If one had any doubt about Obama being one of "them", just look at his record over the last few weeks, writes VINCENT BROWNE
THERE WAS never even a slender hope Barack Obama could bring any substantive change to America, no matter how often he and his fans chanted the "change" mantra.
No change in the "war on terror", which has been the mask for foreign adventurism in pursuit of imperial ambitions and gross abuse of human liberties. No change in the direction of unqualified support for Israel, a state founded on terror and ethnic cleansing and maintained by savagery. No change to the rearmament of America and, incidentally, in replication now, the European Union as well.
No change to the reality of 36.5 million people living in poverty in America. No change to the 47 million without health insurance cover and therefore, mostly, without access to healthcare. No change on gun laws or on the death penalty.
The rhetoric was and is as vacuous as it sounds. Obama is another one of "them". If one had any doubt about Obama being one of "them", just look at his record over the last few weeks since he secured the Democratic nomination. On Independence Day, July 4th, he delivered a speech in Independence, Missouri. This was not just another piece of kitsch but intended also as a tribute to one of America's presidential war criminals, Harry Truman, the president who ordered the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civiliansin May 1945. Obama began his speech with another tribute, this time to the "men of Lexington and Concord . . . our first patriots". No hint here of any acknowledgment of earlier patriots, who befriended the "discoverers" of American and then tried to defend themselves against the rapaciousness of the invaders.
Such oversight is commonplace among the conventional blatherers of American politics, but Obama, the first black presidential candidate to be entirely insensitive about what was done to native Americans?
He went on to commend the "sacrifice" of American troops in Iraq, an implied endorsement of their invasion, which he supposedly opposed, and their conduct of a brutal war there on the basis of lies and in the pursuit of domination. He hailed US troops who had fought in Vietnam as well as Iraq "on behalf of a larger cause". What "larger cause", other than the cause of domination? He denounced the "so-called counter-culture of the Sixties", the "so-called culture" that opposed the war in Vietnam, that campaigned for civil rights for blacks and other minorities!
He has gone on to resile from his earlier commitment to bring US troops home for Iraq within 16 months of becoming president. He is now talking about the "situation on the ground", listening to the military and, overall, seeking a more "muscular" US presence in the world, in the words of his senior national security adviser, Richard Danzig.
He has repeated his support for the death penalty, not just for those who take the lives of others but for child rapists, and criticised the US Supreme Court for failing to extend the death penalty beyond the category for murder. He supported the US Supreme Court's decision to uphold the "right" of Americans to carry handguns. In the last week he voted for George Bush's law legalising extensive phone tapping initiatives and granting immunity to the telephone companies that joined with the Bush administration in the illegal tapping of hundreds of thousands of phones.
He has expressed support for "faith-based" social programmes, programmes advocated by the extreme right of American society. He has broken a previous promise on election funding and now plans to vastly outspend his rival John McCain in the forthcoming campaign, as he outspent Hillary Clinton.
He has gone further in supporting the far right in Israel than George Bush ever did in committing himself to supporting a united Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
There is nothing surprising about the emergence of another cynical opportunist as a US presidential candidate. Remember how in 1992 Bill Clinton rushed back to his home state, where he was governor, to sanction the execution of an intellectually impaired man, who was later put to death? However, there is a special dismay with what is happening in the case of Obama. Being the first Black man to win the presidential nomination of one of the major parties, he has given rise to more expectation of change, of profound change on the part of his own Black community and on the part of poor Americans of all races and fooling them is a special disgrace.
But there is more to it.
The cynics who say and write that Obama is now merely being "pragmatic" in moving to the centre without the support of which he has no hope of winning in November are, of course, right. But there is no hope of winning change in America or anywhere else without campaigning for change; without spelling out the hard options change demands; without winning consent and support for such change and getting elected on that basis, on the basis of having changed people's minds, having changed the political culture. That is if we are talking about changing the character of society to an equal and fair society and changing the world to a peaceful and fair world too. And this is as true for Ireland and for Europe as it is for America.