Don’t Let Barack Obama Break Your Heart

Posted on Nov 6, 2012

By Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch

(Page 3)

In a sense, though, domestic policy may, relatively speaking, represent the good news of the coming Obama era. We know, for instance, that those preparing the way for the new president’s arrival are thinking hard about how to roll back the worst of Bush cronyism, enrich-yourself-at-the-public-troughism, general lawlessness, and unconstitutionality. As a start, according to Ceci Connolly and R. Jeffrey Smith of the Washington Post, Obama advisers have already been compiling “a list of about 200 Bush administration actions and executive orders that could be swiftly undone to reverse White House policies on climate change, stem cell research, reproductive rights and other issues,” including oil drilling in pristine wild lands. In addition, Obama’s people are evidently at work on ways to close Guantanamo and try some of its prisoners in U.S. courts.

However, if continuity domestically means rollback to the Clinton era, continuity in the foreign policy sphere—Guantanamo aside—may be a somewhat different matter. We won’t know the full cast of characters to come until the president-elect makes the necessary announcements or has a national security press conference with a similar line-up behind him. But it’s certainly rumored that Robert Gates, a symbol of continuity from both Bush eras, might be kept on as secretary of defense, or a Republican senator like Richard Lugar of Indiana or, more interestingly, retiring Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel might be appointed to the post. Of course, many Clintonistas are sure to be in this line-up, too.

In addition, among the essential cast of characters will be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Michael Mullen, and Centcom Commander David Petraeus, both late Bush appointees, both seemingly flexible military men, both interested in a military-plus approach to the Afghan and Iraq wars. Petraeus, for instance, reportedly recently asked for, and was denied, permission to meet with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

All these figures will represent a turn away from the particular madness of the early Bush years abroad, one that actually began in the final years of his second term. But such a national security line-up is unlikely to include fresh thinkers, who might truly reimagine an imperial world, or anyone who might genuinely buck the power of the Pentagon. What Obama looks to have are custodians and bureaucrats of empire, far more cautious, far more sane, and certainly far more grown-up than the first-term Bush appointees, but not a cast of characters fit for reshaping American policy in a new world of disorder and unraveling economies, not a crew ready to break new ground and cede much old ground on this still American-garrisoned planet of ours.

Breathless in Washington

Let’s assume the best: that Barack Obama truly means to bring some form of the people’s will, as he imagines it, to Washington after eight years of unconstitutional “commander-in-chief” governance. That—take my word for it—he can’t do without the people themselves expressing that will.

Of course, even in the Bush era, Americans didn’t simply cede the public commons. They turned out, for instance, in staggering numbers to protest the President’s invasion of Iraq before it ever happened, and again more recently to work tirelessly to elect Obama president. But—so it seems to me—when immediate goals are either disappointingly not achieved, or achieved relatively quickly, most Americans tend to pack their bags and head for home, as so many did in despair after the invasion was launched in 2003, as so many reportedly are doing again, in a far more celebratory mood, now that Obama is elected.

But hard as his election may have been, that was surely the easy part. He is now about to enter the hornet’s nest. Entrenched interests. Entrenched ideas. Entrenched ideology. Entrenched profits.
Entrenched lobbyists. Entrenched bureaucrats. Entrenched think tanks. An entrenched Pentagon and allied military-industrial complex, both bloated beyond imagining and virtually untouchable, along with a labyrinthine intelligence system of more than 18 agencies, departments, and offices.

Washington remains an imperial capital. How in the world will Barack Obama truly begin to change that without you?

In the Bush years, the special interests, lobbyists, pillagers, and crony corporations not only pitched their tents on the public commons, but with the help of the President’s men and women, simply took possession of large hunks of it. That was called “privatization.” Now, as Bush & Co. prepare to leave town in a cloud of catastrophe, the feeding frenzy at the public trough only seems to grow.

It’s a natural reaction—and certainly a commonplace media reaction at the moment—to want to give Barack Obama a “chance.” Back off those critical comments, people now say. Fair’s fair. Give the President-elect a little “breathing space.” After all, the election is barely over, he’s not even in office, he hasn’t had his first 100 days, and already the criticism has begun.

But those who say this don’t understand Washington—or, in the case of various media figures and pundits, perhaps understand it all too well.

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