Vote for the Barack O-rama, but Don't Buy the Show

Barack Obama's "Yes We Can" Youtube video typifies the candidacy. It's both uplifting and lacks specifics. The very close Democratic race and Barack Obama's eloquence has generated hopes, but and Barack is the best of an unpromising lot of Presidential candidates. He has positioned himself as a symbol of "change," but that change is symbolic, without specifics or direction.

He is a clear change from Bush and from other Republicans, but then so is Hillary Clinton. However, we know what a Clinton administration looks like; triangulation, war, neoliberal trade policy and welfare cutbacks, a heritage that Hillary Clinton defends. With Barack, a least there's some doubt.

Furthermore because he has raised the expectation of change, the mobilization of young people and people of color that he has generated makes him more vulnerable to progressive campaigns to create progressive change. He has also done neighborhood organizing for three years before going to Harvard Law and practiced civil rights law.

Yet, expecting that just getting Obama into office will generate progressive change out of his own political nature goes against what we know about his history. Obama began his political ascent running for public office as a mainstream Democrat, not a Movement candidate. For example, while living in upscale Hyde Park, he ran against Bobby Rush, a progressive and former Black Panther, in the South Side of Chicago. In his current campaign, rather than running on an anti-right wing platform, he positions himself as above partisan stands and conciliatory to a now far-right Republican Part, where even an out and out militarist, fiscal conservative like John McCain is seen as suspicious.

Examining his positions that he has articulated, he is not that different from Hillary. Of the questions that really matter, race, U.S. militarism internationally, neoliberal trade policies, there's little discussion. For example Barack wants to expand the military, particularly the "ground forces" and so does Hillary. Barack supports an amended NAFTA and opposes CAFTA free trade agreements. So does Hillary. Even the relatively progressive positions both Hillary and Barack have taken, John Edwards, by staking positions to the left of them on health care, poverty and withdrawing the troops, had to push both of them in the early campaign. Neither of them has taken up, on the other hand, Edwards' anti-corporate themes when Edwards withdrew. However, Barack addresses poverty in his present platform though his solutions don't even come close to Johnson's War on Poverty programs.

This is also a commentary on the U.S. electorate. People want change, but they don't know what, Obama himself hasn't said what, only that he is (change).

Vote for Obama. It will help, but let's be clear-eyed about it; it's not sure that he will help. Getting the Republicans out will be the first priority to give activists more room to act. Hopefully Obama will be elected, but to get the direction and level of change we want, we'll have to keep organizing and pressuring him.