Wear Clean Draws  (’coz there’s 5 million ways to kill a ceo)

At 11:38 AM 11/6/2008, Jeffrey Fisher wrote:

i think it’s the way we fetishize voting and elections in this country,
isn’t it? that voting is actually doing something, and then nothing else is required? it will be interesting to see if they can hold it together. it
would pretty genuinely change american politics if they could, don’t you
think? a party as an actual organizing machine (deleuze warning?) instead of just an electing machine. and instead of organizing falling to fractious NGOs.

j

——

I’m going by what I see at work, the people of color supporting Obama. 20-somethings, professional-managerial, some clerical and sales. Judging by their attitudes toward the poor and by their tendency toward social conservativism, I’m not at all inclined to see this as a movement I could want to see held together.

Opposition to the war is only significant among half of them. What ties them all together is antipathy to anything smacking of “partisanship”. Being “political” is considered so Jesse Jackson. Like I said: I think it’s a social class thing. an organizing machine for people who think that gay marriage is wrong? an organizing machine for people who think that the problem in black America is the poverty caused by absent fathers? an organizing machine for people who cheer whenever Obama says, “government can’t solve our problems”? an organizing machine for people opposed to unilateral bombing who, instead, want an upstanding country that creates coalitions of nations to bomb them instead?

thanks. but no thanks.

this is what you get when you go to the web site, btw. You are redirected to a request for money to support the DNC: https://donate.barackobama.com/page/contribute/dnc08splashnd

thanks. but no thanks.

I would like it to be different. I would like to be proven wrong, that my social milieu is not representative.

When Obama was confronted by Uhuru in St. Pete, asking, “What about poor black people, Obama? What about Africans, Obama?” he responded by listing some things he’d done: fight against predatory lending, something about racial profiling.

You don’t have to like me, he said. We don’t have to agree. In fact, if you don’t agree with me, why don’t you run for office yourself? he asked. For no drama Obama, that was an intemperate outburst in so far as he was using logical fallacy to trounce a critic.

The audience cheered about that. One woman turned around and looked at the guy and said, “Yeah, why don’t you run for office?” with a vengeful little smirk that said, “There, take that, punk.”

Thanks. But no thanks.

Like Gulick, I’m not reminded of some new day in history. I’m not smelling some radical uprising. Instead, I’m reminded of a slightly less giddy 1992. Then, what proliferated was a mass of wonk think tanks, smart people sitting around trying to influence policy with position papers and debates. These people are chomping at the bit for the money that will flow into their little houses of wonkery.

ho. hum.

It was their hay day, that time. They were flush with the anticipation that they could turn around the Reagan revolution. Clinton flushed that for them. Now they want to get it back, to try one more time.

The people in this movement who could orchestrate a massive ramping up of the organizational effort to sustain a grass roots organization that would hold Obama’s feet to the fire aren’t likely to do this.

First of all, as people like Glen Ford and Adolph Reed have repeatedly pointed out: there is no there, there. There is very little in the Obama platform that points at any sort of Liberalism. He is a centrist. He holds many right wing positions. Sometimes, he is more rightwing than the rightwing! There are no feet that were close to the fire and so there is no way those feet are going to try to move away from it.

Second of all, Obama’s biggest supporters want wonky think tanks; they don’t want messy writhing humanity to have to manage. They’ll pull them into volunteering and interning for their think tanks, sure. They set up Change.gov to provide people with the illusion of participation. It is meaningless and a good way to monitor the base, to keep extracting money for it. Is it any surprise that it’s run by a democrat fund raising outfit?

So, Obama’s supporters aren’t going to want to actually, you know, engage the unwashed because who wants to talk to people who have to be engaged at a much more basic level? They are wonks: they want a grad seminar not to actually listen to people.

Obama speaks constantly of how he needs people because he needs them to help *him* do his work. In the Rachel Maddow interivew I posted, he assumes a republican clientele that needs to be persuaded. Magically, he assumes a democratic clientele that doesn’t need to be persuaded. He takes them for granted, as all Democrats do. The rest? Well, he threw the activist movements of the sixties under the bus in his speeches and books, repeatedly. And he doesn’t feel he has to do anything different because his apolitical Democratic base throws radicals under the bus all the time as well.

So, instead of taking Maddow’s concerns seriously, he famously grinned and threw her under the bus! He actually had the nerve to pit Maddow as the one stupidly spoiling for a fight with conservatives. He wasn’t having any of that. (The right is blameless here? It is not spoiling for an argument as well? wuh? She prefaced the whole interaction with a discussion of the way the rightwing characterizes Democrats as unpatriotic and anyone more Liberal than a mere dem as antiAmerica ferchrisakes.)

He’s not interested in what his base wants politically. He is interested in mobilizing people who already agree with him, or who are so apolitical as to not really care as long as his actions aren’t doing anything to uproot their cushy little lives. He’s assuming the rest will just put up and shut up, that he doesn’t have to listen to the more liberal or, heaven forfend, radical critique.

Because, remember: socialism is about condescendingly sharing *your* sandwich, not about asking why the other guy doesn’t have a sandwich to begin with. fuck.

Obama is not interested in working with people who do not agree with him, as you can clearly see in his response to the Uhuru’s question. He simply used the heckling of the audience against them. Concerns about police violence in FL, concerns about Jena 6, concerns about Sean Bell ….

*crickets*

Not even the decency of silence. Instead, he said, basically, “put a sock in it or figure out how to get as much money as I’ve gotten and run for office yourself. Because the answer is in elections!” (In other words, the rules of the game are centrism, young men, so be there or be square. Oh! The irony.)

He wasn’t interested in listening to a thing they had to say if it was critical of him. He was blameless. He had never done anything but speak up for Jena 6, Sean Bell, racial profiling, police violence, black men rotting in prisons and being gunned down for nothing.

Ask yourself: have you ever once heard him frame things as him being open to listening to “the people” — especially if those views are outside the pragmatic centrism that he insists on using to delimit the terms of debate?

No, he simply assumes his base is already in line. When he anticipates disagreement, he doesn’t anticipate that he might be open to criticism and change his mind due to grassroots agitation. No, when he anticipates disagreements, he does so in order to set the stage: *I* am going to do things with which you won’t agree. *You* are probably not going to like it.

Don’t like it? Run for office yourself.