Sam Smith at The Progressive Review has written this outstanding op-ed that I think paints a much more realistic picture of what the United States will face with Barack Obama as President than anything else I have read to date.
From the get-go, he points out some things that I think a lot of the Obama-maniacs have overlooked:
On the other hand we will still have a president who supports the Patriot Act, No Child Left Behind law, the basic fallacies of the war on terror, the continued abuse of the war on drugs and a medical industry controlled by profiteering insurance companies. He also appears largely indifferent to the collapse of constitutional government. There is nothing liberal, progressive or enlightened in any of these positions and it is a marker of the dismal state of liberalism that Obama has not been called on them.
Instead of mindlessly shouting “Yes, we can,” liberals and progressives should be telling the Obama crowd, “Yes, but.”
Smith points out that Obama may simply be in the right place at the right time for a transition in American politics and society where much of the fervor that has been devoted to religious fundamentalism can be re-channeled back into positive political action, but that there’s an equal chance that Obama is indeed nothing but the empty suit many people charge him as:
Obama is an empty vessel. If liberals and progressives are as pathetically obsequious towards Obama as they were towards Clinton, that vessel will be filled with the desires of large financial institutions, health insurance oligopolies and foreign policy experts attempting to compensate for hormonal insecurities by invading this or that. And Obama will end his term with the status of Reid or Pelosi rather than of JFK.
In short, the Obamania needs to die on Inauguration Day, replaced by a movement to end American imperialism, restore the Constitution, unravel the evils of neo-capitalism and instill some eco-sanity. It will be the strength of such a movement, and not the new president’s virtues, that will largely determine whether he does the right thing and whether the right things happens.
I could not agree more.
