us election

27 Oct 2008

The Patient Has To Want To Change

By Andrew Crook

crook-obama

America is not well, and even if Obama romps home, there'll be no real change if the US can't muster some energy after the election, writes Andrew Crook

As the media waits anxiously for the incoming Obama Administration to divvy up the White House access cards, Democrat strategists are revelling in the possibility of a magical Senate majority.

Michelle Obama is spruiking herself as a reforming force on higher education and Joe Biden is just biding his time, happy to have avoided another off-the-cuff embarrassment over the weekend (hasn't the man seen State of Play?).

McCain's minders, bewildered by his running mate's descent into diva-dom, must be wondering whether it's better to put the Straight Talk Express out of its misery.

One week out, the Dems look like the natural party of 21st century American power, led by an unflappable mixed-race phenomenon in flip flops. The President Obama pipedream, born just four years ago on the Democratic Convention floor, is on the verge of becoming very, very real.

For the effete liberals of New York's Upper West Side everything is illuminated, while the rabble they define their sophistry against, "southern rednecks", prepare to take up arms against the idea of a black man in power.

But how long can this soft-left nirvana last?

If you believe the experts, about two weeks. Financial hard heads say the global financial crisis has at least another year to run — after the briefest of honeymoons economic depravity will tighten its grip on ordinary Americans. Temporary accommodation will become commonplace, social inequality will go beserk and at Democratic HQ people will be claiming credit for starting the current mutterings about 2008 being a "good election to lose".

So is there any prospect that lasting social change will actually occur under Obama? Not if the campaign to date is anything to go by. In fact, as one commentator suggested last week, it's social movements, not an Obama administration, that hold the key to cutting through the gloom enveloping the middle class. The problem is, it doesn't look like the country has any left.

Earlier eras are illustrative: under FDR, the labour movement effectively cut a deal with the White House that gave birth to far-reaching reform in social security (and some curious outfit called Fannie Mae). While Obama has spruiked his own "new New Deal", its content is more like an amalgam of piecemeal responses designed to stave off the recession's worst excesses.

There's another crucial stumbling block: the US labour movement has been reduced to a rump. Aside from the novel tactics pioneered by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), with private sector membership languishing at 3 per cent its future is by no means assured. Despite the energetic noises being made by the well-meaning John Sweeney, president of union peak body AFL-CIO, irresistable pressure for more far-reaching reforms is unlikely to emanate from labour.

What of the "new social movements" that arose in the late 60s and initially included luminaries like Bill Ayres and the Upper West Side's own Todd Gitlin? They congealed into the insufferable "identity" groups of the 1980s, that ended up defending singular traits rather than the complex hybrids which constituted their members' actual identities.

While these groups won an expansionary range of anti-discrimination rights, they failed to achieve anything like the kind of social mobility required for the US to call itself a functioning democracy.

The "anti-globalisation" movement of the late 1990s (Seattle etc.) appeared to be going swimmingly, winning concessions on NAFTA and generally serving as a bit of an inspiration. September 11 changed all that.

In fact, as Jeff Sparrow argued recently, the most visible social movements in the US today are anti-Government libertarians and militias with heroes like Timothy McVeigh. These post-X Files quacks all own a DVD copy of Loose Change and many believe the country would be more efficiently run by a more radical Ron Paul.

But an Obama triumph will mark the beginnings of a new era, the optimists say. According to them, the change we can believe in will happen slowly, befitting Obama's gradualism and over-thought through solutions. Socialism through the institutions is a long way off, but there is still some oxygen being given to reformism.

There are, of course, real policy differences between McCain and Obama. An upper echelon of CEOs and trust-fundees will get slugged by Obama's tax plan and some greedy health insurers could go to the wall. But a structural fix to the desperation and displacement ripping the country apart remains firmly off the agenda.

For the corporate media, the "we told you so" headlines are already written, the printing presses hovering like the Hell's Angels at Altamont, ready to pounce at the slightest hint of trouble.

And as things turn from bad to worse, President Obama will feel its full force, as a fractured nation wakes up, both to its declining influence in the world, and the reality that its founding fathers' dream of self-sufficiency is receding further and further from view.

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Venise Alstergren 27/10/08 5:44PM

Andrew: Thanks for an excellent article. The thing which really worries me, and a lot of other people I dare say. Is how long will the Southern rednecks allow Obama to live? If anything were to happen to him the first people to come under suspicion would be the rednecks, but rednecksville and imagination could be mutually exclusive.
Any US president has to be vulnerable; triple that for a Democrat and multiply that by 2000 for a black president. The photo of him striding along in his thongs, flip-flops, whatever, seemed to be taken with a wide-angle lens; where were the minders? Or doesn’t a potential president get them? He may be a hero in Hawaii but not so much so in Decatur or Louisanna.

GraemeF 27/10/08 6:53PM

He will be up against it hoping for fair coverage of his ideas in an increasingly narrow media. How the right wing shock jocks can twist and manipulate the facts is astonishing. Did you know the whole economic meltdown was caused by Bill Clinton forcing respectable banks to give loans to bludging poor people who rorted the system at the expense of hard working bankers?

victoria08 28/10/08 2:20PM

I think you’re being way too pessimistic about the prospects of an Obama presidency.
I believe you underestimate the man’s transformative talents, ability to inspire and motivate, and grasp of the detail to inform decision-making.
There has to be a way out of the current global malaise-the world won’t end because of it-and, with the tools of an incumbent President at his disposal, I think Pres.Obama will go ahead in leaps and bounds. At least we all hope he does, and I’m sure he’ll have plenty of goodwill from all over the world to put some wind in his sails.
Finally, I believe that society’s next new social movement has already been spawned. As we need to start adjusting the way we live our lives, as a result of global warming, you will find that communitarianism will rise, and we will truly have to start thinking global and acting local.

trixie_dlr 28/10/08 3:02PM

‘For the effete liberals of New York’s Upper West Side everything is illuminated…’

my semiotics major is old and tarnished but i’m sure as hell there’s some dodgy coding going on here.

peterbest 28/10/08 5:55PM

I worry that Obama won’t get a chance to do any transforming. America may be ready for change but it’s the same electorate as always - racist, conservative, fearful. People are pissed off about Iraq, not because they think America shouldn’t have killed Saddam Hussein, but because they’re not clearly winning. McCain talks like the swaggering sheriff from the old western. He promises to make the world salute the stars and stripes. Obama promises to do more consulting. McCain talks as if nobody should have to pay any tax, and criticises Obama for wanting to increase taxes on the wealthy. Americans have voted twice already for a president who promised to make the rich richer at everybody else’s expense. And an awfully high proportion of people who, wanting to be likeable, tell pollsters they’ll vote for Obama, will go into the ballot box and find themselves suddenly unable to accept the idea of a black president. What percentage is that? I reckon as much as 10-20%. If Obama can’t get out enough black voters who’ve never voted before he’s a gone goose.

David Hollier 29/10/08 11:42AM

As ever, I agree with Venise, interesting article. I wonder if we’re all underestimating the strength of the movement behind Obama. The power of his campaign has come from getting people involved in the political process, so many feel they have something personally at stake. He’s not so much promising to do it all for them as asking them to help him do it. No doubt he’s going to inherit an economic shitstorm, and sure he’ll get a media thrashing from time to time, but people are optimistic because of his consultative, unifying approach and the depth of talent behind him. Certainly the energy here in the US is infectous.
Also, the Republicans are so deeply divided that they have to choose between its increasingly marginalised Christian right base and its more centrist core. Look what that’s done to McCain.
If not Obama, who?

denise 29/10/08 3:03PM

I hope Obama does have the number to render the Bradly factor negligible.
The US may be sick, but that’s because it has been poisoned by bad policies.
With a likely Democrat majority in the Senate (as well as the election of Barack Obama) this should enable a far more expedient change in policy direction.
The first problem for the newly invigorated Left to deal with, is the right wing militia gangs and the ‘southern rednecks’.
Good governance means using taxes for the good of the majority.
And obviously the union movement has been ‘reduced to a rump’, if there is a decent industrial relations legislation in place and no more need for militant unionism to protect worker’s rights. Those bad old days should be well and truly over by now.
Michelle Obama is on the right track with her emphasis on higher education, as this is the real key to social mobility.

Patman 03/11/08 3:49AM

Hold on folks, Obama hasn’t been elected yet.. Not everyone in the US is an imbecile, a redneck and/or a fascist. Obama will be a target for the nutters of the right; two teenagers have already been arrested for planning to top him.

All of this is still, at this stage, hypothetical talk. Has anyone thought about what will happen if the Dangerous Duo (McCain-Palin) actually win the election?

I wasn’t an Obama supporter during the Democratic run-off - yes, I was very much a Hillary Clinton supporter, and would have liked to have seen her good self and Pat Richardson, let’s say - going forward - and I’m still less than convinced that he’ll do a good job, but a few pieces of bread are better than nothing.

Why hasn’t New Matilda done a synopsis on the other 21 (!!) presidential candidates, by the way?