THE LIMIT OF OBAMA’S IMAGINATION
Al-Ahram Weekly
21 -27 February 2008
At a time when Obama’s moral voice was most needed, the reach of his
wings proved to be cautiously perforated on an AIPAC line, writes
Hamid Dabashi*
"We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We
are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding
conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too
late . . . Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous
civilizations are written the pathetic words, ‘Too late.’ There is
an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or
our neglect." — Martin Luther King, Jr
I HAVE BEEN a silent witness to a succession of US presidential
elections for over thirty years now. I came to the United States in
August 1976, the very last year of the presidency of the incumbent
Republican president Jerald R. Ford, and as he and Jimmy Carter
were debating each other in the lead up to November 1976 election,
in which President Ford lost and President Carter succeeded him. At
the time of writing this article I am yet again witness to a highly
contested series of primaries for the presidential election of 2008 —
as on the democratic front Senators Hillary Clinton of New York and
Barack Obama of Illinois have captured and divided the attention of
a highly charged and massively divisive American electorate — along
the thorny issues of race and gender, establishment versus progressive
politics, and above all a regressive politics of the status quo and
a buoyant possibility of yet another upsurge of hope for the younger
generation of Americans to give political reality to their otherwise
moot and mute idealism.
Meanwhile, Senator John McCain of Arizona is leading the Republican
hopefuls on a path of pathological disregard for the pain and suffering
of people the world over, beginning with the poor and disenfranchised
Americans. For thirty years, I have wondered what does this dazzling
exercise in the democratic will of the people of the United States —
when from conservative and retrograde multimillionaires to liberal and
progressive public servants fight head over heels for every single
vote of ordinary or even poor people — has to do with the rest of
the world.
When I came to the United States in August 1976, the country was
plunged in a deep moral apathy following the US atrocities and
final defeat in Vietnam, the aggressive thinning out of the social
synergy evident in the Civil Rights Movement, the onset of the Vietnam
Syndrome, and above all the political anomie that had set in after the
assassination of President John F Kennedy (1963), Malcolm X (1965),
and Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr (1968), and then to top them all
by the Watergate Scandal.
The first Vice President appointed to that position under the terms
of the 25th Amendment of the US Constitution, Jerald Ford succeeded
the disgraced Richard Nixon and became the thirty-eighth President
of the United States, serving from 1974 to 1977, effectively the
interim president covering the hiatus between the beleaguered and
corrupt presidency of Richard Nixon and the advent of Jimmy Carter’s
presidency. Ford was not elected to either of his two successive
offices and was in fact the transitional figurehead covering two
scandalous resignations, first by Vice President Spiro Agnew on 10
October 1973 (on corruption charges), and then by Richard Nixon
on 9 August 1974 following the Watergate Scandal. Very much the
establishment candidate, Ford lost that election to Jimmy Carter,
the idealist peanut farmer from Georgia — a president who had made
human rights the hallmark of his renewed commitment to a more morally
responsible American foreign policy.
That dream too, like all other hopes fostered in vain in this land,
was not meant to be. It was during the presidency of Jimmy Carter
(1976-1980) that the Iranian Revolution happened, and it was in
the run-ups to the presidency of Ronald Reagan (1980-1988), that
the American Hostage Crisis in Iran forever changed the face of the
geopolitics in the region and even the globe, pushing the American
imperial politics ever more aggressively to the right and beyond the
arrested moment of Vietnam Syndrome.
For obvious reasons, all these events — the Iranian Revolution of
1977-1979, the American Hostage Crisis of 1979-1980, and the Iran-Iraq
war of 1980-1988 — were exceedingly important to millions of people
living in the region, and thus following the American presidential
elections from that point forward became a matter of overriding
curiosity as to what precisely does this spectacular exercise in the
democratic will of an imperial nation-state has to do with the rest
of the world.
LOOKED AT from a domestic point of view, the American presidential
elections are perhaps the most spectacular democratic dramas one can
ever hope to witness. Consider the drama of the current election: the
world will not understand what it means for a Barack Hussein Obama
to be this close to be the president of the United States unless
and until it can imagine an Armenian becoming the Prime Minister of
Turkey, or a Turk the Chancellor of Germany, or an Egyptian Copt the
President of Egypt, or a Palestinian the Prime Minister of Israel,
or an Iranian Jewish woman the President of the Islamic Republic, or
a Pakistani the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, or an Algerian
the President of France. But the sociological glory of this fact in
the United States is predicated on the political calamity that ever
since the commencement of the presidency of Ronald Reagan in 1980
the ideological pendulum in this country has so radically swung to
the right that it is impossible to imagine how long it will take to
push it back towards a meaningful center.
The best possible scenario, so goes the best hope of this campaign,
is for Barack Obama to defeat the business-as-usual of Hillary Clinton
drive and then go on to defeat Senator McCain and become the first
African-American President of the United States and allow the waves
upon waves of hope he has managed to generate to redefine American
political culture. The worst possible scenario is for Hillary Clinton
to defeat Barack Obama and then go on to lose to McCain in the general
election, so we will end up with yet another four to eight years
of belligerent Republican thuggery around the world and predatory
capitalism at home. Which one of these two scenarios, or anything
between them, will come to pass — only time will tell.
For now, the painstaking process of American Democratic machinery
is yet to unfold. However, it is important to note here how former
president Bill Clinton, Senator Clinton’s husband, had succeeded
radically in racialising the presidential election when immediately
after Obama won the South Carolina primary he quipped: "Jesse Jackson
won South Carolina in ’84 and ’88. Jackson ran a good campaign. And
Obama ran a good campaign here." What do Jesse Jackson and Barack
Obama have in common — other than being what Americans in their
unguarded moments call "black"? So much for Clinton being "the first
black president of the United States," as the Nobel Laureate Toni
Morrison once famously said.
The most racist sound-bite of this Democratic primary so far in
fact came from former President Clinton — with one racist comment
he transformed Barack Obama into a "black" candidate and sought to
diminish his national, cross-racial, and universal appeal. Soon after
this racist remark, Toni Morrison took that epithet back from Clinton
by publicly endorsing Senator Obama in a moving letter to him. "Dear
Senator Obama," she wrote, "This letter represents a first for me —
a public endorsement of a Presidential candidate. I feel driven to let
you know why I am writing it. One reason is it may help gather other
supporters; another is that this is one of those singular moments
that nations ignore at their peril. I will not rehearse the multiple
crises facing us, but of one thing I am certain: this opportunity
for a national evolution (even revolution) will not come again soon,
and I am convinced you are the person to capture it."
In the inner sanctum of their most dreadful despairs, the best amongst
Americans now fear for Obama’s life — as they did for John F Kennedy,
Robert Kennedy, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King. In the fragility of
that fear, and the even more fragile hope for a more humane politics
that it conceals, the best among Americans continue to dream for a
better and a more just world, while their elected officials continue
to inflict unfathomable pain on other nations, while ignoring the
ever increasing hardship of ordinary people in the US. Within that
paradox dwells the combustible hope to which Obama has now put a match.
Barack Obama rises in American political consciousness after eight
years of Ronald Reagan, consistently pushing the country to the
right of even his own conservative politics, after four years of one
cynical and opportunist President Bush, after eight more years of a
President Clinton whose foreign policies was even worse than his two
Republican predecessors, and then after eight long and terrorising
years of yet another President Bush who has now pushed the world to
the edge of moral and environmental meltdown — with the horror of the
neocons and their Oriental regiment (Fouad Ajami, Hirsi Ali, et. al.),
capping the terror that this country has brought against the word,
in Afghanistan and Iraq in particular. When today young, innocent,
hopeful, and idealist Americans cry out for "change" they mean change
from this succession of catastrophe — and they have invested that
hope in Barack Obama — for both John McCain on the Republican side
and Hillary Clinton on the Democratic side have a sustained record
of warmongering abroad and cut-throat, opportunistic self-promotion
in domestic politics. Barack Obama has thus captured the imagination
of a nation — its youth and idealists in particular — in dire,
desperate, and earnest need for change.
But will Barack Obama be able to deliver half the hope he has ignited
in his fellow-Americans?
TO BE SURE, on many issues, both domestic and foreign, Congressman
Denis Kucinich of Ohio and after him former Senator John Edwards
of North Carolina (both Democratic contenders for presidency) are
far superior and progressive in their politics than both Senators
Barack Obama and certainly Hillary Clinton put together — and perhaps
precisely for that reason they were both ousted from the race earlier
in the primaries, Kucinich earlier than Edwards. To be even more
precise, despite the fact that along with many other Democratic
senators, Senator Barack Obama voted against authorising President
Bush to go to war in Iraq, he has voted with Republicans to increase
the size and presence of the US military there (in the so-called
"Surge" program); he has voted yes to reauthorise the undemocratic
USA Patriot Act that endangers Americans’ civil liberties; and has
voted in favor of a Republican bill to authorise the construction of
a 700-mile fence on the border with Mexico.
Barack Obama’s record becomes particularly troublesome when we turn to
the acid test of American foreign policy, namely the bugbear of its
unconditional support for the Jewish apartheid state of Israel. Here
he has hit the rock bottom limit of his courage and imagination, and
no one has understood Obama’s problem in this respect better than
Rabbi Michael Lerner, a progressive public intellectual, political
activist, and editor of Tikkun Magazine. In his essay "Obama’s
Jewish Problem," Rabbi Michael Lerner has poignantly observed: "A
new generation of young Jews no longer blindly adopts the strategy
of domination or salutes to the policies of the current government
of Israel. It is these Jews who are the future, but they do not yet
control the institutions of Jewish life . . . Obama’s problem is that
his spiritual progressive worldview is in conflict with the demands
of the older generation of Jews who control the Jewish institutions
and define what it is to be pro-Jewish, while his base consists of
many young Jews who support him precisely because he is willing to
publicly stand for the values that they hold." The problem that Rabbi
Lerner identifies goes to the heart of Senator Obama’s message and
appeal to a younger generation of Americans across all religious,
ethnic, and even political divides, and yet his political cowardice
prevents him from having the courage of his own convictions.
In an article in The Electronic Intifada (4 March 2007, "How Barack
Obama learned to love Israel"), Ali Abunimah, a leading Palestinian
activist in Chicago, has fully exposed the manner in which the
Illinois Senator gradually dovetailed his (perfectly legitimate)
ambition for the White House with a systematic distancing of himself
from the Palestinian cause and a simultaneous catering to the Zionist
Lobby in the United States. "Israel," Senator Obama has assured his
AIPAC audience in a speech on 3 March 2007, is "our strongest ally in
the region and its only established democracy. . . We must preserve
our total commitment to our unique defense relationship with Israel
by fully funding military assistance and continuing work on the Arrow
and related missile defense programs."
The actual speech he delivered in March 2007 in front of AIPAC, from
which Ali Abunimah excerpts certain key passages, gets worse, much
worse, all culminating in his January 2008 letter to the US Ambassador
to the United Nations, Zalmay Khalilzad — soon after hundreds of
thousands of Palestinians broke out of the Gaza concentration camp and
flooded into Egypt in search of food and other basic necessities. "Dear
Ambassador Khalilzad," wrote Barack Obama, "I understand that today
the UN Security Council met regarding the situation in Gaza, and that
a resolution or statement could be forthcoming from the Council in
short order. I urge you to ensure that the Security Council issue no
statement and pass no resolution on this matter that does not fully
condemn the rocket assault Hamas has been conducting on civilians in
southern Israel."
In his recent debate with Senator Clinton at the Kodak Theater in Los
Angeles, just before the Super Tuesday primaries, and while referring
to Senator McCain, Senator Obama quipped, "Somewhere along the line
the Straight Talk Express lost some wheels." Precisely so: as did
Obama’s own moral standing on behalf of a new generation of hope, or
"the fierce urgency of now," as he likes to quote Rev. Martin Luther
King. Precisely at the moment that his moral voice for a just cause
definitive to all other just causes on this planet was most needed,
he fell so sadly short, and the reach of his moral wings proved to
be cautiously perforated on an AIPAC line.
The record of the Zionist contingency in this particular election,
as in all others, is effectively to strangle the American political
culture anytime it wants to have a sigh of relief — and draw a line
from which no dreamer, no idealist, no visionary can ever dare to
cross. The question that Israelis, particularly the so-called Israeli
"left" ought to ask themselves is what sort of a calamity is this
colonial settlement in which they live that even at the most uplifting
moments of a nation, they throw around the weight of all the might
and money they command and cut the wings of a soaring eagle to their
own size.
NONE OF BARACK OBAMA’S fancy footwork to the AIPAC tune means that
he has fully convinced the Zionist contingency of American politics
that he is their man, that he too, just like Senator Clinton, is
their candidate.
"Israeli values are American values," Senator Hillary Clinton famously
said at the height of the Israeli bombing of innocent Lebanese
in July 2006. But that is perfectly normal for Hillary Clinton,
who just like her husband is a political creature of unsurpassed
cunning, opportunism, and self-promotion — and thus the logic of her
calculated move to New York to run for Senate when her husband’s term
as president ended. Throughout her campaign in 2000, as she moved
to New York and run for office from a state in which she had never
lived, she was rightly accused of carpet-bagging by her opponents,
a charge that has stuck to her to this day.
But things are supposed to be different about Barack Obama, the man
who has stirred unsurpassed hope for change in young and idealist
Americans. But instead, what we witness is his move to one up Senator
Clinton and ingratiate himself to AIPAC. If he could only burn that
picture that Ali Abunimah has taken and published of him sitting with
his wife, Michele Obama, at the same table with Edward and Mariam Said.
But — and there is the rub — no matter how fast Barack Obama may
spin to AIPAC’s music, it does not mean that the Zionists are happy, or
are willing to trade the sure deal — squarely bought and paid for —
Hillary Clinton for the young and idealist Obama. How could they trust,
horribile dictu, a man with a Hussein for a middle name, a Kenyan
Muslim for a father, and above all a man who speaks a progressive and
hopeful language that at least in its rhetoric promises to deliver
Americans form their epileptic seizure in which they cannot ever dream
a liberation for their ideals and aspirations without AIPAC formal
approval or else cutting their wings short where it says "Israel."
All his attempts to appease AIPAC notwithstanding, Obama remains
a suspicious character to fanatical Zionists. The same essay that
Ali Abunimah wrote in exposing Obama’s gradual distancing from
the Palestinian cause, was used by Ed Lasky in his essay, "Barack
Obama and Israel" for American Thinker (22 March 2007 — revised and
republished again on 16 January 2008) categorically to dismiss Obama
as a man for Israel. Lasky accused Obama of concealing his affiliation
with a church that is in fact "Afro-centric" in its Christianity,
accusing Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Jr., the Pastor of the Church
Obama attended, as the man who coined the term "audacity of hope"
(that defines Obama’s campaign), and also of having "a militant past."
"Moreover," Lasky points out, "Pastor Wright has beliefs that might
disturb some of Obama’s supporters. He is a believer in "liberation
theology," which makes the liberation of the oppressed a paramount
virtue." (This for Lasky is a vice.) Extending his dismissal of
liberation theology to its very founder Gustavo Gutierrez, Lasky
narrows in on "Pastor Wright for having criticised Israel and uttered
the unforgivable sin: ‘The Israelis have illegally occupied Palestinian
territories for almost 40 years now.’" (Imagine the audacity of
uttering that sentence in Chicago!) Then we hear from Lasky that
"Once this history came to light, Obama started publicly distancing
himself from his spiritual mentor, disinviting Wright from various
Obama campaign events. Wright rationalised his current persona non
grata status by stating that otherwise ‘a lot of his Jewish support
will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell.’" Lasky moves on to
expose more of Obama’s sins by lining up Ali Abunimah and Edward Said
as Palestinians whom Obama has actually met and conversed with. Lasky
is particularly incensed that Obama does not have much of a pro-Israel
legislative record. Scarce as this young Senator’s record might be on
being a pro-Israeli stooge, he has nevertheless "already compiled one
of the most liberal voting records in the Senate (even more liberal
than Ted Kennedy) and a great deal of his most fervent support has
come from the left-wing of the party, who have turned against Hillary
Clinton . . . This is precisely the wing of the Party that has been
increasingly corrupted by anti-Israel and anti-Semitic activists."
This is enough reason for Lasky to go after Obama for having, among
other things, "decidedly very soft approach on bills dealing with drug,
gang and gun control issues," for daring to make a sleight comment
about Israel’s apartheid wall, for having the audacity to talk about
"the desperation and disorder of the powerless . . . of children on
the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi," which to Lasky translates to
"appeasement, stated clearly and succinctly." The list of Lasky’s
concerns about Obama goes on and on and includes the support of the
former President Jimmy Carter for him. As for his speech in front of
AIPAC, Lasky believes this speech "left many nonplussed. This speech
was, in part, prompted by his knowledge that a panel of experts
in Israel considers him to be the candidate that would support the
state of Israel the least." The same speech that caused anger and
frustration in Ali Abunimah left Lasky with much to be desired, and
not sufficient at all. After a prolonged list of litany against Obama,
Lasky finally concludes, "Barack Obama does have a record to run on
and it is a record that should be of concern to those who support
America’s relationship with Israel."
IT IS OF COURSE ultimately unfair to laser-beam on Senator Obama
a calamity that has long plagued American political culture. Over
the last half a century, American foreign policy is held hostage (as
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have extensively demonstrated) to
a single-minded commitment to the Jewish apartheid state, which has
in turn degenerated its own political culture to that of Christian
imperialism. The US is narratively trapped inside a single-minded
commitment to the Jewish state, which now amounts to the worst common
denominator of American political culture, and as such it will pull
down any sign of hope that may aspire to transform this catastrophe
to become the promise that it has always been — a beacon of hope for
the world. But it is equally false to blame the Israeli lobby for the
calamity of American imperialism around the globe, a reality entirely
sui generis and predicated on the very nature of this economic and
military monstrosity.
I for one have absolutely no doubt that Obama has indeed awakened
a dead soul in American political culture, a yearning, a wish,
a vision perhaps always embedded in the American dream — to be a
nation among others, to wed the fate of its own poor, sick, homeless,
and forsaken to that of others around the world. What sort of decency
is it, what sort of historical record is it, for a country, a people,
a nation, like what they call "Israel" to abort that dream at its
very inception and use all its power and wherewithal not to allow it
to imagine beyond the particular demands of a ghastly apartheid state.
Obama has had to renounce his connections not just with the Palestinian
cause but also even to the pastor of a church he faithfully attended
because he is a liberation theologian. How many of his wings will
the Illinois Senator have to cut short before he can fly, and if
he ever gets actually to fly how far can he soar, how deep will he
fall? The thing that he has failed to understand is that he can never
out-Hillary in appealing to, satisfying, and securing the endorsement
of the pro-Israeli lobby. Every corner that he comes to cross and sell
a bigger part of his soul to AIPAC, Hillary Clinton has already been
there and done that. If he only had the courage of his convictions,
if he only believed in the spectacular hope that he has generated in
millions of young and idealist Americans — including (and in fact
particularly) young and idealist Jewish Americans.
The problem with Barack Obama is thus the limit of his imagination,
for the hope he has managed to generate in young and progressive
Americans of all colours and creeds has now far surpassed his
own limited courage. He has come up through the ranks and moved
from an unknown local politician in Chicago to a national figure
of open-ended possibilities. When he groomed himself to look like
Malcolm X, consciously modulated the cadence of his voice to that of
Martin Luther King, and actively sought the public endorsement of the
Kennedys, he had no idea what hidden hopes, what repressed aspirations
he would awaken among young and idealist Americans. If he does not
listen carefully to the echo of the voice he has unleashed in this
valley, he would be yet another bitter disappointment, even if (or
particularly if) he gets to be the next President of the United States.
Today the absolutely weakest link in the chain of global injustice
that tests the mettle of humanity at large, is the plight of millions
of Palestinians suffering the indignity of exile from their historic
homeland, forsaken in refugee camps and brutalised in the West Bank
and Gaza Strip.
That Barack Obama’s message to these suffering millions is to send
more missiles to the apartheid state of Israel is an obscenity that
mocks every time he stands up and puts forward his messages of hope
and change.
The critical question of course at this conjuncture is that if we
coloured and marginal folks — we Blacks, Asians, Latinos, Arabs,
Muslims and all the most recent (legal and illegal) immigrants to
this land — will have the courage and the imagination that Barack
Obama lacks. Will we cross a fence and extend a hand to a man who is
after all one of us, however he may think it politically expedient
to pick and chose one thing or another from the baggage he and we
have brought along across the borders?
Two of my three children (born and bred here in the United States)
have now reached the age when they can vote. They are both committed
Obama fans and voted for him in the New York primaries on Super
Tuesday. At this point, I am afraid the votes of my two children are
all I can offer Brother Barack.
Come next November, I too may leave my own darkest convictions behind
and vote with the bright hope of my children.
Sometimes I think that the worst thing about the United States is
that there is always hope for it.
* The writer is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and
Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York.