Obama disappoints

I just got off the phone with Jeff, an old friend from college who described himself as disgusted with Obama’s interview with Keith Olbermann on the MSNBC Countdown show. He saw Obama’s performance as smacking of just the kind of superiority and condescension that the Republicans were trying to cynically exploit-turning the contest into a referendum on “who you would want to drink beer with”, just as was the case in the 2004 election.

I should add that my friend is a longtime Nation Magazine subscriber who plans to vote for Obama. His views were shared by Richard, another friend of ours from college, who posted the following comment underneath one of my blog postings on Obama:

C’mon now, who cares what Obama does or says between now and November, IF HE GETS ELECTED! He’s not the “lesser” in this race. Consider, for example, the Supreme Court. The Next President will probably name 3 or 4 Justices. Do I have to ask? What about the thousands of federal office holders, throughout all the federal regulatory agencies? Can you really believe Obama will appoint the same people McCain will? American elections are all about WINNING. We don’t have a Parliamentary system. It’s WINNER TAKE ALL in the USA. The choice is Obama or McCain. Is that really hard to make?

Not only did Richard share Jeff’s take on Obama, so did Jeff’s friend Iris who actually went out to Ohio as an Obama volunteer. I would describe the mood of all three, from what Jeff told me, as one of despair over Obama’s unwillingness to take the fight to the Republicans.

Obama’s interview with Olbermann will be accessible on the Countdown transcript page either later today or tomorrow morning. Since I have access to Lexis-Nexis, I couldn’t resist taking a look at what Obama had to say, since it had such a dismaying effect on 3 of his supporters.

When Olbermann asks Obama if Palin is experienced enough and qualified enough to become president of the United States in the relatively short-term future, he refuses to go for the jugular about her totally unacceptable ultra-right positions and offers up bromides like this instead:

You know, those are going to be I think the issues that ultimately matter to the voters, and that’s why I’m trying to offer to them a very clear set of prescriptions, very clear ideas about what we intend to do, how we want to change the tax code, stop giving tax breaks to companies that ship jobs overseas, give 95 percent of Americans tax relief.

Have an energy policy that is serious about climate change, is serious about weaning ourselves off of Middle Eastern oil, investing in solar and wind and biodiesel so we’ve got energy independence and creating jobs here in the United States, having a health care system that makes sure that we don’t have 47 million people without health insurance.

This is exactly the kind of bloodless, policy wonk type message that has been delivered up by Democratic Party candidates going back to Jimmy Carter. The refusal to attack their opponents with the same kind of vehemence that they are attacked fosters the impression that the Democrats are brie-eating losers from the Eastern Seaboard. Olbermann makes it clear that another approach is required:

I mean, sixty years ago Harry Truman went out and campaigned very simply, looked out at people in trouble because of a Republican Congress at that point and the impact it had on their lives and he said, “How many more times do you have to be hit over the head until you figure out who’s hitting you?” I mean, has your campaign in some way not kept it that simple?

As I tried to explain to my friend Jeff earlier today, Obama will not take the brass knuckles approach of an FDR, a Harry Truman or even LBJ-the last of the New Deal politicians-because the Democratic Party has lost its class moorings. Through the 1960s, the trade unions were a powerful constituency of the Democratic Party. With the steady erosion of industries that provided the kinds of union jobs of the past, the Democrats have become much more of a middle-class party. With relatively well-off constituents in the “New Economy”, the Democrats do not feel the need to go into the trenches to fight for jobs and social benefits. The typical Democratic candidate for President today is a policy wonk like Obama, who reminds me more and more of Michael Dukakis.

If the performance on Countdown could be described as lackluster, it was far worse on the O’Reilly show where Obama tried to mollify the right-wing FOX-TV audience. Part one of the interview can be read here. It starts off with Obama showing that he is ready to “bring it on” with the terrorists, just as long as we don’t attack the wrong country.

O’REILLY: OK. Let’s start with national security. Do you believe we’re in the middle of a War on Terror?

OBAMA: Absolutely.

O’REILLY: Who’s the enemy?

OBAMA: Al Qaeda, the Taliban, a whole host of networks that are bent on attacking America, who have a distorted ideology, who have perverted the faith of Islam, and so we have to go after them.

Considering the news this week about dozens of Afghan children ending up as “collateral damage” in a bombing raid, one might have hoped that the Democratic candidate might have ratcheted down the war propaganda a bit. No such luck.

When O’Reilly keeps pressing Obama to admit that the surge “worked”, he finally has to admit: “Bill, what I’ve said is – I’ve already said it succeed beyond our wildest dreams.” Since Obama’s opposition to the war in Iraq has always been based on the criterion of whether it is the “wrong” war, it is to be expected that he would fall in line around the surge. No Democrat has had the guts to denounce the American occupation on grounds other than it is a waste of the taxpayer’s money, so naturally they will always appear to be indistinguishable from the Republicans on the all-important question of principle. No American presidential candidate since George McGovern has made the obvious point that the U.S. has no right to act as the world’s policeman, least of all the ever-so-cautious Barack Obama.