Barack Obama: Radical or Windbag?
By • 11/17/08 |
More of a windbag than a radical. |
Barack Obama has filled racial right writers, as well as many commenters on this website, with dire foreboding. Steve Sailer has called Obama a “man of the radical left, driven by racial animosity against the American majority,” and has written a whole book to prove his point. Pat Buchanan predicts the passage of amnesty within Obama’s first 100 days, as well as universal health insurance that would cover illegal aliens. Michael Hart thinks Obama “hates whites” and is favorable to communism.
I agree that Obama’s election is a disturbing and possibly disastrous event, and I will no doubt find many occasions to rail against him in the future. However, what we need now is a sober assessment of what the man actually believes and how he will try to change America. I have not found evidence to support the claim that Obama is a radical leftist driven by a lust for racial vengeance. Certainly, Obama’s association with the appalling Jeremiah Wright, his past work as a community organizer and civil rights lawyer, and the college radicalism described in Dreams of My Father prove that he possesses a profound sense of racial identity and was steeped in academic leftism in his youth. However, these aspects of Obama’s history should not be exaggerated. The Obama of The Audacity of Hope, the campaign, and the transition is a moderate center-left politician, not a firebrand leftist, on issues of race and welfare. Moreover, the circumstances of Obama’s presidency will make it difficult for him to pass even a moderate leftist agenda into law.
The memory of the Republican landslide in the congressional elections of 1994 haunts the Democrats. They will be wary of provoking a conservative backlash by pressing for unpopular liberal policies, as the Clinton administration did in its first years. There is, after all, no evidence that American public opinion is shifting to the left. Rather, Americans appear to have voted Democrat out of discontent with an unpopular president rather than eagerness for radical change. Voters in 2008 were much more likely to call themselves conservatives than liberals, and the percentages were almost exactly the same as in 2004. Voters chose the conservative option on most ballot initiatives dealing with issues of race, immigration, and culture.
Obama undoubtedly favors amnesty and other forms immigration liberalization, although not as passionately as John McCain does. However, Mark Krikorian, the foremost expert on American immigration issues, has convincingly argued that the new administration recognizes the unpopularity of amnesty and will not push for it in the foreseeable future. The incoming White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has said that amnesty has “emerged as the third rail of American politics” and once told a Hispanic activist that “there is no way this legislation [comprehensive immigration reform] is happening in the Democratic House, in the Democratic Senate, in the Democratic presidency, in the first term.” Many of the incoming Democrats ran on an anti-amnesty platform; in fact, the next Congress will not move substantially to the left on immigration.
Besides, the rationale for any kind of immigration liberalization will be even weaker for the foreseeable future than it was during the Bush years, when all such initiatives failed. America is entering a recession that will probably last for years. It would be suicidal for any politician to back legislation friendly to foreign workers in a time of high unemployment.
When it comes to affirmative action, Obama is hardly a radical. Rather his position is vague and cautious to the point of incoherence. In The Audacity of Hope, he makes it clear that he thinks blacks still suffer from widespread discrimination and endorses racial preferences as a correction. He even calls for “goals and timetables for minority hiring” for corporations, trade unions, and government agencies that are insufficiently diverse.1
On the other hand, Obama says that he thinks policies designed to help the poor in general will do more for minorities than racial preferences. For example, he writes, “a plan for universal health-care coverage would do more to eliminate health disparities between whites and minorities than any race-specific programs we might design.”2 When Obama addressed the NAACP in July, he didn’t mention affirmative action at all, but spoke of the need to help out all of the poor, “whether they live in Anacostia or Appalachia.” Finally, Obama thinks poor white applicants to college deserve preferences more than his own daughters, which would be an odd position for anyone who hated white people to take.
Obama will face considerable resistance if he tries to implement affirmative action policies or stock the courts with judges who are racial preference radicals. Affirmative action has never been popular among Americans, and Obama’s very success has convinced even more people that it is obsolete. An October poll found that 68 percent of whites and even 43 percent of blacks believed blacks and whites have an equal chance of getting ahead today, which was up considerably from 1997 and even from earlier this year. Moreover, suspicions that Obama is a race-baiting demagogue, stoked by his association with Jeremiah Wright, almost sunk his campaign. Since Obama will be eager to avoid reviving these suspicions, he may actually be less aggressive in promoting racial preferences than a white liberal president would be.
We don’t need to worry that Obama is a socialist or a Marxist or any such thing. Yes, Obama believes in greater government investment in and regulation of business; yes, he supports an increase in welfare spending, particularly for health care; yes, he wants to raise taxes on the wealthy. However, Obama believes in government as a supplement and partner to the free-market system, not as a replacement for it. In The Audacity of Hope, Obama speaks of the “bankruptcy of socialism and communism” and praises America’s “business culture,” which has resulted in “a prosperity that’s unmatched in human history.”3
There is good reason to believe, moreover, that Obama’s plans to increase welfare spending will founder. The government has already spent trillions on the bailout of the American financial sector, and now the Democrats want to bail out the automakers too. It will be difficult for the Democrats to justify increasing the size of the welfare state after this orgy of spending. Democrats will also find it hard to convince Americans that businesses should spend more on employee health insurance during a recession when business will be struggling. Finally, fiscal conservatives will be able to make a strong case that tax increases of any kind will retard economic recovery by lowering investment.
All predictions about the course of a presidency are unreliable, of course. A single event can push a president in an unexpected direction, as 9/11 did Bush. All bets about the Obama presidency are off if the worst forecasts for the economy—those that call for an outright depression—come true. If unemployment reaches 20 percent, America may enter strange and turbulent times, when radical changes, whether for good or evil, become possible. Moreover, only a rapid Republican recovery can contain the left. The Democrats will grow more frightening the longer they retain the presidency and their congressional majority.
The interpretation of Obama as a radical racialist and leftist mistakes the man’s basic motivations. As he made clear in his March speech on race, Obama thinks of himself not as an avenger, but a healer. As Obama sees it, blacks, whites, Hispanics, all of us are angry. We all need to come together and learn to understand each other’s anger so that we can forgive it and be healed, and Obama himself is the miraculous being who will make this transcendence possible.
Obama’s image of himself is not just pompous and hackneyed, but downright insulting. After all, whites are suicidally indulgent to minorities already—how much more understanding and forgiving do we have to be? However, Obama’s vanity is less likely to result in hate-whitey legislation than in windy speechifying about a “the fierce urgency of now” and “unyielding hope” and such. So stay strong, keep the faith, and make sure your remote has a functioning mute button!
- Barack Obama, *The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream” (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006), 244. ↑
- Ibid., 247. ↑
- Ibid., 149-50. ↑
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You make a strong case, but I think Obama’s moderation is mostly a pose created by his political consultant, David Axelrod, with whom he fell in in 2002.
Now he may for reasons of continued prudence restrain himself and make his leftward push slow enough to avoid provoking a massive pushback, but I think his gauzy rhetoric is a mere sales job.
The real Obama is the one who, even when he was coasting to victory inthe final weeks, talked of “power” in the Marxist sense, as in “power not yielding itself” and needing to be seized, who would draw diagrams on blackboards for his students of power relationships. This guy plays for keeps and I think is extremely dangerous, the more so because he is intelligent and cool-headed rather than brash, excitable, and liable to overstep.
Only time will tell.
It’s important to remember, however, that Obama has succeeded in one key area where other Democrats have failed. He’s gotten a fairly good sized chunk of the “Reagan Democrats” (the folks that some liberals ridicule as “Archie Bunkers”) back into the Democratic fold. That’s how he won the election, taking such crucial states as Ohio and Pennsylvania.
These (mostly white) people voted for him because they’re hurting economically and have had enough of Bushonomics, and didn’t want more of McSame. They believed Obama when he promised to help the hurting middle class.
If Obama does nothing but hew to the liberal Democrat line, handing out goodies to the gays and the blacks and the Hispanics and the pro-choicers and the fashionable elites, the white working class will desert him in droves, and he’ll be out of office in 2012. Maybe there’ll even be a Gingrich-style Republican takeover of the Congress in 2010 just like 1994.
But if Obama really does address the concerns of working Americans, among these the depression of their wages by illegals, he could shift the balance of power to the Democrats for a long time to come, just as FDR did.
Hopefully he’s smart enough to realize this. No way of knowing. We shall see.
PBS had a real good program on a few weeks ago about Obama. He is a very calculating man - a true politician. When he first arrived in Chicago, he attempted to take Bobby Rush’s Congressional seat but the blacks didn’t go for him. He was an unknown with little connections. He changed his method. He married Michelle (whose family was imbedded in Chicago), became friends with members of the Chicago political machine, and then pursued the black vote through the anti-white venue. He knew he’d win blacks with it and that most whites could look beyond it. The liberal white vote was a done deal without even trying.
I have a wait and see attitude. Although I believe he is a closet Communist (and Communism and Communists have done much for the civil rights troop) I am not too sure which way he’ll go during his first term (assuming he believes he will do his “best work” during his second term). His cabinet picks tell me he is not going to be the extremist many of “us” are expecting. At least not the first term. As we all know, Presidents have anything to lose during their second terms. The huge give aways will start then, if he has a second term.
This is just a comment of human interest. I am only nine days older than David Axelrod and we were both born and raised on the lower East Side of New York. Furthermore, he and I were high school classmates, Stuyvesant High School Class of 1972, although I have no recollection of him. I do know for certain that he was not among the radicals who were busy protesting the Viet Nam War and vandalizing school property.
I agree with this article. My thoughts on Obama have been very similar.
Shortly after Obama’s victory over McCain, I visited a few right-wing Internet communities to see what their reaction was to the election. I laughed at some of the things they were writing: they talked about buying guns to defend themselves because they feared chaos would break out, and they stressed urgency on buying guns immediately because Obama supposedly planned to implement gun control as soon as possible. What was even more funny was the fact that they were probably being serious. And, another funny post was written by a paranoid American in the British section of the message board: he was worried that civil war would break out, and he asked the British members how he could emmigrate to the UK for sanctuary.
Do I dislike Obama? Absolutely. But do I believe that Obama being president will result in armageddon? Although I admit that Obama makes me slightly uneasy, I certainly don’t believe it’s the end of the world or that chaos and civil war will break out (as some right-wingers believe).
Something that struck me about Steve Sailer’s comments on Obama’s supposedly historic speech on race is that in the speech he compared his grandmother’s fear of some menacing black thug to his preacher’s many decades of demented hatred of whites. He used these two as symbols of white and black America and said, in effect, that both have their flaws and both have to be accepted and understood. He could “no more disown” Wright than his own grandmother. So, morally, there is no real difference between a woman being quite justifiably afraid of someone who presents a real physical danger and a man who makes demonization of an entire race the center of his life and career. Of course, in saying that, Obama was just taking a very typical liberal position, judging blacks and whites by a radical double standard that seeks to equate the most innocuous white behavior with the most vile black behavior.
So in a sense Sailer and Jobling are both right. Obama is not really that different from any politician in the western world. On the other hand, the typical western politician is totally steeped in radical anti-white racism. Living in a radical, “inverted” society, the normal, typical things people believe are radical and crazy.
I am troubled and disgusted by Obama’s reference to the white grandmother who raised him as a “typical white person.” The remark, and the equivalence B. Hussein draws between his grandmother and his unhinged “pastor,” says a great deal about him and his racial views. Certainly his handlers put a few more qualified and moderate statements in his mouth during the campaign, but of what significance is that compared to his 20+ years of close association with a Kill Whitey black church?
Cassiodorus,
Unlike you, I’m not at all offended by Obama’s reference to a “typical white person,” having spoken about typical black people for years. One problem with today’s pro-white movement is that it uncritically adopts the absurdities of multiculturalism in the defense of whites. Since generalizations can be made about American whites and blacks, the concept of the typical white or black person is a legitimate one, and objecting to it is excessive sensitivity. Besides, I’m sure we all know a few typical white people!
The Jeremiah Wright objection is more troubling. I suspect that Obama’s allegiance to the man was driven more by political opportunism than principle. As an aspiring black politician in Chicago, Obama had everything to gain by getting in touch with his blackness. Moreover, I’m certain that Obama never believed Wright’s wildest statements, such as the conspiracy theories about AIDS. To the extent that he was even aware of them, he forgave them as the excesses of an anger that he found fundamentally righteous. Moreover, I suspect Obama, when listening to Wright, felt the intellectual’s sentimental, condescending satisfaction in the vulgar authenticity of the people. Obama, I think, never regarded himself as Wright’s disciple, but as the superior being who could comprehend and transcend Wright’s anger in order to bring racial healing to America.
What’s most disturbing about the “typical” thing to me were the facts that 1)it pertained to his own grandmother and 2)it was openly disparaging and made at a public rally. We both know that a white politician speaking about “typical black people” would be crucified in the media. To that extent it is an indictment of the public culture and its double standard as well as of Obama. When white public figures can talk this way about blacks, I will probably be less sensitive about it. In some ways of course Obama’s grandmother was a typical white person, as she cleaned up a mess left by blacks. The difference was that she had a choice, whereas most of us merely pay our taxes.
I doubt that Obama believed the crazier items on offer in his circus-clown “church,” but he attended for two decades and subjected his children to “Reverend” White and his black-lib bilge. That’s bad enough. Notice also that Obama professed (at first) not to understand what all the fuss was about. I do believe that he really didn’t see what the big deal was, as I think he has a very limited understand of and sympathy for, well, Americans (those gun-and religion-clingers). Besides, as a native of Chicago I can assure anyone who’s interested that there is no shortage of black churches where a cynical politico (and to a great degree that is what I believe Obama is) can hone his street cred. Why this church?
Ian, I have a couple of objections to what you have written here (apart from being very skeptical about the conclusions of the above article). You are, of course, right to find the “typical white person” remark inoffensive. Finding it offensive is, indeed, kowtowing to P.C. Here’s the problem:
1.) The double standard. If a white pol had violated P.C. as egregiously, his campaign and political career would have been exterminated by the left. Obama gets a pass for being black. All such events further the project of white dispossession.
2.) Obama’s remark is a slander against his own Grandmother. (It is quite accurate for “right wingers” to use the figure of “throwing Grandma under the bus”.) I reiterate what JZ has written,” So, morally, there is no real difference between a woman being quite justifiably afraid of someone who presents a real physical danger and a man who makes demonization of an entire race the center of his life and career.” This kind of rotten, calumnious, false moral equalization again furthers the smearing and dispossession of white people. You say that you doubt that B. Hussein Obama “believed” Wright’s sermons of insanity. Ian, if this was mere political opportunism, than Obama is even more empty and sinister. I have been in long term attendance in a church. One develops a close kinship with both the leadership and the people of such a church, a kind of family. Twenty years of this kind of attendance and official membership is not insignificant. He exposed his two daughters to this “ministry”, this hate fest, raising and baptizing his girls in this virulent environment of twisted minds and souls. That he would expose his children to this airborne moral deadly cloud says volumes about his inner man, exposing him as a moral leper. Calling it merely political opportunism only worsens the offense.
Again, the double standard is appalling, but far worse in the case of attending Wright’s “church” Can it be imagined, what would become of any white politician who attended, for one day, a white majority church of equivalent evil? They would be vaporized by the left wing, main stream media.
This dude’s ascension is a demonstration of the raw power of the left wing dominated, Democrat controlled, main stream news and (perhaps more importantly) entertainment media. It is in-your-face, raw power from the likes of Soros, the far left, and their media pals. It is very nearly Plato’s nightmare of democracy as demagogic dictatorship.
I have no crystal ball, and neither does anyone else. One can only judge the past as prologue regarding Obama’s inner man and direction. Someone who writes from the heart that he felt his loving, nurturing, sustaining Granny’s decent, innocent, righteous fear of the reality of black male behavior (manifested to her, weak and alone, by a threatening black male shake-down beggar) as a sucker punch to the gut, is a sick boy, to my mind.
His Clintonista picks and seeming opening moderation do not reassure me. He is a radical of the Saul Alinsky school (as is Hillary). He is just cynical enough to know that his campaign radicalism will fail, not want to lose reelection, and seek gradual radicalism through court appointments and postponing the worst to a second term.
Much more can and will be written on this creep. Time will reveal his stripes
DTF,
I agree with most of what you have written here. Yes, of course there is a double standard with the “typical white person” thing. However, I don’t think issues like this will be very effective for pro-whites because merely imitating the excessive sensitivity of the other side will make us look trivial. We should focus on more substantive issues.
It was, I agree, offensive and insulting for Obama to draw an equivalence between Wright and his grandmother, and that is a substantive issue that he should be hammered for. Really, the assertion that there is an equivalence between whites’ anger towards blacks and their anger towards us was the fundamental flaw in Obama’s speech on race. Our anger towards them over issues like crime and affirmative action is quite justified, but their anger towards us is groundless.
However, it is not quite accurate to call Obama sick for this distortion of perspective. Rather, it is our society that is sick, and Obama is simply going with the flow. His offensive remark is rooted in the fundamental sickness of race denial, or the taboo against recognizing that there are psychological differences among the races. Given this taboo, it becomes comprehensible why people draw bogus equivalences between white and black behavior.
I continue to believe Obama’s association with Wright should have lost him the election, and I certainly do not think political opportunism is any excuse for this association. Again, the double standard in the treatment of white and black politicians is obvious and appalling.
I agree the Left is very powerful and that this power contributed to Obama’s election. However, I don’t think using terms like “demagogic dictatorship” about Obama is at all helpful for the simple reason that the man isn’t has never expressed any desire to suspend democracy or civil liberties. As far as whether Obama is a leftist goes, only time will tell. All I can say is that everything he has done so far is centrist.
Basically, I agree that Obama is appalling, and I don’t mean to defend him. However, I think all politicians today are pretty appalling, and I think American society is appalling, and I don’t think Obama is very much more appalling than the norm. I don’t think Obama represents anything radically new for American politics, as you do. Rather, he just represents the dismal status quo grinding on. That’s the real difference between us. We will see who is right.
Ian,
What you say is sound and makes good sense. I think we fundamentally agree, and I truely don’t see you as defending Obama.
What you say about the appalling state of politics, politicians and our national culture, I could not agree with more.
As to Obama’s radicalism being unique, I don’t find it unique, but uniquely extreme. I hope, for our country’s and people’s sake, that you are right and that I am wrong.
Four reasons why the Democrats will enact amnesty laws:
1) Most of the Senators up for election in 2010 are Republicans; it is not possible for the Democrats to lose majority status in the Senate.
2) Lots of Americans from all demographic groups (blacks, rich whites, whites living far from Mexico, and of course Mexicans) would support an unconditional amnesty; the few who don’t (mainly poor whites in southwestern states) are already devout Republicans and therefore the problem of anti-amnesty voters defecting to the Republicans is trivial.
3) Any votes that were lost would be more than made up for by new Mexicans.
4) Missing the chance to pass amnesty legislation while the Democrats are in control could lead to the prospect of a Republican challenger in 2012 running on a pro-amnesty platform. This would threaten to take Hispanic votes away from the Democrats, votes that they would need to win the election (and as stated above, those few American voters who make opposition to amnesty their only driving issue are already Republicans).
—— Yes, I’m a Republican, and yes, I’m anti-amnesty, but I am realistic enough to realize that any two-party system by nature can’t give anybody everything they want. Just like the Republicans of 1866 won the black vote for 80 years by passing the 14th Amendment, so could we have won the Hispanic vote by passing a broad faced amnesty bill. Now that opportunity is past, and the Hispanic vote will go the way of every other racial minority in the United States; namely, to the Democrats.
I am about to make myself look dumb, but better it be me than someone else.
1) There is actually a pretty nearly even ratio between the parties as to who is up for election; I was wrong before. Nevertheless I think the possibility of Republicans winning 9 Democratic seats out of 12 is highly unlikely.
2,3,4) I stand by what I said here, except I think I got a little carried away in the footnote. I doubt that Republicans would win the Hispanic vote just by passing an amnesty bill; Hispanics today aren’t like blacks in 1866. Nevertheless I often point out that Hispanics, especially Mexicans, are presently the /least/ Democratic racial minority in the US after correcting for income (in other words Asians, Indians, Jews, and blacks all vote further left than Hispanics do) and that there is probably some truth to the much-despised but often-heard claim that anti-Hispanic sentiment in the GOP is chipping away at that until now surprisingly balanced Hispanic voting pattern.
And I do believe that we can’t expect Republicans to represent the interests of white voters and only white voters. As John McCain said, “the illegals are never going home”. Amnesty of some sort is inevitable; if the Republicans could be the ones to do it we could at least frustrate and possibly eventually break the racial arms race strategy that the Democrats are trying to work towards. A party based on white interests alone isn’t going to be viable; it never has, even when American voters were nearly 100% white.
I’m sorry for my first post containing an error and not explaining my points very well; I’ll be more careful in the future.
Does anyone still say Mr. Obama’s radicalism is greatly exaggerated? From where I stand, it looks pretty radical to me.
It’s too early to tell if Obama is a true radical or not. Everything depends on what he follows through on and what he just chitchats about. So far he’s still in the macro/fiscal-policy and foreign visits phase of the Presidency. Who knows if he will start expanding or contracting affirmative action, trying to hamstring local police in catching nonwhite perps, etc.
Don Reynolds is correct. Based on his publicly stated beliefs alone, there can now be no doubt that Barack Obama is a radical in all issues of concern to the white race.
The Republicans are going to go the way of the Whigs and it is going to be because they haven’t figured out that they cannot out-pander the Democrats where any minority is concerned. That’s why they are called The Stupid Party. They are merely a party in the pockets of the global corporate interests who will see Whites reduced to economic serfdom, forced as they are to compete with colored Third World new citizens who are used to working for coolie wages.
Say what you will about the socialism. A White population facing the reality that power is concentrated in a welfare state who then decides where the wealth is distributed is far more likely to defend its racial interests than one who has drunk the capitalist kool-aid and is laboring under the illusion that individuals can get it all by themselves with a little more hard work and initiative.
The political elite may have White faces, but their true colors are gold and green. They want to import all of Mexico; not only the people but the system. Where the elite oligarchy live like kings and have dictatorial powers over the rainbow spectrum of impoverished peons. They don’t care exactly what shade their serfs are, as long as they have them.
“There is good reason to believe, moreover, that Obama’s plans to increase welfare spending will founder. The government has already spent trillions on the bailout of the American financial sector, and now the Democrats want to bail out the automakers too. It will be difficult for the Democrats to justify increasing the size of the welfare state after this orgy of spending.”
Oh yeah?
How it really ended up going down is that in 2009 Federal Spending on Welfare as a % of GNP increased by 26% over what it was in 2008!
Check it out below, “Other” was driven up the most due to the bailouts, but Welfare went up the second most and only a couple ticks slower than overall federal government growth:
Pensions +10% Health +16.8% Education -10% Defense +12.6% Welfare +26.2% Protect. +13.2% Trans. +21.5% General +11.1% Other +756.8% Interest -43.5 Total Spending +34% Deficit +301.5% Gross Federal Debt +28.9%
Source: http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/index.php
With health care reform about to pass, it looks as though my hopes that Obama would not be able to increase welfare spending materially were indeed in vain.
I advocate scare quotes around “reform”, or a neutral term like “overhaul”, or even a pejorative like “takeover”, “bureaucratization”, or “creeping / slow motion socialism”.
Uncritical use of the phrase “health care reform” concedes from the start that what the Democrats are cooking up is indeed a reform, and thus the entire debate.
Good point, us calling what Obama is doing Reform is like a Liberal falling into the trap of calling a Tax Cut “Tax Relief”.
Thinking about it, why don’t we start calling what Obama is about to the Healthcare system “Healthcare Deform”?
When trying to access President elect Obama’s motivations I tend to place more weight on what he said and wrote prior to entering politics. This is why his well received March speech on race, to me, is little more than diversion away from his historically radical connections. Obama has spent his entire life around well educated, left leaning, egalitarian white folks. Indeed, he knows what they want to hear and wastes no time telling them. Would I go so far as to say he has a deep seeded hatred for Whites - no. However, he has a connection to his African kin and kith that mirror many of the sediments that are expressed on white racialist websites such as IW and AR. To this end he will advocate for legislation that will ultimately be in the best interest on non-whites even if it is at the expense of the Whites.