Now that Obama's election is looking more likely, my thoughts are moving toward the question whether, in fact, he can make a difference. The strong support for Hillary among Democrats is very potent evidence that almost half of rank and file Democrats either don't have a clue how power works in this country, or if they do, that they are ok with it. Clearly the Clintons don't offer the possibility of a significant shift away from the policies of the militarist power elite that have dominated this country since at least the time of Reagan.
I think Obama does. He has a clue and I don't think he's ok with it, but that doesn't mean when he's president he can do anything about it. Will he have the power base to reverse the policies of the country's power elite over the last thirty years? "Change" is his motto, but real change does not happen top down; it has to have a bottom up thrust, and quite frankly, while most Americans are fed up with the Republicans, there isn't a very potent broad-based, well organized, focussed and well-funded opposition to the agenda of the power elite that dominates our political class that I'm aware of. It certainly is not the agenda of the Democratic Party. So where does Obama's power to change anything come from?
We know the the Republicans are absolutely ridiculous when it comes to their alignment with the interests of the country's militarist wealth and power elites, but we also know that the Democrats as a whole, and certainly the one's in elective office, do not represent a potent opposition, either in their thinking or in their will to stand up against the forces in this country that are destroying it. While a decent guy like Sherrod Brown has since repented of his vote for the Military Commissions Act, the very fact that he voted for it to begin with tells us how things work. It's flabbergasting. When even the good guys vote for bills like that, what does it say about our process? Do these people have even the remotest clue of what is going on? If these people are so easily manipulated, what hope is there for the rest of the electorate to understand what is happening?
So as I have written here, Obama's emergence has given me reason to feel an optimism even a year ago I would have thought unimaginable. It shows that the system is not so tight as to prevent such a thing, which is a very encouraging sign. But that does not mean I am naive about what I think he can realistically accomplish. Obama has enormous upside potential, but that potential will not be realized unless he develops a power base that will enable him effectively to confront the already enormously powerful entrenched interests that will fight him tooth and nail.
The power he needs must derive from broad, committed support in the electorate, and while he might be able to get that over an eight-year period, he certainly doesn't have it now, and if elected, it will be very tough going in the beginning. It's one thing for Americans to feel disaffection with the current administration; it's quite another thing them to have the will to do something to reverse the enormity of what it has effected in the last eight years. If there is a will to do it, I'm not seeing it as very broad based, at least not yet.
Americans in general are unsophisticated about how power works. In large part this is because they live in a world where their political imaginations are shaped by discourse in the MSM--even the so-called liberal MSM like the New York Times, NBC, or even NPR/PBS. Tom Friedman or Charlie 'the-surge-is-working' Rose are the paradigm. The latter a decent, seemingly open-minded, better-than-Larry-King, but frequently out of-his-depth guy who is so entrenched among the nation's power elite he has no real critical perspective. Moyers is more incisive.
Power defines reality, certainly in the MSM, and so the MSM has a conscious/unconscious vested interest in making our politics seem as though it's a personality contest rather than a conflict of interests. The MSM has its own interests, and certainly among them is to disguise how those interests are aligned with those of the militarist power elite. For that reason it has an interest in diverting the public's attention away from how the country really works. And as long as the country stays so diverted, the power arrangements as they currently exist go unchallenged no matter who's in office.