Black pundits rally around the president

Three high-profile African-American members of the punditocracy have reacted to the mounting chorus of criticism against Obama, particularly over the tax deal with the Republicans. Although they have different political backgrounds and adopt varying tones, they agree that challenges to Obama are ill-advised, except for what amounts to friendly criticism. In other words, they would prefer that the left treat Obama in more or less the same way that Fox News treated Bush. You could find an Ann Coulter or a Rush Limbaugh disagreeing with Bush over, for example, immigration policy but there was never any question about whether or not he was The Man.

On Friday, Washington Post op-ed columnist Colbert I. King issued a Memo to the left: Hands off Obama. It turns out that the left he was referring to was not the kind of people who write for Counterpunch but the Democratic Party left that might back someone against Obama in the 2012 primaries. He writes:

Sabotage the nation’s first black president and the Democratic Party might as well bid farewell to its most loyal base of supporters: African Americans.

In 2008, the turnout for young black eligible voters was higher than that of young eligible voters of any other racial or ethnic group, according to the Pew Research Center. Consider them gone in future congressional and presidential elections if the left dooms Obama in 2012.

Of course, Obama seems to be doing a pretty good job himself convincing Blacks to stay home, with Black turnout decreasing from 13 percent in 2008 to 10 percent in the 2010 midterm elections.

King, as might be expected, warns that if Obama had not been elected, all sorts of really terrible things would be happening to the country. But, thanks to Obama, Wall Street has been reformed and billions have been spent to fight homelessness and hunger. It should be mentioned at this point that Colbert I. King was once the Executive Director of the World Bank so he should have a pretty good handle on fighting poverty. (Insert irony symbol here.) He is also a big fan of Obama’s efforts on behalf of peace, confirming the wisdom of placing the Nobel Peace Prize upon his saintly shoulders:

Would the United States be on its way out of lraq under a McCain presidency? Or pursuing a strategy to disengage from Afghanistan, even while thrashing al-Qaeda and rounding up home-grown terrorists?

I should mention that the misspelled “LRAQ” above is in the original article, a sign no doubt that the Washington Post’s editing standards are on a par with its politics. The idea that the U.S. is “disengaging” from Afghanistan, of course, has the same credibility as Obama waging a war on poverty. None.

Now all this is par for the course for an op-ed writer at the Washington Post. We wouldn’t expect anything different. But another op-ed piece that appeared in the N.Y. Times this weekend might have thrown some for a loop, since it was written by Ishmael Reed, one of those people who do write for Counterpunch. In What Progressives Don’t Understand About Obama, Reed says that calls for Obama to “man up” against the Republicans (a term I doubt that Rachel Maddow has ever used) will backfire since “he’d be dismissed as an angry black militant with a deep hatred of white people”. This strikes me as somewhat puzzling since Obama campaigned vociferously about a tax break for millionaires up until very recently. When he was speaking out in that manner, nobody ever likened him to Louis Farrakan, now did they?

This is not the first time that Reed has expressed his displeasure with Obama critics. Last May he was interviewed by Jill Nelson on Counterpunch about his new book Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media: The Return of the Nigger Breakers. It’s not just the mainstream media that is racist. It is also the alternative media:

The white males who dominate the progressive media are used to black guys playing basketball. Their opinions dominate NPR, Pacifica, The Nation even though it has a feminist editor. They’re crazy about Michael Jordan.

NPR and The Nation I understand but Pacifica? There are all sorts of problems with the network, but excluding Black voices is not one of them—at least it wasn’t when I listened to the local station. It turns out that the offending party at Pacifica is our good friend and comrade Doug Henwood, about whom Reed had this to say in the aforementioned book:

On January 1 during her annual retrospective program Obama was subjected to withering criticism by her guests and this was followed the next day on progressive Pacifica radio by Doug Henwood, a marxist economist, who was just as unrelenting in his criticism of Obama.

Even while admitting on his Pacifica show, aired on Jan 9, that manufacturing jobs were beginning to return, he, using the kind of language that slave masters used when trapping the movements of a fugitive slave, referred to Obama as slippery and like some others who are treating non-white voters as invisible, noted that Obama was losing his friends.

This is what Doug said. I will let others judge whether this is the “kind of language that slave masters used”:

Though the right has been energized by fighting against Obama’s phantasmic radical leftism, he is of course no such thing. But his very vaguness and slipperiness has come to haunt him. Since he stands for little other than compromises aimed at shoring up the status quo, his ranks of enthusiastic supporters shrink every day. He has more enemies and fewer friends all the time. This is what happens when you’re a brand rather than someone with principles.

And finally there is the inimitable Bill Fletcher Jr., who unlike King and Reed does represent himself as some kind of Marxist, although never so gauche as to actually cite Lenin or Mao in his communications to the left.

Over on ZNet, he holds forth on Obama the Tax Cuts, & the Federal Pay Freeze. You can find the same riff about avoiding the “angry black man” image as in Reed’s piece:

Emotion from a black person is often perceived by whites as threatening and since President Obama wanted to assure whites as to his stability, he could not afford to show emotion. Thus, the anger that millions are feeling, regarding the collapse of their lives, is not something that he can channel because to do so would be to raise the spectre of the Mau Mau, literally and figuratively in light of his Kenyan background…at least that seems to be his fear.

All this is sheer nonsense. Nobody ever asked Obama to howl at the cameras as if he were Howard Beale in “Network”. All he had to do was calmly and coolly—just like Mr. Spock—tell the insurance companies and the American people that he was pushing ahead with a single-payer plan, for example. But the problem was not in his emotions but in his intellect. The guy believes deeply in U. of Chicago economics and his fans on the left had a hard time figuring that out before they got involved with nonsense like Progressives for Obama. You might as well have launched Progressives for Milton Friedman.

Fletcher concludes his article with a warning that a primary challenge to Obama would not be a good idea since it “is unlikely that a good, multi-racial, progressive challenge – that has credibility – can be mounted against Obama.” My own position is that would not be a good idea but for a different reason, namely that it would be a god-damned waste of time and energy. More about that here.

Bill Fletcher Jr. has reacted to an open letter to the Left Establishment by calling attention to his criticisms of the president:

So, assuming that there is loving intent from the authors–and i am certainly not critical of the signatories–then i would say, i agree with many of the criticisms they have offered of the Obama administration; i have offered many of those criticisms already; i have been active, as have most of my colleagues, in trying to engage liberal and progressive social forces in the need to both combat the political Right as well as put the pressure on the Democrats; and, guess what?  I will continue to, and i am assuming that my colleagues will as well.

As I said at the outset, leftist supporters of Obama have not been shy about making criticisms. But this is not adequate to the task. Instead what is needed is a posture of opposition, no different in fact from that taken against George W. Bush. This is a bridge too far for people like Fletcher and obviously why the open letter was written. Nobody believes that Fletcher, Vanden Heuvel and Michael Moore will ever budge on the basic question of supporting Obama but it is important to raise awareness about their obligations to the left, in whose name they presume to speak.

There are clear signs that Obama has made up his mind to wash his hands entirely of the “professional left”. Whether they continue to carry a torch for him is their business, not ours. But at least one professional rightwing pundit has it all figured out, even if they don’t. In a mailing to Weekly Standard readers, Matthew Continetti, a rightwing asshole of biblical proportions, professed an admiration for Obama that exceeded the Establishment Left’s. This is a contradiction for them to resolve, not us:

Well, I’m in a good mood. It only took about a month after the midterm election for President Obama to start moving to the center-right. In the last week, the president has (a) frozen salaries for non-defense federal employees, (b) negotiated a major trade deal with South Korea, and (c) agreed to a two-year extension of current tax rates along with a temporary reduction in the payroll tax. At this rate he’ll be haggling with Paul Ryan over the fine points of the Roadmap for America’s Future by next August.

The tax deal, moreover, falsifies two myths. The first is that Obama is incapable of moving to the center. I confess, I had my doubts. The man is too professorial, too committed to the liberal view of the world. What I forgot was that he is also a politician who seeks reelection. If his speech announcing the tax deal is any indication, Obama will kick and scream as he works with Republicans in the next Congress. He does not like ceding ground to American conservatism. But that’s fine. He doesn’t have to like it. What’s important is that conservative ideas will have an opportunity to work.

The other myth? That the left matters. Oh, they’ll howl that Obama is abandoning his base. They’ll point to the emerging center-right fiscal consensus, the lack of a public option in the health care bill, the president’s continued intervention in Afghanistan. They’ll make a fair case, especially when it comes to Obama’s relations with Wall Street, that the president is an elitist who has no connection or sympathy with the common man. The talk shows and headlines will be filled with chatter that Obama’s “betrayal” will hurt him in 2012.

But none of it will make any difference. For the fact is that, while the center-left is overrepresented in the public discourse, the liberal core is limited to around 20 to 30 percent of the electorate. There are far more votes to mine in the places where voters identify as conservative. Anyone can see that—even the president. So the question isn’t whether Obama can survive the disaffection of the left. It’s whether Republicans will be ready when the president tries to poach the center-right.