Toban Black

(Photo by “changsterdam“)

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Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi (in this article) -

“Obama [was at the helm of] a presidential campaign with an inherent contradiction between its form and substance. In its form––the ways his campaign mobilized different constituencies, the way he appeared in rallies, and in the very intonation of his oratory––he presented himself as a populist candidate advocating radical change. Substantively––in [the Obama campaign] economic plan, in [its approach to] global conflicts, and in [its] political vision––[the Obama campaigners] differentiated [Obama] by a hair’s breadth from Clinton-era center-right doctrine. History tells us that substance is enduring and form is ephemeral.”

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Morton Skorodin (in this article) -

“The machine grinds on relentlessly. Now it’s: give Obama a chance. This means: Public, go back to sleep. In the meantime Obama and the state machinery work at feverish pace.

Take a look at the people who have quickly been announced as contenders for high office in the Obama administration.”

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Missy Comley Beattie (in this article) -

“President-elect Obama has named nearly a platoon of war hawks and Clintonites to his team. This looks nothing like change we can believe in.”

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A “CHANGE we can believe in” t-shirt
in a storefront here in London, Ontario, Canada

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Dan La Botz (in this article) -

“Obama has strengthened, broadened, and revitalized the [so-called] Democratic Party‘s ties to the banks and corporations whose executives have historically dominated the party’s inner councils both organizationally and financially.  Corporate executives, youthful financiers, young lawyers, and socially conscious doctors rushed forward with their money, their time, and their talent to support a candidate who shared their educational background and their liberal values.  Meanwhile, Obama, like Democrats before him, relied on the labor unions of the AFL-CIO and Change to Win, particularly the latter, unions such as SEIU, UFCW, and HERE with a base among low-wage workers, many of them workers of color, to canvass the precincts.”  “Obama’s campaign represented the first step of rebuilding the Democratic Party to become an organization that can more effectively bring together the well-heeled with the down-at-the-heels crowd, the corporate elite with the labor unions, that vast mass of working people who prefers to call themselves “the middle class” with Latinos, blacks, and the poor.

For the elite — who dominate the [so-called] Democratic Party, at the level where the party converges with the permanent government of long-term elected officials, government bureaucrats, and top military officers, as well as fuses with the financial and corporate board members and executives who largely pay for and staff the party’s upper echelons — the point is to recreate a party through which they can rule.  Obama’s usefulness for them, besides the fact that in all but his social origins he is one of them, is that [the Obama campaign] had made the Democratic Party attractive again to the mass of the middle class and working people.”

“The future lies not with Obama, it lies with all of those people who place their hopes in him.  The future lies in the struggle for all of the implicit agendas wrapped up in those hope.”

“Obama has his job to do, for those he serves.  We have our job to do.  And, since November 4, they are not the same.  In fact, they were never the same.”

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Ron Jacobs (in this article) -

“Our job now is to turn the … support that Obama received from many on the left into a movement that strives to return the focus of the movement away from the man and his victory and towards ending the war/occupations, etc.  To do this, we must engage the issues.  The most important issues are the issues of imperial war and capitalist failure.  We should understand the difference between the symbolism of a [man who is (supposedly) 'black'] winning the presidency of the United States and the reality of a [neoliberal] who believes that there is a war on terror and that it can be won by killing Afghanis and other people whose religion and culture are used to define them as the enemy.”

“Opposition to the occupations and wars of Washington must be organized with an understanding that it is imperialism that causes these wars and that understanding must be translated to the grassroots.  Resistance to the capitalists’ theft of the peoples monies for their aggrandizement must be explained for what it is–the [internal] workings of … capitalism, not some aberration due to greed and lack of regulation.”

“It is necessary that we make this knowledge better understood by many more people.  After all, people do want to understand why their world is so screwed up.  The election of Obama and his message of change is evidence of that.  His presidency is almost certain to prove that the change he is referring to is not going to be enough.”

“[The United States], like all nations, has seen times worse than these past eight years, only to have their hopes picked up by some politician speaking pretty phrases but limited by his determination to resolve the crises he faced while leaving the very system that created the crisis intact.”

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Pat LaMarche (in this article) -

“OpenSecrets.org shows that this year’s [military] contractor contributions to Democrats exceeded those made to Republicans for the first time since 1994.”

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Simon Critchley (in this article) -

“[The Obama campaigners'] strategy is very clear. There is to be no change at the level of the state and capital. We must maintain and defend the state in its classical, liberal constitutional form and use the governmental mechanisms of the state to stabilize the current disorder of finance-based capitalism. Change alone consists in a moral-symbolic shift or recalibration that allows citizens to overcome their despair at the hands of Bush and reaffirm their civil faith in the US governmental system.”

“As I walked to the subway at about 10 p.m. [on November 4th] a vast United States flag was being unfurled in Union Square; there were spontaneous parties in the streets of my part of Brooklyn, and many others can testify to much more exotic, collective experiences. This was a moment when people, no longer cowed by the power of the state and held in check by the police, suddenly become aware of their power and the power of their activity, which is nothing less than the activity of liberty. At such a moment, no force can stop them and a demonstration or street party erupts into being. This is collective joy. There is the potential for a political moment here, but it is a potential whose actualization is denied by the very representative process which is being celebrated. At the moment when people become aware of their power through the activity of the vote, they are simultaneously rendered powerless by the representative process. Liberty slips from the hands of those who have suddenly become aware of its power.”

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Jean Bricmont (in this article) -

“Of course, given the disastrous state of the Left worldwide, people desperately want to believe in something positive happening somewhere, and that only reinforces the illusions about Obama.”

“The only hope is that people will take him, not at his word, because he has not promised [much], but at what they think his word is, and will react furiously when he betrays their (unfounded) hopes. Only that can prevent the United States from escalating its wars in Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere.”

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Raj Patel (in this blog post) -

“Growing up under nearly two decades of Conservative rule in the UK (Margaret Thatcher 1979-1990 and John Major 1990-1997), I remember when the British electorate put Tony Blair 1997-2007 in power. Having voted Green in the 1997 British Election, I came to America on the day that Blair’s Labour Party came to power. I wasn’t around to see the day when, I’m told, people smiled at one another on the London Underground – a sign of unrefined joy if ever there were.

But Blair’s Britain turned to ashes. And I’ve no doubt that the Obama presidency will disappoint the vast majority of those who voted for him – he will not redistribute as forcefully, nor demilitarise as vigorously, nor change quite as hopefully as he offered.”

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Another post about the Obama campaign -
“Change we need”