Thomas Frank on Obama's Compromising Positions

- In a long article in the September edition of Harper's Magazine Thomas Frank argues that Obama's conciliatory nature has led his first term to look like a Bush third term.

Frank starts out his Harper's article by noting that Obama won the presidency four years back in a wave of what he calls progressive fantasy.

But instead of continuing using progressive terms and adopting progressive policies he has borrowed Republican similes.

Obama likes to compare the national budget to a family budget. Just as when times get tough families have to tighten their belts so does the government. This analogy has long been used by Republicans. Obama is a Democrat and Democrats are supposed to believe in government spending when the economy is declining.

Obama also likes to say that America should look forward not backward. Hence he is not going to look at such past practices as rendition or Bush's torture policies or at who was responsible for the financial disasters of 2008. As Frank puts it:.

” It’s a kind of intellectual amnesty program that has absolved in one fell swoop the nation’s failed political leadership and pundit corps."

Rather than closing Guantanamo and trying those held in civilian courts he has revived the military tribunals that were so reviled during the Bush term in office. Many who are there will continue to be held without trial.

In other respects as well the Obama program is warmed over Republican policy. Obamacare is based upon material borrowed from the conservative Heritage Foundation and Romneycare in Massachusetts. Obama's bank bailouts resemble Bush bank bailouts. The chairman of the Fed under Bush is still there under Obama.

Obama did decide to go on a populist mission and apparently go after Wall Street but as Frank says:

When he decided to go populist and snarl at the One Percent, he took

care to dispatch an emissary to New York to let the finance industrknow he didn’t mean it. (Just as he didn’t mean it when he badmouthed

NAFTA or promised to revisit the Patriot Act.)

Although Obama has constantly pursued compromise with the Republicans and adopted conservative ideas on health care, deficit spending, and other areas his reward for trying to move to the middle and compromise is to be described as a socialist dictator!

And yet, in the great electoral contest that has now commenced in

earnest, it is Barack Obama the would-be socialist dictator who stands

on trial. Back in 2010, a leaked Republican presentation identified

“sav[ing] the country from trending toward Socialism” as the G.O.P.’s

strongest fund-raising appeal.

As Obama reaches for compromise the Republicans can move further to the right. At the same time the political spectrum becomes so warped that the Republicans can offer some of the same policies that created the financial mess as solutions namely more deregulation and more tax cuts. If at first your ideological claptrap fails then try it again and fail again. As for Obama he is regarded seriously as leading the U.S. to European style socialism. While willing to compromise and anxious to reach bipartisan agreement Obama keeps having his agenda set by the right as he moves further and further towards their positions as they move even further to the right.

I am not sure that Frank is completely correct although his analysis is interesting. I have always felt that Obama was basically conservative to begin with. His foreign policy positions illustrate this. If anything Obama is more hawkish than Bush except for his withdrawal from Iraq. Even there he withdrew completely only because the Iraq government would not allow troops to stay without being subject to Iraqi law. There remains a huge presence too in the huge embassy and its associated staff and security personnel.

Obama has had his very own surge in drone attacks and has spread the war on terror to Africa and Yemen and is challenging China in the Pacific.

Obama and Socialism

This is from this Magazine.



The term ''socialism'' is used in popular discourse as a boo word. A boo word is one that has purely negative emotive meaning and very little cognitive meaning. Socialism replaces private ownership of the major means of production, distribution and exchange by some form of socialised ownership. Production is on the basis of need not on the basis of profit. Redistribution within a capitalist system may be progressive but it is not socialism. Often it is simply a means of stimulating capitalist production as in the recent distribution of tax refund checks by the US government in the hopes of stimulating buying and consumption. Even the partial nationalisation of financial institutions has nothing to do with socialism. It is a rescue plan to bail out the system in a crisis and when the crisis passes the institutions pass back completely into private ownership. Some institutions such as the courts, police, and often the post office, and some infrastructure such as highways usually remain socialised under capitalism since they involve necessary costs rather than profits. However under advanced capitalism even these institutions are privatised as far as possible. The prison system is a good example, and security contractors, even for services formerly done by military and police. Prisons are another example.








October 29, 2008
Obama and socialism
Posted by Daniel Tseghay at 04:13 PM ET
McCain, Palin, and their Republican acolytes have recently taken to calling Barack Obama a socialist. In making that "charge" (apparently socialism is a very bad thing in the States) they point to Obama's progressive, or punitive, depending on how you look at it, income-tax plan. In his plan, people making more than $250,000 will face increased tax rates. The rest will experience tax cuts. The McCain campaign calls this redistributionist and, therefore, socialist.
There are a few things to keep in mind at this point: graduated taxation is not necessarily socialism. It is, at best, only one of the conditions for socialism. The United States is now and has been for quite a while a country with a graduated income-tax rate. Obama merely wants to increase the top marginal income-tax rate from 35 to 39.6, amounting to an incremental progression from an existing income-tax plan - not a major shift into a totally different economic system.
Finally, McCain and Palin should not be throwing stones. Palin, as Alaska's governor, did nothing but redistribute wealth. Here is the New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg on Palin's hypocrisy:
"She is, at the very least, a fellow-traveller of what might be called socialism with an Alaskan face. The state that she governs has no income or sales tax. Instead, it imposes huge levies on the oil companies that lease its oil fields. The proceeds finance the government's activities and enable it to issue a four-figure annual check to every man, woman, and child in the state. One of the reasons Palin has been a popular governor is that she added an extra twelve hundred dollars to this year's check, bringing the per-person total to $3,269."
And when asked in 2000 why people are being penalized for making more money and if this was socialism, McCain responded: "Here's what I really believe: That when you reach a certain level of comfort, there's nothing wrong with paying somewhat more."
That indeed might be what he really feels. Now why can't he bring himself to let the truth out? He knows Obama is not a socialist and, ultimately, he sort of agrees with Obama's plan, if not the specifics. Where's the "Straight Talk Express" now?More entries on: American Presidential Election