In doing research for this article, I confess that I was taken with the story of Barack Obama, a remarkable story of multiculturalism in the United States, its contradictions, and its triumphs.
It is hard to separate who Barack Obama is from what he stands for. He was born and lived the bulk of his formative years in Hawaii. His father was a Kenyan, and his mother a Caucasian women who was born in Kansas. His mother and father met in Hawaii where her family had moved in college. Although his father, (who died in 1982 in an auto accident) as Barack (he was called “Barry” as a kid) was to write, was raised as a Muslim, he was a “confirmed atheist.” Religion played only a small part in Obama’s life, until much later, when he would be baptized in the Trinity United Church of Christ in the 1980s.
After his parents divorced, Obama’s mother married an Indonesian man, also a foreign student in Hawaii, and Obama spent four years in school, ages six to ten, in Indonesia in the late 1960s.
This was after the 1965 mass killings directed against Indonesian Communist party members, supporters, and members of the Chinese minority, although there is nothing from what I have read to link Obama’s family to any of that larger political context.
Right-wing hate mongers have asserted that Obama was “educated” in fundamentalist Muslim schools in this period and is a sort of brainwashed Muslim version of the Manchurian candidate. There is as much truth in these assertions as their predecessors claims in the 1930s that Franklin Roosevelt was a Jew whose real name was Rosenfeld.
On the question of names, Obama’s middle name is Hussein, which the same right-wing hate mongers are using to put forward the same conspiracy theory. This has as much truth as someone from the Clinton campaign suggesting that Obama is a secret Goldwater Republican because his family and friends called him Barry in his youth. Barack, as he once told Jewish voters in Chicago, is an East African word of Hebrew origins, which means “blessing” in Hebrew, although the right has not yet suggested that he is secretly Jewish.
Obama returned to Hawaii to live with his grandparents and had, by his own candid admission, a difficult adolescence. Although he lived in a state where Americans of European and Asian extraction lived in large numbers, he questioned his own identity and what color meant to him.
He drank, smoked marijuana, even experimented with cocaine. If he is the Democratic nominee, we can expect the Republicans to launch their holier than thou attacks on him for that, but his frankness deserves to be contrasted with another Democratic presidential aspirant, who admitted famously on MTV in 1992 that he did smoke marijuana, but never inhaled.
Barack Obama did through his individual struggles and social interactions transform himself into a vital and productive human being. In college he went first to Occidental College in Los Angeles, and then transferred to Columbia University in New York.
After graduating in 1983, he went to Chicago where he became a community organizer and director of Communities Development Project, working with working-class people in the Altgeld Gardens public housing development (named after Illinois progressive governor, John Peter Altgeld), and low-income people in Chicago’s Roseland community. Obama then attended Harvard Law School in 1988, graduating Magna Cum Laude in 1991 and become the first Black president of Harvard Law School’s prestigious Law Review in its history.
With his distinguished record from Columbia and Harvard, two of the most prestigious schools in the US, Obama could have easily embarked on a career in law that would have assured him wealth and privilege. Instead, he went back to Chicago, becoming politically active in voter registration campaigns, joined a law firm which represented grassroots community organizations, and advanced civil rights cases rather than representing law corporations against those organizations and defendants in civil rights cases. He also lectured at the Chicago School of Law from 1993 to his election to the US Senate in 2004.
Obama won a seat in the Illinois State Senate in 1996, representing the South Side Hyde Park district, which includes both the elite University of Chicago and a large low income African American community. As a state legislator, he distinguished himself in advancing pro-working class social legislation, increasing state subsidies for child care and health care, and tax benefits for low income workers.
He also played a significant role in advancing civil rights and civil liberties legislation, serving as the leading sponsor of legislation which required the videotaping of police interrogations in homicide cases and anti-racial profiling legislation, which required police to state in their reports the “race” of all drivers they stopped.
As an Illinois State Senator, Barack Obama was an early and active opponent of the Bush invasion of Iraq, unlike most candidates of both parties. On October 2, 2002, when Congress passed a joint resolution authorizing Bush to use military force (a resolution that both John McCain and Hillary Clinton endorsed), Obama addressed an anti-war rally in Chicago’s Federal Plaza and said with prophetic eloquence: “I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East and encourage the worst, not the best, of the Arab world and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda. I’m not opposed to all wars. I’m opposed to dumb wars.” Obama continued to actively oppose the war, speaking to a St. Patrick’s Day rally in Chicago’s Daley Plaza, calling upon activists to oppose war on the day in 2003 that Bush issued his final ultimatum to Hussein before the invasion.
Since his election as Senator in 2004, he has advocated a phased withdrawal from Iraq and diplomatic overtures to Syria and Iran to achieve regional peace. While he has made it clear that the US and the international community should use economic sanctions to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, he has de-emphasized the use of military force. He has also in his four years in the Senate been a leader in activities to control nuclear weapons and achieve nuclear disarmament.
Although the Clinton campaign and some on the left are going to great lengths to disparage Senator Obama’s progressive credentials, it is important to note that he not only has them, but has backed them up with analysis, which is more than can be said for most politicians who “vote right” because they are expected to and developed policies as commercials for themselves.
In April 2005, for example, he defended Social Security and other New Deal derived programs in an address to the National Press Club and condemned Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security as Social Darwinism. It was an important analysis because when people fail to recognize contemporary expressions of discredited and destructive thought patterns of the past, those patterns can become dominant again.
While Clinton is currently condemning Obama’s health care proposals as not universal, Obama is on record as stating that before the end of the next president’s first term, “we should have universal health care in this country.” (Both Clinton's and Obama's universal health care plans have significant flaws, but one is not, in my opinion significantly better than the other.) Obama has also supported and has in his campaign committed himself to specific plans to fund early childhood education, expanded educational opportunities for working class and non-traditional students along with expanded education programs for math and science.
His has also taken a strong position on the environment, stating that “businesses don’t own the skies. The public owns the skies.” And he has proposed innovative policies to curb carbon emissions and a ten-year program to develop alternative energy sources. Obama’s speeches are often general but he has specific policies and good ones.
While Obama has called for a “tax cut for the middle class,” as Democratic politicians since Bill Clinton have routinely, he has once more backed this up with analysis. He has said “we are taxing income from work at nearly twice the level that we are taxing gains from investors….We’ve lost the balance between work and wealth.” Obama’s specific tax proposals are excellent. He has pledged to eliminate all income taxes for seniors earning less than $50,000, repeal the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, close corporate tax loopholes and sharply restrict off shore tax havens.
Obama has taken some positions which have earned him some enmity from groups associated with progressive political action, but some of this is based in misunderstanding his arguments. For example, while he is keenly interested in upgrading education, he has proposed using incentives to reward effective teachers. Some in labor view this goal with suspicion, but Obama has made it clear that he favors such incentives being negotiated as part of collective bargaining agreements, not imposed to bypass and undermine teachers unions as “merit pay” systems. He also has been a long time opponent of school voucher programs and other privatization schemes supported by the Republican Right. Although the AFT is currently supporting Clinton, given his overall progressive orientation, I as an activist in an AAUP-AFT University Teachers Union chapter trust him to defend union rights in education more than I do Clinton, whose background in both law in Arkansas and politics in New York (where she started at the top, so to speak) is much less progressive than Obama’s.
Another issue that Obama has been active on is more difficult to explain. Although he has not crusaded against illegal immigrants, he was a cosponsor with John McCain of the “Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act” and a supporter of the “Secure Fence Act” which the Bush administration sought to identify with to authorize fencing and other security enhancements for the US Mexican border. While many Republican rightists have denounced McCain for his “betrayal” on immigration, Latino voters have been encouraged to distrust Obama’s position on these issues and their votes in California particularly have been important to Clinton’s success.
Let me conclude this introductory article by saying that I was surprised, as I did my research, about how progressive Barack Obama is. The media, and as is often true, sections of the left which criticize the media but often accept their evaluations, have dealt with his campaign as the campaign of a young, dynamic African American, not looking at his history and the content of his policies. In essence, they have failed to get much beyond the color of his skin and haven't listened seriously to his call for both unity and change.
Barack Obama is not representative in terms of his personal history of African Americans or for that matter any other group. How could anyone with anti-religious Muslim father from Kenya, a “white” non religious mother from Kansas, an Indonesian stepfather (who doesn’t appear to have had much influence on him at all) and a life growing up in Hawaii be personally representative of any group. But he is a sterling representative of what the US cultural diversity can mean in its best sense; a community organizer and attorney with extensive experience as an advocate of grass roots peoples organizations and individuals defending civil rights and civil liberties. He isn’t as great on the issues as a Dennis Kucinich, for example, as Abraham Lincoln wasn’t so great on the issues in 1860 as say Charles Sumner. But in 2008, he has the capacity to lead a progressive people's coalition to victory in a way that Kucinich and his rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination did not, just as Lincoln did lead the anti-slavery coalition to victory in a way that an abolitionist Senator like Charles Sumner could not.
The Obama campaign has spoken of a “transformation” rather than a “transition” if he is elected. Based on both the content of his policies and to paraphrase Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, the “content of his character,” that is, assuming a major victory against the Republican right at all levels, a very strong possibility, if not a likelihood.
