- With David Swanson, Michael Moore, and David Lindorff
(who should know better) all joining the swoon of the controlled corporate
media for Obama, it is time to re-assert reality. The Super-Tuesday results
show conclusively that Obama could never win the general election in November.
He would be yet another losing Democratic candidate, acceptable to wealthy
elitists but not to the voters from working families of the middle class
and lower middle class, doomed to go the way of George McGovern, Walter
Mondale, Michael Dukakis, and John Kerry. He appeals to two groups
well-off suburbanites and blacks, and these will never be enough to carry
the general election.
-
- Any Democratic candidate who cannot win California and
New York should probably call it a day. That applies to Obama, but his
situation is even worse. The voter pool for the Democratic primaries is
notoriously not typical of the broader US population. The Democratic primaries
have been skewed for decades by the presence of large numbers of upper-middle
class elitists concerned about environmentalism, race and gender quotas,
balanced budgets, good government, corruption, gridlock, excessive partisanship,
and related issues. They are not interested in the minimum wage, trade
union rights, stopping home foreclosures, and other kitchen table concerns
of the less well off. In this year's Super Tuesday, it was estimated that
about 56% of the voters on the Democratic Party side had been to college
about twice the level for the population as a whole. Yet, even with
this voter pool, Obama could not win a single Electoral College megastate
vital for any Democratic candidate, with the sole exception of his own
home base of Illinois.
-
- OBAMA TROUNCED IN THE MEGA-STATES
-
- The list of states captured by Obama on Feb. 5 is largely
a joke, except for Illinois and a couple of others. He proudly lists Alaska,
Idaho, Kansas, North Dakota, and Utah. What do these states have in common?
They are states which a Democrat could never win in a general election.
Under the Electoral College system, Democratic votes in these states are
worthless they will be thrown away. How many people are there in
the Alaska Democratic Party? The caucus turnout seems to have been below
10,000 people. Idaho is one of the most reactionary states the Democratic
Party there could meet in a phone booth. The same goes for Utah. Delaware
is a perfect state for Obama rich Volvo-driving, chablis and brie
elitists in the Philadelphia suburbs, but it does not look like America.
Colorado is another Obama state where the well-off suburban voter can be
decisive in a Democratic primary. True, Obama won Connecticut, which has
some union voters, but it looks like Greenwich, Cos Cob, and Yale carried
the day. Missouri might fall to Clinton on a recount; in any case, the
race was very close. Minnesota is a special case because of the Democrat
Farmer-Labor Party; this was in any case a state that went for Mondale,
for various reasons not a good bellwether.
-
- To win an election, a Democrat must win the Electoral
College megastates to get to the 270 plus electoral votes needed to eject
the GOP from the White House. Mrs. Clinton carried these states convincingly,
starting with California, where all of Obama's money could not save him.
California is so huge, so crucial, and so much a symbol of America's future
in the Pacific century, that the argument could well end here. A Democrat
who cannot win California has no hope of entering the White House. But
there is much more.
-
- RICH ELITISTS FOR OBAMA
-
- The Obama campaign looks very much like the past campaigns
of Howard Dean, Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley, and other losers
of the past. He appeals to wealthy elitists, and therefore has a fundraising
base. He can turn out small numbers of dedicated liberal activists for
caucuses, as we have seen in Iowa. He can use the Internet to get money
in the same way that Howard Dean did. He enjoys the benefits of a collective
media swoon, and the systematic fawning of the media elites. But none of
this adds up to the ability to win a general election.
-
- Obama lost Massachusetts, in spite of the effusions of
the politically decadent Kennedy clan. Despite media hype, he lost New
Jersey. He lost border states like Tennessee and Oklahoma that a Democrat
might win. Mrs. Clinton had already won megastates Florida and Michigan.
She is likely to win in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas. What can we do with
a Democratic candidate who cannot win California, New York, Texas, New
Jersey, Massachusetts, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Florida cannot
win even the skewed Democratic primary voters of these critical states?
The question answers itself. As sociologist Fabio Rojas has noted: "The
Obama campaign assumed that winning big states, aside from Illinois, was
simply impossible. [Obama's] strengths do not undermine Hillary's single
most powerful asset: rock solid support among the white women, retirees,
and unionists who make up the majority of the Democratic base. There is
nearly nothing that Obama can say to sway those voters.Obama can continue
to win his kind of state (caucuses, low union, small to medium size, heavily
Affirmative Action) and have the money to continue till the end, but he
can't deliver a knockout punch by winning in California, NY, NJ, Texas,
Florida, Ohio or PA." Obama's campaign depends on creating the illusion
of success. When there is no real success.
-
- A DEMOCRATIC SOUTHWESTERN STRATEGY
-
- Again, a Democratic candidate who cannot appeal to working
women, retirees, and trade unionists is an exercise in futility. But Obama's
situation is even worse. While winning California, Arziona, New Mexico
(already), and likely Texas, Mrs. Clinton has demonstrated a superiority
among Latino voters, now the largest minority group in this country and
the key to the future for any political party. Here she won by a 2:1 margin.
She also carried the best educated group, Asian Americans, by a similar
2:1 margin.
-
- It might be argued that these Latino and Asian voters
will simply go to a Democratic candidate in the general election, whoever
that candidate might be. But the Latinos might just as easily go to McCain,
who has carefully built a public record of being sympathetic to them, as
Rush Limbaugh repeats every day.
-
- Therefore, it seems fair to say that while Obama may
have a strategy to win the Democratic nomination, he has no strategy at
all for winning the general election in November. Mrs. Clinton's results,
by contrast, add up to something historically important in American and
world history: this is the outline of a new national coalition in the United
States, and a new geographical formula for carrying the Electoral College.
During the four decades since Richard Nixon's victory in 1968, the Electoral
College has been dominated by the so-called Southern strategy of Kevin
Phillips, as refined by Lee Atwater and Karl Rove. This has meant that
the Republican nominee generally starts off with a solid Southern block
of reactionary states, motivated initially by racist backlash against the
civil rights laws, as well as resentments against the Vietnam and student
protests of the 1960s. In sociological terms, the Southern strategy for
Reagan coalition has meant that the Republicans could build a majority
around such groups as the South, white men, affluent suburbanites, Christian
evangelicals, and ideologized factions like the neocons. We are now in
the throes of a party realignment, that is to say of a qualitative transformation
of the structure and dynamics of American politics with the emergence of
a new majority coalition. These events come rarely -- generally only once
in about four decades. We have seen party realignments in 1828, 1860, 1896,
1932, and 1968. The 1932 party realignment ushered in the great progressive
Era of the Roosevelt new deal. The 1968 disaster brought us Nixon and 40
years of reactionary politics. It is now clear that the old Southern strategy
and Reagan coalition have collapsed as of 2006. The recognition of this
collapse has even become an issue in the Republican primaries, with the
comments by Ed Rollins of the Huckabee campaign.
-
- A MODERN EQUIVALENT OF THE FDR PROGRESSIVE COALITION
-
- If we want to usher in a new progressive Era, we must
find a new national coalition, somewhat similar to Roosevelt's New Deal
alliance, that will dominate American politics for the next four decades
or so. We must also identify a formula for winning the Electoral College.
Obama's crazy quilt of states, heterogeneous congeries of supporters, and
odd assortment of potential Electoral College votes can never do this.
-
- The key to replacing the old reactionary Southern strategy
of the Republicans may well be a Southwest strategy for progressive Democrats.
We have already noted that Mrs. Clinton has carried the Latino vote by
a margin of two to one, and has also carried the Asian vote by a similar
two to one margin. Latino voters and Asian voters represent two of the
most dynamic classes of voters in the United States today -- they represent
in many ways a wave of the future. If we add in women, trade union families,
blue-collar workers, retired people, blacks, the lower middle class and
the broad middle class, plus immigrant groups, we can see the outlines
of a national coalition capable of dominating the American political scene
for the foreseeable future. This national coalition will not be based on
the wedge issues developed by Lee Atwater and Karl Rove over the last 40
years. It will be based on solid economic populist issues like a rising
standard of living, the eradication of poverty, and expanded economic opportunity
for all.
-
- In terms of the Electoral College map, we must especially
stress Mrs. Clinton's ability to carry California, Arizona, and New Mexico.
Because of her ascendancy among Latino voters, it may well prove possible
to add Texas to this voting bloc If we can succeed in detaching Texas
from the reactionary Republican solid South of the past 40 years, something
that Latino votes will help to make possible, then the future path of virtually
any Republican to the White House is permanently barred.
-
- Hispanics distrust Obama. Asians also distrust Obama.
As we will see, we all have good reason to distrust Obama. If Obama is
the Democratic nominee, Latinos and Asians may be tempted to vote for McCain.
A McCain Lieberman presidency would abort the ongoing party realignment,
creating disastrous consequences which we would have to live with for the
next 40 years -- for many of us, for the rest of our lives. In addition,
a McCain Lieberman presidency virtually guarantees war with Iran within
six months.
-
- THE PARTY REALIGNMENT MUST SUCCEED
-
- It is therefore imperative that we take the historically
long view of current events. The choices of 2008 will determine the political
playing field from now to the middle of the 21st century. It is vital that
people look beyond their resentments concerning Senator Clinton; some of
these are valid, but many are absolutely irrational. But the argument here
does not turn on any personal qualities Senator Clinton may have or not
have. We should not focus our attention on the number worn on the player's
back, or on the color of the jersey being worn. We need to focus on the
redesign of the entire playing field, since the players of today will in
any case soon pass from the scene. The great task of 2008 is to prevent
a catastrophic abortion of the party realignment now so clearly going on.
-
- OBAMA A PUPPET OF BRZEZINSKI
-
- If Senator Obama possessed truly exceptional qualities
of leadership or morality, it would not be necessary to make this argument
against him. But he possesses no such superiority. Quite the contrary.
He has called very explicitly for the bombing of Pakistan, a country 2
1/2 times larger than Iran. Obama spoke against the Iraq war in 2003 when
he was not required to vote on the issue, but he has also voted for every
Iraq military appropriations bill in the Congress, until this year. Most
important, he is a Manchurian candidate, reminiscent in many ways of the
disastrous Jimmy Carter of 1976. Jimmy Carter had been chosen and groomed
for the presidency by David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski, the leaders
of the Trilateral Commission. When Carter reached the White House, he turned
US foreign policy over to Brzezinski. The results were the seizure of power
by Ayatollah Khomeini, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the founding
of Al Qaeda by the CIA as an Arab Legion to fight the Soviets in that country.
Carter turned economic and financial affairs over to Paul Adolf Volcker
of the Federal Reserve, who raised interest rates to 22%, thereby destroying
the industrial potential of the United States, and contributing to a disastrous
fall in the standard of living. Volcker, by the way, has just made a rare
presidential endorsement of Obama. Our left liberal friends are in
a united front with Volcker of the Federal Reserve. The chilling image
of Carter as a failed puppet president who set the stage for two decades
of reaction, labor rout, and national decline should remind us that a candidate
like Obama must be carefully scrutinized.
-
- The overall image consultant for Obama is none other
than Zbigniew Brzezinski, now joined by his son Mark Brzezinski -- a veteran
of the Clinton National Security Council -- plus Mika Brzezinski, who is
leading the charge for Obama at MS NBC. Zbig is also Obama's foreign policy
controller. Zbigniew Brzezinski's entire life has been dominated by his
consuming, fanatical hatred for Russia. As he approaches 80 years of age,
Brzezinski feels that he has one last chance to dismember the Russian Federation
and to partition European Russia. This will be the great foreign policy
project of a future Obama administration. It is certain that Zbigniew Brzezinski
will join Napoleon and Hitler in failure, but what will become of our country?
The Bush neocons have been addicted to aggressive war, but they were at
least cunning enough to pick countries which had no ability to strike against
the continental United States. Brzezinski lacks this cunning. He proposes
to court confrontation with Russia, the one country, which maintains the
capacity to incinerate the United States several times over. The Brzezinski
project to be carried out under an Obama regime is a project of incalculable
folly, tailored to the obsessions of a clique of old central European revanchists
left over from the 1930s, not to the needs of the United States in the
twenty-first century.
-
- OBAMA WOULD PRIVATIZE SOCIAL SECURITY
-
- In the area of economics, Obama's handlers and advisers
are a group of right wing thinkers. The first is Austan Goolsbee, a 1991
member of Skull and Bones at Yale. Goolsbee is a member of the monetarist
Chicago school founded by Milton Friedman; he is a free trade ideologue.
Another Obama advisor in economics is Jeffrey Liebman of Harvard, who has
proposed the partial privatization of the Social Security system, in addition
to increasing the regressive payroll tax, while lowering and delaying Social
Security benefits. This is not materially different from the proposals
of George Bush in 2005. Then we have David Cutler, who thinks that high
health care costs are a stimulus to the overall economy. He has proposed
more financial incentives in the healthcare field, meaning that he wants
to transfer more and more money into the hands of insurance companies and
pharmaceutical firms. Is this the politics of hope?
-
- In every area of economics, Obama has turned out to be
far to the right of former candidate John Edwards, and substantially to
the right of Senator Clinton. Obama rejects the concept of universal health
coverage. Obama's economics team has rejected the idea of a freeze on home
foreclosures in the current crisis. Obama's economic stimulus package,
as Paul Krugman has correctly observed, is skewed to the right. In a year
marked, above all, by a rebirth of powerful economic populism in the electorate,
Obama offers nothing in this crucial department.
-
- Instead, Obama offers fatuous and fuzzy platitudes of
the utopian and messianic sort. He favors the appeasement of adversaries.
He wants to end partisan struggle in politics. He seems to conjure up a
golden age or earthly paradise. He seems to want to restore an oligarchical
consensus, and give a face lift to US imperialism. It is no accident that
left liberal activists who have signed on with Obama are dropping the impeachment
issue like a hot potato. Impeachment is sure to be a very messy, very partisan,
and very acrimonious process. It will be a short, political struggle, and
struggle of any kind is simply not found in the Obama playbook. The senator
is a weak and passive figure, a quietist. Many can remember the refusal
of Bill Bradley to defend himself against the lies of Al Gore in 2000,
or the stubborn impotence of John Kerry as he was swiftboated by the Bushies
in 2004. Obama raises that kind of impotence and cowardice to the level
of a theory. The Clintons, by contrast, know that counterpunch is imperative.
They deal in War Rooms. Whatever else may be said about the Clintons,
they fight. That is no small advantage in the country in which the petty
bourgeoisie will always incline to whoever appears stronger. That will
never be Obama.
-
- MICHIGAN AND FLORIDA: THE PEOPLE HAVE ALREADY DECIDED
-
- A controversy has now risen about the delegates of two
critical mega-states, Michigan and Florida, at the Democratic National
Convention. Once again, these are states that a Democratic candidate must
win, so it would not make sense to offend voters there. However, Howard
Dean, Donna Brazil, and a gaggle of elitists at the Democratic National
Committee have decided that for some arcane reason, the delegates of Michigan
and Florida should not be seated. Perhaps this has something to do with
the fact that Senator Clinton has handily won both these big states. In
Florida, she received 850,000 votes, and beat Obama going away. In Michigan,
she received an absolute majority of voter support -- not just a plurality.
Obama's hope of winning the Democratic nomination seems to come down to
excluding Michigan and Florida in the same way that the Mississippi Freedom
Democrats were excluded from the Democratic Convention in 1964. Now Howard
Dean is saying that Michigan and Florida need to repeat their primaries,
except now it must be in the form of caucuses. Anyone who says caucuses
is saying Obama, since in caucuses small numbers of wealthy elitists and
ideologues can exercise a political effect out of all proportion to their
real numbers in the population. So Howard Dean is not an honest broker,
but rather a partisan for Obama. Obama says he is the candidate of hope
and reconciliation, but he seems quite ready to resort to some very dirty
tactics to grab the Democratic presidential nomination that he can never
hope to win in a fair fight. Any rational person would instead say, "Let
the people decide!" And in this case, the people have already decided.
-
- More broadly, Obama's hopes of grabbing the nomination
seem to revolve around the prospect of a palace coup in a smoke-free room
Howard Dean is saying that if no clear front runner emerges in the next
couple of months, he will convene a pow-wow and decide the nomination in
connivance with a narrow oligarchy, while flaunting the will of the Democratic
primary voters. It is superfluous to point out that Howard Dean comes from
the wealthy elitist school of Democratic politics and not from the blue-collar
or working-class branch. He also has a well-known grudge against the Clinton
machine. So American voters can have no confidence in Howard Dean.
-
- DUMP OBAMA, AND A DEMOCRATIC LANDSLIDE COMES INTO VIEW
-
- The perspective for November can only be the destruction
and break up of the Republican Party as we have known it for the past four
decades. The Republican Party has always been an uneasy alliance of four
distinct, and even antithetical groups: the social conservatives or Christian
evangelicals, the foreign policy conservatives or neocon warmongers, the
fiscal conservatives or Wall Street plutocrats, and the anti-state Libertarians.
Because of the onset of the Bush economic depression -- including dollar
hyperinflation, the death agony of the US dollar as the world reserve currency,
and banking panics breaking out all over the world -- the available pie
has shrunk to such a degree that these competing interests can no longer
all be satisfied. Life boat ethics have set in. Accordingly, they are now
all at each other's throats in a hilarious spectacle of factional warfare.
Romney, a hedge fund operator and asset stripper, has now dropped out --
which ought to remind David Swanson that money means very little in 2008.
(Obama's millions will never buy him a single Electoral College mega-state
outside of Illinois.) Huckabee is the wedge issue social conservative,
but his appeal is strictly limited to the Deep South. McCain is the warmonger,
and he now seems to be on his way to seizing the nomination Ron Paul,
of course, is the Libertarian, but can only appeal to a slender ideological
minority since he has no elements of economic populist appeal. The traditional
conservative leaders and spokespersons like Rush Limbaugh, Shawn Hannity,
Ann Coulter, and James Dobson are all loudly denouncing McCain as a heretic
and apostate to their strange reactionary doctrines. This indicates a party
that is already severely fractured, and may be on the verge of an outright
split.
-
- THE NEXT GOP: A MINOR REGIONAL PARTY OF THE DEEP SOUTH
-
- If the Obama campaign subsides, the prospect for the
Democratic Party is that of a colossal historical landslide victory on
the scale of 1932 or 1964. The Republican Party may well emerge as a Southern
regional party, limited to the deep South states of the old Confederacy,
based primarily on racism and Mexophobia, and with little or no appeal
in other parts of the country. It would be, in short, the party of Huckabee.
There is every reason to believe that the Republican representation in
the House and the Senate might be cut by as much as one third to one half.
This would have the effect of sweeping away the alibis and excuses that
have been used by the bankrupt Pelosi-Reid leadership to explain away and
justify their own countless crimes and betrayals, from the failure to end
the war in Iraq and Afghanistan to the failure to roll back the police
state to the failure to impeach Bush and Cheney. The more the Republican
Party collapses and disintegrates, the greater the potential for a split
on the Democratic side between the reactionary neocon minority and the
antiwar progressive majority. Any Democratic president will have to choose,
and, if not a puppet, will likely choose the majority. This is the great
promise of 2008. Obama's rhetoric seems to assume that the Republican Party
will be around indefinitely in its present form, and therefore a compromise
with them will be unavoidable. The party realignment now taking place suggests
that a more effective strategy will be to aim at a radical reduction in
Republican power on the basis of aggressive economic populism, making preventive
concessions to the GOP needless and counterproductive. The main threat
to such an historic Democratic Party victory is the Obama candidacy itself.
-
- THE GOP: A BORDERLINE PSYCHOTIC AND A FOREIGN AGENT
-
- The Republican ticket right now looks like McCain and
Lieberman. McCain is a borderline psychotic. Republican Senator Thad Cochran
of Mississippi says, "The thought of his being president sends a cold
chill down my spine." McCain is known to be subject to transports
of rage, which allow him to be cleverly manipulated by his unscrupulous
handlers. Lieberman is one of the foremost warmongers in the Senate, and
may well be a foreign agent. If this ticket were to take the White House,
war with Iran would be guaranteed within six months. But because of McCain
this immigration policies, he might be able to appeal to Latino voters
and other recent immigrants -- provided of course that the Democratic nominee
were Obama.
-
- A final consideration is the danger of a puppet president.
After the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945, the financier oligarchy
in Wall Street swore that they would never again permit an American president
to actually exercise the powers prescribed by the Constitution. They did
this because they saw a strong president as a lethal threat to the oligarchical
system, which they intended to perpetuate. Accordingly, since 1945 we
have had a parade of puppet presidents who have tended to carry out the
orders of the Wall Street group. Whenever a new presidential candidate
comes on the scene, especially when they are relatively unknown, the first
question we must ask ourselves regards whether or not they would function
as puppets in some future White House. This is a critical question, because
only a president who is not a puppet will be able to respond to the will
of the people as expressed through the political process overall.
-
- OF PUPPETS AND PRESIDENTS
-
- With a McCain Lieberman ticket, the judgment on puppet
status is clear -- a psychotic and a reputed foreign agent add up to guaranteed
puppets. Obama also flunks this crucial test. Obama would be nobody without
the investiture, financing, networking, media support, and other forms
of assistance provided by Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Trilateral Commission,
Skull and Bones, and other members of the financier elite. He is a candidate
who has been literally manufactured out of nothing in a very few years,
through a carefully planned media campaign culminating in the hysterical
media swoon of the past several weeks. Even so, he has proven unable to
carry a single Electoral College mega-state outside of his own home base
in Illinois. But it is certain that Obama's potential for escaping puppet
status is very, very low.
-
- Obama is also afflicted with certain egregious scandals,
which the media have so far covered up. First, Obama is closely linked
to a slum lord and organized crime figure named Tony Rezko, who was jailed
at the end of January, just before Super Tuesday. This explosive sleeves
has been totally covered up by the controlled media. Secondly, there are
the Larry Sinclair allegations, contained in a U-tube video widely viewed
online, and involving a cocaine orgy. Finally, some enterprising investigative
journalist might make the connection between Zbigniew Brzezinski, the center
of the entire Obama campaign, and Ilyas Achmadov, the current Washington
ambassador for the Chechen terrorist organization. This ambassador of terrorism
is currently living in the United States, at taxpayers' expense, thanks
to the lobbying of Zbigniew Brzezinski. The Clintons may not use this material
against Obama, but we can be sure that Karl Rove will not hesitate. Here
we have the making of a swiftboating campaign far beyond anything seen
in 2004. Even if the Rezko and Larry Sinclair allegations are not brought
up, they can be used to blackmail Obama and keep him obedient in the status
of a puppet.
-
- As for the Clintons, they are a known quantity, for good
and for ill. They have a well-established personal and historical identity.
Bill was a protege of Pamela Churchill Harriman and her PAM-PAC, but she
is gone now, and the Clintons cannot be said to owe their entire existence
to any one person or faction in today's world, in the way that Obama may
be fairly said to owe his entire existence to his Brzezinski-Goulsbee Trilateral/Skull
and Bones handlers and backers. The Clintons were treated very roughly
by the financier elite during impeachment ten years ago, and they fought
back. They are getting a very rough treatment from the bankers and their
controlled media outlets right now, and they are fighting back. They are
also getting betrayed by an array of rotten elitist politicians like Ted
Kennedy and John Kerry who owed the Clintons a great deal, and are now
stabbing them in the back. The Clintons are not the beneficiaries of a
CIA people power coup or flower revolution. It seems clear that Billary
as a combat team are on the whole less likely to follow orders from the
banking establishment than the Manchurian candidate Obama, who has no record,
stands for nothing, and seems to have no loyalties to anything. This may
not be much, but it is at least something, in the present terrible situation.
-
- In short, our left liberal friends are demanding that
we support a hand-picked Wall Street Manchurian candidate for another puppet
presidency à la Carter, a man who probably cannot win the White
House, whose economic profile is far to the right of his opponent, and
who would probably provoke war with Russia if he ever did get elected.
They are doing this to spite the obvious fact that the controlled corporate
media are signaling every day that Obama is the preferred alternative of
the financier elite and the banking establishment. And, although they may
not know it, they are supporting the only Democrat left standing whose
ineptitude, incompetence, and narrow appeal will almost certainly cause
the ongoing party realignment to miscarry, generating catastrophic consequences
that will be felt for decades, should this country last that long. Obama
is manifestly the wrong choice. Under most circumstances, is doomed to
lose. If he wins, our likely reward will be that Zbigniew Brzezinski will
get the chance to live out his twilight of the gods in all-out thermonuclear
confrontation with Russia. All in all, this is the worst of all possible
alternatives. As usual, our left liberal friends are out of sync with the
American people, and out of sync with the imperatives of world history.
|
