January 2009
If I were one of the eager, late-adolescent Christopher Robbinses for “change” who formed Barack Obama’s noisiest, earliest, and most visible constituency throughout the primaries and before, I’d shout “Sold!,” hurl my OBAMA 08 button on the ground, and stamp on it. Since the election, it has become plain that by “change,” Obama understood mainly the replacement of George W. Bush by Himself in the White House. Fair is fair in war and politics. As First Lady, Hillary Clinton roamed the country urging the necessity for Americans to “accept change.” By “change,” she meant, of course, breaking the glass ceiling by sending Herself to the White House as the first lady president of the United States. Apparently, the voters heard her better than she realized, and responded by leapfrogging a half-black man into the presidency ahead of her. Beware of what you ask for…, etc. Now that Senator Obama is president-elect Obama, we are beginning to develop an idea of what, beyond his own personal glorification, the 44th president of the United States intends to achieve by “change,” and what he doesn’t, and how.
It is obvious already that, in Obama’s promised post-political future, White House operations will remain as they were in the partisan past: politicized, bureaucratized, tough, and ruthless. The choice of Rahm Emmanuel, the consummate Washington operator--every bit as much so as Karl Rove--assures it, and so does the presence on Obama’s transitional team of a number of advisers who worked formerly in the Clinton White House. So much was expectable by everyone, some million Christopher Robbineses excepted. Certainly, Senator Clinton did not conduct herself in the primaries as though she viewed Barack Obama as the first post-political presidential candidate, all sweetness, light, and detachment. Nor does she owe her nomination as the next Secretary of State to post-political thinking on the part of the president-elect.
In respect of Obama’s cabinet and upper-echelon administrative appointments, “change” appears in the form of the blurred faces one sees flash by every thirty seconds astride the brighly painted and lavishly equipped horses on a merry-go-round, starting with Hillary Clinton herself as Madame Secretary. In the brilliant whirl we can make out as well the familiar faces of Bill Gates (Secretary of Defense), Bill Richardson (Secretary of Commerce), Tom Daschle (Department of Human Services), and Lawrence Summers (National Economic Council Director); also the less familiar features of Timothy Geithner (Secretary of the Treasury), Eric Shinseki (Secretary for Veterans Affairs), Janet Napolitano (Secretary for Homeland Security), Eric Holder (Attorney General), and Peter Orszag (Office of Management and Budget). Centrists of both national parties have largely applauded these choices, and so have several neoconservative columnists, including David Brooks (soon, no doubt, to proclaim himself a neoliberal), while the progressive Left looks on, sitting on its hands with teeth clenched. Things could be worse, “conservatives” say. The devil you’ve grappled with is preferable to the demon you haven’t, and Obama’s appointments represent no more than the hoary Washington establishment, changeless save for occasional actuarial misfortune. Included among them we even find two gentlemen--Mssrs. Giethner and Summers—both of whom were prominent architects of the present financial collapse, now entrusted once again with the keys to the counting-house and the national vault. Over the past three decades or so these people have done their worst, yet the country, though tottering, still stands. What is there, really, to fear from the incoming Obama administration?
The first is thing is the continuation, broadly speaking, of the adventurist foreign policy of George W. Bush and of Bill Clinton before him. To the extent that “change” occurs in this department, it will likely come through some unexpected crisis or catastrophe, either abroad or at home. President Obama can be counted on not to remove U.S. troops from Iraq earlier than the Iraqis insist upon them leaving. And he has already pledged to broaden the war in Afghanistan. That war depends largely on what happens in Pakistan, and what happens in Pakistan is heavily influenced by what happens in India. Obama and Clinton, like every U.S. administration before them, are not going to push back against Israeli aggression in the Middle East. Obama may initiate a superficial détente with Russia, but not at the expense of Georgia and Abkazia’s interests. After several generations, American foreign policy is determined largely by its own momentum. Any “change” that occurs within it will be largely one of nuance.
In domestic policy, what we have to fear is less the Obama administration than that of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Obama, “young” and ignorant as he is in spite of his Harvard education, apparently believes that the New Deal was a rousing economic and social success. No one told him at Harvard that, by 1937, the U.S. was worse off economically than it had been in 1933. It was World War II that killed off the Depression, along with four hundred thousand American troops. Today, Barack Obama proposes to treat the economy with another dose of FDR’s medicine: more public works, more deficit spending, more nationalization, and (in the end) higher taxes on the “rich.” It is a plan to snatch catastrophe from the jaws of disaster by attempting to fight debt with more debt, pile deficit upon deficit in response to the demands of one importunate interest after another, but it is not a plan that represents “change” in any sense of the word. Indeed, it is purely reactionary politics of the modern variety.
Where Barack Obama really does intend to promote change is in the department of multiculturalism, immigration, and demographics. Obama’s White House staff, in early December, was already assuming a face: a face, the Baltimore Sun reported, that looks like his. That staff will be majority black, Hispanic, and female, including three black women with whom the president-elect was for years associated in Chicago. (A recent analysis shows that of Obama’s 28 appointed White House staff to date, 43 percent are women and 29 percent belong to some racial minority.) That, to a degree, is understandable, given the president-elect’s background. And it is true that both George Bush and Clinton appointed diverse cabinets. But Obama misses no opportunity to assert that there is no longer any such thing as a “typical-looking” American, or to suggest that a mixed-race president will reassure the Third World of America’s understanding and good intentions. He is relentless in his quiet but sly insistence that America is no longer a European-American nation. Obama plans to include a member of La Raza in his administration. And, though he has been careful since his election to avoid the issue of amnesty for 12-20 million illegal immigrants, Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, is boasting that amnesty will be a pushover in the Senate as early as the next congressional session. In amnesty, with its potential to add 50 million or more new “Americans” to the U.S. population, Obama will find his best leverage for “change”—change that will, indeed, make a difference: a difference that will obliterate, forever, historic America. There are rumors that he may put off addressing the issue until a second term, in order to deal with less explosive, and more immediately pressing, economic matters. But take up amnesty he will, sooner—or later. A man of his background and inner convictions (as indicated by his choice of wife and pastor) can do no other. The eclipse of white America would amount to a legacy, indeed.
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Chilton Williamson, Jr.