Trouble Right Here in River City!

Watching the progglesphere discover that their folk heroes are power-mad little machiavels willing to say any goddamn thing--the going phrase is "embrace GOP talking points," I believe--in order to make themselves seem "electable," or whatever, is not without its joys. "Obama is not a progressive," cries a commenter at the linked Ezra Klein post above, to which the natural rejoinder is that inimitable 1980s sitcomism: No shit, Sherlock. Obama is the precise analogue to Mitt Romney. It is a subtle and enduring sort of race-guilt among white liberals that makes them assume Obama, being a magical negro, sups at the table of social democracy. Never trust someone whose favorite biographical trope is to play up the dissipation of his youth as counterpoint to his virtuous present. I fear an Obama presidency more than any other, including any conceivable administration of Candidate-for-Life Benito Giuliani. When Obama speaks, he gets the same glassy-eyed, messianic look as our current dauphin, and it is quite clear that he's been reading his own press releases about "change" and "transformation" and a new kind of this and a bold kind of that.

So much as electoral tactics are relevant, it seems perfectly clear why Obama has positioned himself as a relative conservative on issues like health-care and social security. He's not going to be another Jesse Jackson. The Democratic establishment still looks in unfettered horror at that brief moment when a droopy-eyed "unelectable" black dude almost took their nomination, and they ain't about to let that happen again. There is, after all, an imperium to maintain. Obama has chosen to craft himself as a kind of MLK--not as King actually was, but as he's come to be remembered, which is as a sainted, nonpartisan, ecumenical martyr dreaming of a "color-blind" society. The real King was a radical socialist and an incipient revolutionary. Obama is a politician.

Fortunately or unfortunately, electoral politics don't matter. The Democrats just traded more than $70 billion in war spending plus countless lives and the contuing destruction of and meddling in Iraq and Afghanistan for $11 billion in "domestic spending." Way to go, progressives.