Kennedy's campaign is a model for Barack Obama. Like Obama, he was a senator with no achievements to his name. Like Obama, he raised the expectations of young people and minorities. Like Obama, he promised to end an unpopular war, not because he opposed the war's conquest of other people's land and resources, but because it was "unwinnable".
Should Obama beat John McCain to the White House in November, it will be liberalism's last fling. In the United States and Britain, liberalism as a war-making, divisive ideology is once again being used to destroy liberalism as a reality. A great many people understand this, as the hatred of Blair and new Labour attest, but many are disoriented and eager for "leadership" and basic social democracy. In the US, where unrelenting propaganda about American democratic uniqueness disguises a corporate system based on extremes of wealth and privilege, liberalism as expressed through the Democratic Party has played a crucial, compliant role.
In 1968, Robert Kennedy sought to rescue the party and his own ambitions from the threat of real change that came from an alliance of the civil rights campaign and the anti-war movement then commanding the streets of the main cities, and which Martin Luther King had drawn together until he was assassinated in April that year. Kennedy had supported the war in Vietnam and continued to support it in private, but this was skilfully suppressed as he competed against the maverick Eugene McCarthy, whose surprise win in the New Hampshire primary on an anti-war ticket had forced President Lyndon Johnson to abandon the idea of another term. Using the memory of his martyred brother, Kennedy assiduously exploited the electoral power of delusion among people hungry for politics that represented them, not the rich.
"These people love you," I said to him as we left Calexico, California, where the immigrant population lived in abject poverty and people came like a great wave and swept him out of his car, his hands fastened to their lips.
"Yes, yes, sure they love me," he replied. "I love them!" I asked him how exactly he would lift them out of poverty: just what was his political philosophy?
"Philosophy? Well, it's based on a faith in this country and I believe that many Americans have lost this faith and I want to give it back to them, because we are the last and the best hope of the world, as Thomas Jefferson said."
"That's what you say in your speech. Surely the question is: How?"
"How? . . . by charting a new direction for America."
The vacuities are familiar. Obama is his echo. Like Kennedy, Obama may well "chart a new direction for America" in specious, media-honed language, but in reality he will secure, like every president, the best damned democracy money can buy.
As their contest for the White House draws closer, watch how, regardless of the inevitable personal smears, Obama and McCain draw nearer to each other. They already concur on America's divine right to control all before it. "We lead the world in battling immediate evils and promoting the ultimate good," said Obama. "We must lead by building a 21st-century military . . . to advance the security of all people [emphasis added]." McCain agrees.
Obama says in pursuing "terrorists" he would attack Pakistan. McCain wouldn't quarrel. Both candidates have paid ritual obeisance to the regime in Tel Aviv, unquestioning support for which defines all presidential ambition. In opposing a UN Security Council resolution implying criticism of Israel's starvation of the people of Gaza, Obama was ahead of both McCain and Hillary Clinton. In January, pressured by the Israel lobby, he massaged a statement that "nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people" to now read: "Nobody has suffered more than the Palestinian people from the failure of the Palestinian leadership to recognise Israel [emphasis added]."
Such is his concern for the
victims of the longest, illegal
military occupation of modern times.
Like all the candidates, Obama has
furthered Israeli/Bush fictions
about Iran, whose regime, he says
absurdly, "is a threat to all of
us".
On the war in Iraq, Obama the dove
and McCain the hawk are almost
united. McCain now says he wants US
troops to leave in five years
(instead of "100 years", his earlier
option). Obama has now "reserved the
right" to change his pledge to get
troops out next year. "I will listen
to our commanders on the ground," he
now says, echoing Bush.
His adviser on Iraq,
Jann Wenner, founder of the
liberal Rolling Stone, says the US
should maintain up to 80,000 troops
in Iraq until 2010. Like McCain,
Obama has voted repeatedly in the
Senate to support Bush's demands for
funding of the occupation of Iraq;
and he has called for more troops to
be sent to Afghanistan. His senior
advisers embrace
McCain's proposal for an aggressive
"league of democracies", led by
the United States, to circumvent the
United Nations. Like McCain, he
would extend the crippling embargo
on Cuba.
Amusingly, both have denounced their
"preachers" for speaking out.
Whereas McCain's man of God praised
Hitler, in the fashion of lunatic
white holy-rollers, Obama's man,
Jeremiah Wright, spoke an
embarrassing truth. He said that the
attacks of 11 September 2001 had
taken place as a consequence of the
violence of US power across the
world. The media demanded that Obama
disown Wright and swear an oath of
loyalty to the
Bush lie that "terrorists attacked
America because they hate our
freedoms". So he did. The
conflict in the Middle East, said
Obama, was rooted not "primarily in
the actions of stalwart allies like
Israel,
but in "the perverse and hateful
ideologies of radical Islam".
Journalists applauded. Islamophobia
is a liberal speciality.
The American media love both Obama
and McCain. Reminiscent of mating
calls by Guardian writers to Blair
more than a decade ago,
Jann Wenner, founder of the liberal
Rolling Stone, wrote: "There is
a sense of dignity, even majesty,
about him, and underneath that ease
lies a resolute discipline . . .
Like Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama
challenges America to rise up, to do
what so many of us long to do: to
summon 'the better angels of our
nature'." At the liberal New
Republic, Charles Lane confessed: "I
know it shouldn't be happening, but
it is. I'm falling for John McCain."
His colleague Michael Lewis had gone
further. His feelings for McCain, he
wrote, were like "the war that must
occur inside a 14-year-old boy who
discovers he is more sexually
attracted to boys than to girls".
The objects of these uncontrollable
passions are as one in their support
for America's true deity, its
corporate oligarchs. Despite
claiming that his campaign wealth
comes from small individual donors,
Obama is backed by the biggest Wall
Street firms: Goldman Sachs, UBS AG,
Lehman Brothers, J P Morgan Chase,
Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Credit
Suisse, as well as the huge hedge
fund Citadel Investment Group.
"Seven of the Obama campaign's top
14 donors,"
wrote the investigator Pam Martens,
"consisted of officers and employees
of the same Wall Street firms
charged time and again with looting
the public and newly implicated in
originating and/or bundling
fraudulently made mortgages."
A report by
United for a Fair Economy, a
non-profit group, estimates the
total loss to poor Americans of
colour who took out sub-prime loans
as being between $164bn and $213bn:
the greatest loss of wealth ever
recorded for people of colour in the
United States. "Washington lobbyists
haven't funded my campaign," said
Obama in January, "they won't run my
White House and they will not drown
out the voices of working Americans
when I am president." According to
files held by the
Centre for Responsive Politics,
the top five contributors to the
Obama campaign are registered
corporate lobbyists.
What is Obama's attraction to big
business? Precisely the same as
Robert Kennedy's. By offering a
"new", young and apparently
progressive face of the Democratic
Party - with the bonus of being a
member of the black elite - he can
blunt and divert real opposition.
That was Colin Powell's role as
Bush's secretary of state. An Obama
victory will bring intense pressure
on the US anti-war and social
justice movements to accept a
Democratic administration for all
its faults. If that happens,
domestic resistance to rapacious
America will fall silent.
America's war on Iran has already
begun. In December, Bush secretly
authorised support for two guerrilla
armies inside Iran, one of which,
the military arm of
Mujahedin-e Khalq, is described
by the state department as
terrorist. The US is also engaged in
attacks or subversion against
Somalia, Lebanon, Syria,
Afghanistan, India, Pakistan,
Bolivia and Venezuela. A new
military command,
Africom, is being set up to
fight proxy wars for control of
Africa's oil and other riches. With
US missiles soon to be stationed
provocatively on Russia's borders,
the Cold War is back. None of these
piracies and dangers has raised a
whisper in the presidential
campaign, not least from its great
liberal hope.
Moreover, none of the candidates
represents so-called mainstream
America. In poll after poll, voters
make clear that they want the normal
decencies of jobs, proper housing
and health care. They want their
troops out of Iraq and the Israelis
to live in peace with their
Palestinian neighbours. This is a
remarkable testimony, given the
daily brainwashing of ordinary
Americans in almost everything they
watch and read.
On this side of the Atlantic, a
deeply cynical electorate watches
British liberalism's equivalent last
fling. Most of the "philosophy" of
new Labour was borrowed wholesale
from the US. Bill Clinton and Tony
Blair were interchangeable. Both
were hostile to traditionalists in
their parties who might question the
corporate-speak of their class-based
economic policies and their relish
for colonial conquests. Now the
British find themselves spectators
to the rise of new Tory,
distinguishable from Blair's new
Labour only in the personality of
its leader, a former corporate
public relations man who presents
himself as Tonier than thou. We all
deserve better.
