What's realty going on is that Obama is moving further right from a position that was already firmly lodged in the "realistic" and "pragmatic" center. He never would been in a position to make this move if he had not showed his centrist safety and "dollar value" to corporate, financial, and military approval authorities years ago [10].
Meanwhile, the supposed centrist John McCain is pushing further to the dangerous and extremist starboard side. He is moving from center-right to hard-right. He has abandoned his onetime opposition to King George II's hyper-plutocratic tax cuts and to offshore oil drilling. Also consistent with his mission of pinning down his party's far-right base, he has dropped his previous "liberal" approach to "illegal immigration
Meanwhile, we know that the actual American citizenry - the purportedly self-governing masters of the United States' allegedly export-worthy "democracy" - stands well to the social-democratic and anti-imperial left of both parties on numerous key policy issues foreign and domestic [11]. The near policy and political irrelevance of this progressive U.S. majority opinion is neither new nor surprising. It is standard and sad American political reality given the harsh imbalance between the extreme power of the Few and the marginalization of the Many that is written into the structure and practices of the United States' corporate-managed pseudo-democracy [12]. In a time when the long proto-fascistic nightmare of King Dubya and Darth Cheney would seem to have sparked progressive fires, the supposedly "left" Obama phenomenon has proved remarkably useful to the nation's corporate and imperial overlords [13]. Obama's early seeming opposition (as a state senator) to the Iraq War, his skin color, his comparative youth and charisma, and his sheer novelty have helped him seem much more "liberal" and "progressive" than he really he is [14]. Vast "progressive" swaths of the American electorate have induced to fall for the great illusion, focusing on the carefully crafted mass-marketed image more than the substance of the candidate and the authoritarian candidate-selection process and political culture that have produced him.
Obama is the likely winner in November. As his ascendancy to imperial power approaches, it is urgent that progressively inclined U.S. citizens peel off the layers of seductive deception to see him and the Democrats for what they really are - partners in corporate and imperial domination and Superpower authoritarianism - and not as what they wish them to be.
My forthcoming "Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics" (order at
www.paradigmpublishers.com/Books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=186987 )
) is not an effort to help elect the arch-authoritarian messianic militarist John McCain. It is designed to help progressive and other citizens distinguish myth from reality in understanding the meaning of Obama. Besides giving a deep historical interpretation of Obama's political and ideological origins and essence, it seeks to help position activists and citizens to respond positively and productively to the Obama phenomenon in coming months and years.
NOTES
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