As more and more progressives awaken from the dream that was once Barack Obama and eat the bitter pill of ‘more of the same’ rather than ‘change you can believe in’, Glen Ford of Black Agenda Report writes a scathing dissection of the president and throws in a little ‘I told you so’ along with it.
Now that self-proclaimed progressives have passed the point of disenchantment with Barack Obama and entered the stage of active anger at their once-imagined ally, they should quickly take the next step and acknowledge that he is what we at Black Agenda Report have been saying for six years: a right-wing Democrat who has long been aligned with the corporate Democratic Leadership Conference, and whose mission is to expand U.S. empire and put the American state at the service of Wall Street. He has been remarkably successful in both endeavors.
Of necessity, these strategic goals require Obama to wage war against the left hemisphere of his own Party, the main obstacle, in the absence of effective grassroots progressive movements, to forging a grand coalition with Republicans. The president, whom deluded Progressives for Obama hallucinated might become the kind of “transformative” leader that would galvanize Left constituencies into a ready-mix, shake-and-bake “movement,” also sees himself as a transformative figure, but of the opposite kind. He presented his candidacy as the antidote to what he described during the Nevada presidential primary as the “excesses” of the Sixties and Seventies. His reverence for Ronald Reagan is genuine. Indeed, if Obama were not Black, and if his supporters had not been busy getting drunk in a wishing-well, he would have been widely recognized as a stylistically updated Reagan Democrat.
Setting aside the historic significance of America’s first black president it is discouraging Obama did not remain ‘larger than life’ but has tumbled and may tarnish his race and the office. The pressure on him is great for like him or not, he has changed America simply by virtue of his race and his success or failure will reflect on all those black and white and Hispanic Americans brought to tears at his inauguration.
