of his heavily amassed political capital on even a single controversial issue he believed in" [22].

 

But what did Obama really "believe in" beyond, well, Obama, during his years in the Illinois State Assembly? Numerous accounts of Obama's Springfield tenure have indicated a more hidden, at once calculating, conservative and accommodating side that was completely consistent and continuous with the post-Springfield evolution noted by Muwakkil and Mendell. According to Tribune reporters Pearson and Long, state senator Obama "tempered a progressive agenda with a cold dose of realism, often forging consensus with conservative Republicans when other liberals wanted to crusade...A review of his tenure [in Springfield]," Pearson and Long noted, "is a study in complexity, caution, and calculation" [23].

 

While catching "Hell" from black Chicago colleagues who accused him of being too conciliatory and careerist, he formed close friendships with three white colleagues - two of whom were Republicans - from the Chicago suburbs and "downstate." Obama was more interested in having his name associated with resume-padding legislative victories than with attaining "progressive" victories.  He sponsored a distinctly modest 1998 campaign finance "reform" bill.  The legislation required electronic filing of campaign disclosure reports, prohibited the personal spending of campaign dollars by candidates and banned most gifts from lobbyists to legislators but set no limits on contributions from corporations or the exaggerated campaign spending of the state legislature's four top party officers.

 

When the state "reformed" (slashed) its public family cash assistance system in accord with the right-wing national welfare "reform" introduced in 1996-97, Obama joined Republicans and conservative Democrats and opposed much of the black Illinois legislative delegation by supporting the imposition of work requirements on single mothers receiving family cash assistance.

 

He managed to be absent from the voting floor when a key handgun control bill came up in 1999 and he voted (in pursuit of the electoral endorsement of the Fraternal Order of Police) with Republicans in 2004 to support a bill granting retired law enforcement officers to carry concealed weapons [24].  

 

An avowed advocate of the state's right to execute people in certain cases, he sold his bill requiring that all criminal interrogations be videotaped in the case of capital crimes to law enforcement and Republicans on the grounds that it would help fix the state's "broken" death penalty system.  Obama also supported the extension of the death penalty to certain types of capital offense - the killing of senior citizens and handicapped persons, for example. 

 

And, again, he voted "present" instead of "no" on seven bills that rolled back abortion rights.

 

As for the universal insurance bill that Silverstein applauded the young Obama for championing in a supposed "quixotic crusade," by May of 2004 Obama had played a pivotal role in certifying its demise.  Working with Republicans and insurance corporation lobbyists who extolled him for honoring their interests, he succeeded in watering down the state's "Health Care Justice Act" to mean little more than the setting up of a panel to research the supposedly mysterious question of how to provide universal coverage - a panel that gave the private insurance industry significant influence in how the issue would be approached. Under an amendment that Obama wrote, Boston Globe reporter Scot Helmman noted last September, "universal healthcare became merely a policy goal instead of state policy." As Helman learned, "Lobbyists praised Obama for taking the insurance industry's concerns into consideration" as he crafted the legislation."  By the recollection of health care activist Jim Duffett, executive director of the Illinois, "in this situation, Obama was being a conduit from the insurance industry to us." 

 

According to Obama spokeswoman Jen Psaki in the summer of 2007, Obama's experience with the Health Care Justice "showed him that real change comes not by dividing but by bringing people together to get things done"[25].

 

"I'M OPPOSED TO DUMB WARS"

 

And then there's the "antiwar" speech that Obama so famously delivered in downtown Chicago. The work of deconstructing Obama's "fairy tale" (Bill Clinton) "antiwar" mystique begins with taking a closer look at his 2002 speech - an oration I heard live in Chicago's downtown Daley Plaza. It was an impressive performance, given when he could afford to be more reckless and outwardly progressive  - before he had been tapped to join the national power elite. Obama opposed what he called "the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne."  He denounced "the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income, to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great

Depression" [26].

 

Obama's 2002 speech was accurate and forthright about critical matters.  It rightly predicted that invading Iraq would exacerbate Islamic anger and terrorist threats.  It correctly observed the politically motivated nature and potentially high length and cost of the planned "war." It struck an especially progressive chord when it related the Bush administration's military ambitions to its desire to turn public attention away from pressing domestic problems like poverty and corporate corruption. 

 

But Obama's Daley Plaza oration, subsequently lodged into the screen doors of Iowa City progressives with peace symbols on their porch, was not an especially anti-war, much less anti-imperial speech. It certainly wasn't a Left speech of the sort that people in the actual antiwar movement (including myself) were already making by the fall of 2002. Calling Bush's imminent war "dumb" but not criminal or immoral, it deleted the highly illegal and richly petro-imperialist ambitions behind the Iraq invasion being planned in Washington.  It said nothing about the racist nature of the administration's determination to conflate Iraq with 9/11 and al Qaeda. It omitted the long and terrible record of imperial U.S. policy that had made 9/11 less than surprising to those (including Obama's own pastor Jeremiah Wright [27) who paid elementary attention to America's provocative global behavior and Middle East politics. Contrary to the Obama presidential campaign's later effort to reinvent its candidate as an ally of the antiwar movement (a mailing I received from the Iowa Obama campaign actually told me that I could "join the movement to end the war" by supporting their candidate), his Chicago speech spoke against the planned invasion's foreign impact  in much the same terms as George Bush Senior's former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and much of the rest of the American foreign policy establishment. It argued that invading Iraq would be a foreign policy mistake - something that would likely not work for United States status and power in the world.  It did not mention that the unprovoked occupation being worked up by the White House and Pentagon would be a brazenly illegal and imperial transgression certain to kill untold masses of innocent Iraqis.   The leading reasons Obama gave not to invade Iraq - economic cost, uncertain outcomes, risks of regional destabilization, etc. (but not immorality, criminality, and the likelihood that many Iraqis would die)  - were widely voiced concerns expressed by many top and conservative foreign policy thinkers [28].

 

"HE HAD BIGGER PLANS"