What’s wrong with a primary challenge to Obama?

There’s an article in today’s NY Times that sizes up the liberal reaction to Obama’s tax break for millionaires deal with the Republican Party. Norman Solomon, a member of the Progressive Democrats of America, warns:

“Obama may have just ensured that he’ll face a significant challenge to his renomination in 2012 from inside the Democratic Party,” said Norman Solomon, a leader of Progressive Democrats of America. “By giving away the store on such a momentous tax issue, he has now done huge damage to a large portion of the progressive base that helped to make him president.”

Mr. Solomon added, “If he thinks that won’t have major effects on his re-election chances, he’s been swallowed up by a delusional bubble.”

Dan Rather, the former CBS news reader, appeared on MSBC’s “Jansing & Company” and opined:

This is a political nightmare for Barack Obama as president. The more-left portion of his party hates this with a passion. And politically, within his own party, if this goes through, Barack Obama will be in a position to have his shirttail on fire, his back to the wall, and the bill collector at the door. Which is metaphorically a way of saying he’s almost guaranteed — if this goes through — to have a serious challenge in a Democratic primary for president in 2012.

Two days ago Clarence Jones of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University summoned up a historical precedent for a challenge to Obama in the Huffington Post:

Then, I began to think about 1968: about Allard Lowenstein, President Lyndon Johnson, Senator Eugene McCarthy, Sarah Kovner and Harold Ickes of the New York Democratic Party New Coalition who had the courage to lead a grassroots challenge to Lyndon Johnson’s re-election.

Lyndon Johnson was one of the greatest presidents in the history of our country. He enacted Immigration reform, bills establishing a National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Highway Safety Act, the Public Broadcasting Act, creation of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, a bill to provide consumers with some protection against shoddy goods and dangerous products, Social Security and Medicare, Voting Rights Act of 1965, only to mention a few. But, he squandered and threatened the viable implementation of these legislative achievements by his aggressive pursuit and escalation of the war in Vietnam.

Some of us, like Allard Lowenstein, Sarah Kovner, Harold Ickes, Eleanor French, Blair Clark, decided that Johnson’s pro Vietnam policy had to be publicly challenged. Our “agent” for this challenge was Senator Eugene McCarthy from Minnesota. He may have been an “uncertain trumpet” on other domestic issues. However, we worked hard to support his candidacy for President in the New Hampshire Democratic primary as a challenge to the Vietnam policy of President Johnson. McCarthy came in second with 42% percent of the vote against 49% for the President. This precipitated Johnson to announce that he would not seek re-election as the candidate of the National Democratic Party.

When few other public figures of national stature spoke out about Johnson’s escalation of the war in Vietnam, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, at New York City’s Riverside Church, before a meeting of Concerned Layman and Clergy, on April 4th, 1967, said “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” For Dr. King, it was “time to break the silence.”

And, so it is with Obama’s continued squandering of the extraordinary support he developed for his election as President.

As an unrepentant Marxist, I have a different take on the value of a primary challenge to Obama. In 1968, when I was a member of the Socialist Workers Party (a group that would implode at the climax of a sectarian “turn toward industry” in the 1980s), I witnessed the disorientation of the antiwar movement as a result of McCarthy’s primary bid, as well as Robert Kennedy’s. Tens of thousands of young peace activists got “clean for Gene” and rang doorbells around the country in a bid to elect someone who promised to withdraw from Vietnam—sort of.

In an interview conducted with McCarthy in 1996 by the National Security Archive, he was asked “What links did you and your campaign have with the anti-war movement?” His reply:

We didn’t have any kind of formal links with them – you know, they were kind of doing their own thing. In fact, some of them were a little upset when we started the campaign saying we were draining off energy; they were more radical. And they weren’t harmful, but they weren’t much help to us. So… I wouldn’t say we distanced ourselves from them: we just sort of let them do their own act.

In 1967, he explained that he was running in order to undercut any tendency “to make threats of support for third parties or fourth parties or other irregular political movements.” In other words, like the Peace and Freedom Party or the campaigns of groups like the SWP.

If you paid attention to McCarthy’s actual positions in 1968, rather than succumb to the illusions fostered by the liberal punditry, you could figure out that he was not likely to bring a swift end to the war. In substance, he was for a bombing halt and favored a coalition government rather than allowing the Vietnamese to settle their own affairs.

Years later I discovered that McCarthy’s chief speech writer was a character named Paul Gorman who hosted an insufferable “New Age” type program on WBAI in New York in the early 80s. My girlfriend at the time, an inept theater director who prided herself in knowing nothing about current events, loved Gorman, understandably so.

The CPUSA, an erstwhile coalition partner of the SWP in the antiwar movement, threw itself into the McCarthy campaign as did many pacifists. The net effect was to reduce the size of the antiwar demonstrations and make many young socialists and radicals feel that the movement was finished. SWP leaders urged caution at the time. They told us that once the election was over, the movement would grow strong again because the war would inevitably continue. When they turned out to be right, they gave me a strong sense of confidence in the leadership. Unfortunately, that served to delay my decision to resign since I held out the possibility that the “turn toward industry” would also bear fruit even though the project seemed an exercise in self-delusion at the time. I turned out to be correct.

Most of the young activists who got “clean for Gene” returned to street activism just as the SWP predicted, but there were some who saw the campaign as a kind of training ground for a future career in bourgeois politics. One of them was the current Secretary of State. The NY Times reported in September 5, 2007:

“She was not an antiwar radical trying to create a mass movement,” said Ellen DuBois, who, with Ms. Rodham, was an organizer of a student strike that April. “She was very much committed to working within the political system. From a student activist perspective, there was a significant difference.”

As the nation boiled over Vietnam, civil rights and the slayings of two charismatic leaders, Ms. Rodham was completing a sweeping intellectual, political and stylistic shift. She came to Wellesley as an 18-year-old Republican, a copy of Barry Goldwater’s right-wing treatise, “The Conscience of a Conservative,” on the shelf of her freshman dorm room. She would leave as an antiwar Democrat whose public rebuke of a Republican senator in a graduation speech won her notice in Life magazine as a voice for her generation.

Of course, there are real differences between 1968 and today. The draft made young people far more willing to confront the system through direct action than is the case today, when low-intensity warfare makes it far too easy to remain on the sidelines. 1968 was also a time when the Black population of the United States appeared on the verge of revolution, a spur to young people to follow in its footsteps.

That being said, there are good reasons for a McCarthy/Kennedy type bid to rise in the next presidential election. Ideological guardians of the system are worried about the health of the two-party system and remain committed to the illusion that progressive change can take place when big capital controls the electoral system.

The best thing would be for a high-profile bourgeois politician to run as an independent candidate against both Obama and whichever nitwit the Republicans nominate in the same fashion as Henry Wallace’s 1948 Progressive campaign. While this candidate would certainly not challenge the capitalist system, the example of independent political action on the left would go a long way to returning the momentum of the more successful Nader campaigns. It should of course be mentioned that Norman Solomon opposed Nader in 2004, telling Democracy Now listeners that “the Nader campaign doesn’t care whether we have four more years of Bush.” Since Solomon was an Obama delegate in 2008, he is in a unique position to know what it means to get “four more years of Bush” since we are enduring what amounts to his third term right now.

Although I doubt that Russ Feingold would take up Alexander Cockburn’s invitation to run as an independent in 2012, it would be of enormous importance if he did. Cockburn wrote:

As I stressed in my Nation column, any primary opponent to the President inside the Democratic Party is doomed: Obama would survive any such challenge.

Moreover the White House deserves the menace of a convincing threat now, not some desperate intra–Democratic Party challenge late next year. There has to be an independent challenge.

My view is that we have a champion in the wings and one whom I am sure George Soros would be only too happy to support. In fact he’s a candidate who could rally not only Soros but the Koch brothers to his cause.

This champion of the left with sound appeal to the populist or libertarian right was felled on November 2, and he should rise again before his reputation fades. His name is Russ Feingold, currently a Democrat and the junior senator from Wisconsin. I urge him to decline any job proffered by the Obama administration and not to consider running as a challenger inside the Democratic Party. I urge him, not too long after he leaves the Senate, to raise – if only not to categorically reject — the possibility of a presidential run as an independent; then, not too far into 2011, to embark on such a course.

Of course, I chalk up Alexander’s foolishness about the Koch brothers and appeals to the “populist or libertarian right” to bad habits he has accumulated over the past 25 years or so but the rest of it is very much worth considering.