From Nobel Peace Prize to Irrelevance for Obama?

As the increasingly ludicrous health “care” “debate” grinds agonizingly along – “Senate Democrats said Wednesday they were not sure exactly what was in a deal the

As the increasingly ludicrous health “care” “debate” grinds agonizingly along – “Senate Democrats said Wednesday they were not sure exactly what was in a deal the

As the increasingly ludicrous health “care” “debate” grinds agonizingly along – “Senate Democrats said Wednesday they were not sure exactly what was in a deal the majority leader said would surmount a disagreement over a proposed government-run health plan” … barf – the painful question of President Obama’s seeming irrelevance becomes harder and harder to ignore.[br]

To be sure, no one wants a return to the nightmare days of Cheney / Bush, when the moronically grinning visage of the front man dominated the mainstream media / Internet discussion / and everyday conversation.

But you have to give Rove and his cadre of right-wing post-modernists credit for understanding the importance of personal “presence” in shaping the discourse, and hence outcome, of debate on public issues.

Certainly, it speaks to Obama’s PERSONAL authenticity and genuine civility that he eschews the Bush “cult of personality” that made most years of this rapidly-closing decade a daily trial for both the US and the rest of the world.

At the same time, after a two-month stretch in the US, one has to wonder if a little MORE assertiveness on Obama’s part might help move the badly drifting American political economy in a MUCH-needed positive direction.

Part of the problem, to be sure, is the continued intimidation of mainstream media by the right-wing echo chamber, whose vigor remains undiminished despite the evident lack of even the most minimally credible – let alone constructive – alternative ideas they fail to put forth.

This, of course, is nothing new: the Fox News “Big Lie” machine and its allies have been militantly insisting since the Reagan era that the mainstream media is “liberal” – and those craven hacks are apparently still obsessed with “proving” this charge isn’t true by catering and giving credibility to every crazed “position” the Republicans espouse.[br]

And part of it is that beloved sawhorse of the – talk about irrelevant – discipline of political science: Presidential personality.

In most situations, personality is far less important than policy – except, unfortunately, in circumstances of the acute and protracted crisis in which the US has been visibly embroiled since Black September 2008.

Put bluntly, for all his evident intelligence – clearly superior to even that of the vaunted Bill Clinton – Obama just seems to lack the cohones that made Franklin Delano Roosevelt the greatest President of the 20^th century.

The nephew of a President, and scion of one of the truly aristocratic families of American society and politics, FDR knew the “people” on Wall Street extremely well, and was not only NOT afraid of them, but was intimately acquainted with the depths of their selfishness and callous disregard for their fellow citizens.

As a result, he didn’t hesitate to challenge them when he saw the disaster they had knowingly inflicted on the US, and call them out for what they were – and in the process, mobilized the vast majority of Americans, getting screwed by Wall Street greed, behind a radical re-structuring of ideology and institutions.

Now you can hardly blame Obama for the continuing racism of a society in which a tall / incredibly smart / unusually talented black man has to spend his whole life making sure white people aren’t afraid of him – which, sadly, is the fate of ANY black person in America, even to this day, but especially a charismatic man like the President.

But at a certain point, someone charged with the grave responsibility of solving the incredibly messed-up situation he faces has got to jettison the “let us reason together” rhetoric, and start, so to speak, calling a spade a spade.

Now, no one could ever say this is easy or even fair – it’s not.

But no one forced him to run for President, and CHANGE was his self-proclaimed guiding value.

So he’s in this situation, with all its perils AND opportunities, of his own volition, and it’s important not just for him, but all Americans and, indeed, the whole world, that he succeed in solving the disaster that has been brewing under every President since Reagan – someone he would do well, it seems, to stop so fulsomely praising.

And there are many elements of his personal biography – above all, his time as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago – that he can and should call upon in dealing with the current crisis.

As FDR understood, a situation like this does NOT call for the “politics-as-usual” casualness into which the President seems to have so easily, and alarmingly, fallen.

Instead, it requires a sustained mobilization of the public behind clearly pro-people – not pro-corporate middlemen – policies that can make an immediate and visible improvement in people’s daily lives.

To articulate – and then push through Congress – based on a tidal wave of popular support – programs that CAN bring about “change” for ordinary folks would not just validate the lessons and experiences of his own life but is what is manifestly called for in the current condition.

And there are plenty of recent, albeit twisted, examples – we’re not insisting on a return to the New Deal, as appropriate as that would be – about how this can be done, supplied by the “no-bid contract” gang that preceded him in the White House.

Cheney / Bush were able to push a completely unnecessary and radically de-stabilizing invasion of Iraq through an intimidated Congress by constantly beating the drums of war.

Isn’t fixing a situation of massive economic pain – touching concretely the lives of all Americans EXCEPT the Moet © – guzzling denizens of Wall and K Streets – a fight more worth making than phantom WMDs in the hands of a brutal-to-his-own-people, but nevertheless beaten down by his own insane invasion of Kuwait, dictator ???

If Cheney / Bush could do it to line the pockets of their past and future employers, why can’t Obama do it to improve quickly the lives of millions of Americans and others around the world who suffer daily, due to the conscious refusal to lend by too-big-to-fail-or-apparently-even-pressure-but-big-campaign-contributor banks ???

It’s a sign of how much the rest of the world justifiably detested the depredations of Cheney / Bush that Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize simply because he said he wasn’t them.

Isn’t it a terrible irony if – at the very moment he’s accepting that award – he is making himself irrelevant, in both the US and globally, precisely because he’s acting all too much like them ???

It doesn’t have to be this way. But if Obama wants to preserve and expand his rapidly-dwindling relevance, he has got to return to the community-organizing experience / New Deal – Great Society tradition from which his own life springs.

Because of the magnitude and depth of the political economic crisis, it really is getting close to “too late”.

Let’s just hope he can re-discover the best in his own life and the American democratic heritage to begin the process of realizing the goal he was actually elected to pursue – CHANGE.