From an unabashedly liberal site - Counterpunch. But I think the thoughts on Obama's "safeness" are valid...
http://www.counterpunch.org/
Obama is one of those politicians whom journalists like to decorate with words as "adroit" or "politically adept" because you can actually see him trimming to the wind, the way you see a conjuror of moderate skill shove the rabbit back up his sleeve. Above all he is concerned with the task of reassuring the masters of the Democratic Party, and beyond that, the politico-corporate establishment, that he is safe. Whatever bomb might have been in his head has long since been dis-armed. He's never going to blow up in the face of anyone of consequence.
There are plenty of black people like that in the Congress now. After a decade or so of careful corporate funding, as the Black Congressional Caucus is sinking under the weight of Democratic Leadership Copuncil clones like Artur Davis of Alabama, Albert Wynn of Maryland, Sanford Bishop and David Scott of Georgia, William Jefferson of Louisiana, Gregory Meeks of New York, all assiduously selling for a mess of pottage the interests of the voters who sent them to Washington.
Obama has done exactly the same thing. He lobbed up the first signal flare during the run-up to his 2004 senate race, when his name began to feature on Democratic Leadership Council literature as one of the hundred Democratic leaders to watch . That indispensable publication The Black Commentator raised a stink about this. "It would be a shame," wrote the Commentator's Bruce Dixon, " if he is in the process of becoming 'ideologically freed' from the opinions of the African American and other Democrats whose votes he needs to win."
Obama wriggled for a while, sending out clouds of mush speak such as "I believe that politics in any democracy is a game of addition, not subtraction", but the Commentator held his feet to the fire. They posed Obama three "bright-line" questions:
1. Do you favor the withdrawal of the United States from NAFTA? Will you in the Senate introduce or sponsor legislation toward that end?
2. Do you favor the adoption of a single payer system of universal health care to extend the availability of quality health care to all persons in this country? Will you in the Senate introduce or sponsor legislation toward that end?
3. Would you have voted against the October 10 congressional resolution allowing the president to use unilateral force against Iraq?
This was in 2003, when Obama clearly felt he could not afford to endanger left support by answering anything other than Yes on the questions and so he duly told the Black Commentator that he would stop hanging his hat in the halls of the DLC and would tell them to remove his name from their 100-To-Watch list.
Hence his press man, Vietor's, sensitivity to my allusion in that last to Obama's "mentor" being Senator Joe Lieberman. As a freshman senator, Vietor insisted, Obama had been assigned Lieberman as "mentor". Read the Hartford Courant and you'll find Lieberman boasting that Obama picked him.
Either way, it's obvious that Obama could have brokered a different mentor if he'd so desired it, same way he could have declined to go and tout for Lieberman at that Democratic Party dinner in Connecticut at the end of March. But he clearly didn't, because he wanted to send out a reassuring signal, same way as his Political Action Committee, the Hope Fund's, is raising money for 14 of his senatorial colleagues--ten of whom are DLC in orientation, which is half of the DLC presence in the Senate.
There has been a more substantive signal, keenly savored by the corporate world, where Obama voted for "tort reform", thus making it far harder for people to get redress or compensation. Actually the Yes vote in the Senate was filibuster-proof, s Obama could have voted either way without it making anydifference. He just wanted the top people to know how safe he was.
A woman from Illinois wrote to me after my last column on Obama, agreeing with my reproofs, and saying:
Here's an example of how the position and adulation from those in Washington have gone to his head. I'm involved with the Springfield (IL) Urban League. We began asking almost immediately after the election if he could be the keynote speaker at our annual fundraising dinner--which was held last fall! His staff delayed positive responses (even as we continued to call and inquire) until it was too late to get on the schedule of any nationally recognized 'celebrity.' (Thankfully, the attendance was excellent and the fundraiser our best ever--despite the brush off we received from Obama.) Let me reiterate: Barack Obama blew off speaking before an audience of 500 primarily African-American voters in Illinois--the state he purports to represent. He's spoken here lots of times prior to his election to the Senate, and even since. But he blew us off for nothing more than continued visits to states that did not elect him to stump for sometimes-questionable democrats--like the Lieberman situation."
Some hopeful progressives still say, "Obama has to bob and weave, while positioning himself at the high table as the people's champion." But in his advance to the high table he is divesting himself of all legitimate claims to be any sort of popular champion, as opposed to another safe black, like Condoleezza Rice (whom Obama voted to confirm. The Empire relishes such servants.
And so Obama, the constitutional law professor, voted to close off any filibuster of Alito and fled Senator Russell Feingold's motion to censure the President, declaring: "my and Senator Feingold's view is not unanimous. Some constitutional scholars and lower court opinions support the president's argument that he has inherent authority to go outside the bounds of the law in monitoring the activities of suspected terrorists. The question is whether the president understood the law and knowingly flaunted it."
That's not the question at all. The vitality of the Constitution does not rest on whether Bush understands it, any more that the integrity of the Criminal Code depends on whether the President has ever read a line of any statute. We can safely assume that he doesn't and he hasn't.
And so also did Obama, the constitutional law professor, vote Yea on March 2 to final passage of the U.S.A PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act, unlike ten of his Democratic colleagues.
Vietor, Obama's man, laughed derisively at my complaint at the end of my last column how most of her Democratic colleagues had fled Cynthia McKinney. "She apologized", Vietor cried, as though that settled the matter. In fact the betrayal of McKinney, particularly by her black colleagues, was an appalling and important political moment rewarding the racism showered on McKinney and the ongoing implosion of the Congressional Black Caucus. Obama, of course, distanced himself from her too.
) that the corrupt system could be fixed. 