COMPROMISE & THE ART OF DECEPTION

by: brian watt | published: 12 20, 2010

After the mid-term election there was much prognostication by the punditocracy on whether Obama would “move to the middle” and adopt a more pragmatic and Clintonesque approach to the unsettled question of extending the Bush era tax rates. It would mean that Obama would have to shed his strident anti-capitalist coat of arms and instead roll up his chainmail and barter with his “enemies” (as he characterized those who stood in his way of fundamentally transforming America) namely the incoming Republican House leadership and the incoming conservative force majeure that was poised to disrupt the Senate Democrat agenda as previously pushed by Harry Reid.

Speculation melted away when Obama clearly made overtures to the new Republican leadership that he was willing to hash out a compromise and when a compromise was reached behind closed doors and away from the respective ‘harrumphs’ and grimaces by Pelosi and Reid, vast numbers ardent Obama supporters who had been giddily riding the Obama juggernaut were seemingly and suddenly left standing out in the cold winter of their discontent as that juggernaut ground to a halt.

Exactly two weeks after the mid-term election and prior to the secret negotiations with the Republican leadership, some prominent figures on the Left including Richard Trumka, Van Jones and representatives for the omniscient, god-like George Soros met in Washington D.C. for the annual meeting of the Democracy Alliance at the (cough) modest Mandarin Oriental Hotel. They hobbled into conference rooms resplendent with hors d’oeuvres and refreshments to make sense of the “Waterloo” that had befallen them. In the attempt to regroup and count the casualties of the battle, they openly raged against the Obama machine even threatening, as multi-billionaire George Soros had, to back, if necessary, a challenger for the 2012 primary who would be more demonstrably to the left of Obama and more vocally socialist – if that is indeed possible. The seeds of doubt were being sown as to whether Barack Obama was indeed the anointed one that would lead them all to the promised land of the socialist utopia. Whether they understood it to be Soros’ new world order, a pan-continental state, crony-capitalist form of socialism where, of course, people like Soros would still hold the reins of power and influence but the rest of humanity would be more equal somehow because the ill-gotten gains held by those other miserly millionaires, billionaires or folks making more than $250,000 a year (or less) would be spread around, was not worth exploring in any depth. More generally, life is unfair and unjust because of evil capitalists, Republicans, conservatives and those racist Tea Party folks who support the capitalist status quo and it still has to fundamentally change. And if Barack Obama was going to flake out on his responsibility to see the mission through then it might be a good strategy to start considering a Plan B and seek a new Marxist messiah.

In an effort to placate his disgruntled legions of followers, Obama took the occasion even after striking the tax rate extension deal with Republicans to still publicly excoriate them for being such toadies for the rich. After all, his most ardent followers certainly know how evil those rich people are. Some pundits thought this tirade to be a sign of political immaturity, that he couldn’t contain his emotions, or just plain foolish. I beg to differ. To me it was as calculated as just about anything Obama has done to keep his followers linked together for the greater goal that he has, and they have, in mind. In a life, dictated by political opportunism and expediency, Barack Obama rarely does or says anything that is not carefully calculated. Hence, the brace of teleprompters seemingly affixed to his person that he relies on even when speaking to sixth-graders at an elementary school.

The Pigford II settlement is a classic case study in political expediency. I for one, find it inconceivable that a junior Senator from Illinois, who just happened to announce months before that he was running for President, had been losing sleep over the supposed injustice of 70,000 additional black “farmers” who had been, somehow snookered out of the original Pigford settlement. But, it’s certainly no secret that Obama had to establish his credibility to deliver the goods, as it were, to the black electorate beyond Chicago and D.C. and reopening the Pigford case was a opportune way to do that and speak to it on the campaign trail particularly in the South. By being the sole sponsor of the new Pigford settlement, Obama could own Pigford II outright and use it to chip away at any following that Hillary Clinton may have had since she was the wife of a Southern governor, often touted as America’s “first black President”. And for all intents and purposes the strategy worked to shift black leadership support from Clinton over to his camp. A clever, calculated move by a clever and calculating politician.

And as much as the tirade against Republicans, that I contend, was a calculated outburst so was the tax compromise with them that purportedly caused it. Given the new math of the incoming Congress, Obama quite rightly calculates that to continue to fundamentally transform America into the socialist state he and his followers desire, he is going to have to slowly slog back and beat back against this disruptive insurrection from the right in general and the Tea Party movement in particular. But doing so will demand that he call upon his powers of rhetoric and charisma more so than he ever has before. By agreeing to the tax rate extension Obama can position himself as a champion of the put-upon middle class, essentially the constituency where he needs to harvest enough votes to maintain his hold on the Presidency. If the extensions help to bolster the beginnings of a recovery, Obama wins. If it doesn’t, Obama can claim that the compromise agreement was more about not penalizing the middle class or a noble attempt to stem the bleeding, during the recession rather than something that would necessarily boost the economy. There is enough wiggle room in the compromise for Obama to wriggle to a defensible position by the time the campaign gets into full swing.

Whether, many of his 2008 Democrat and Independent supporters who voted for Republican candidates in the midterm have left Obama for good remains to be seen. But as in love, war or politics anything can and will happen. And events beyond America’s borders (North Korea, Iran, the growing threat to Israel) could actually strengthen Obama’s 2012 hand much as the attacks on 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq temporarily strengthened George W. Bush’s hand, enough so as to give him another term in the White House.

One thing to emphasize is that even as Obama is employing a seemingly pragmatic Clintonesque maneuver, Barack Hussein Obama, even as many in the media would like him to be, is not William Jefferson Clinton. As the bizarre, impromptu press conference showed Obama is quite comfortable letting Clinton sell the message of the tax compromise. A dumb or naïve thing to do? Or calculating? Many pundits felt it made Obama look weak. But I would argue that allowing Clinton to commandeer the Presidential podium actually makes Obama appear as pragmatic as Clinton was (and still apparently is). After all, Clinton’s economic record (it must be said and hardly ever is, with the help of a Republican-controlled Congress) was something that Americans still remember fondly. Even Art Laffer, the economic architect of the Reagan recovery, looks back at Clinton’s term in office with fondness, at least from a macro-economic perspective. So, who better to place in front of the cameras than Bill Clinton – even if he did seize the moment? And perhaps the more that Obama shared the stage with Clinton the less commanding Obama would have looked. So, why not head over to the First Lady’s party? Why prolong the comparison?

If one considers Obama in the mold of other more ordinary liberal Democrats, one might consider that he has been so politically wounded by the results of the mid-terms that his prospects for continuing his Presidency are not likely.  But discounting the power of Presidential incumbency is not a good gamble, the odds are typically in favor of the (White) House, unless one is as impotent and incompetent as Jimmy Carter and Obama is not Jimmy Carter — at least not yet.

There is no question the road forward for Obama has indeed been made that much more difficult as the poll numbers indicate. But polls can also be mercurial, rising, falling and sometimes rising again. I would contend the damage is, more immediate and tactical in nature rather than long-term or strategic. In the heat of the 2008 Presidential Race, many Republicans and pundits belittled Obama’s qualifications because, after all, they said derisively, he was a ‘community organizer’. But Stanley Kurtz has done yeoman’s work delving into Obama’s socialist past and his years as a community organizer and what he learned by being one. And the lessons should not be discounted because if Obama took anything from his years as a community organizer, aside from the hardball Alinsky tactics, it was the practiced deception to mask his socialist beliefs; something that was taught to him and other community organizers in and around Chicago by instructors at the Midwest Academy. In Chicago, Barack Obama learned time and again that patience, deception and continued stealth can be rewarded.

In conventional political terms many Americans assume that achieving the Presidency is the ultimate goal for any gifted, aspiring American. This has never been Obama’s ultimate goal but the Presidency was an opportunity that presented itself to him and one that he quickly seized to the delight of many on the left who were so tired of the Clintons and some who wanted someone with stronger “progressive” credentials. Barack Obama’s ultimate goal was and still is to fundamentally transform America into a ‘socially-just’, centrally-controlled, crony-capitalist, socialist state. Fueled by the Marxist teachings of Frank Marshall Davis as an impressionable youth, he embarked from Hawaii to carrying that dream to Occidental College in Los Angeles, where John C. Drew, a fellow Marxist described him at the time as a radical Marxist-Leninist. His belief in this mission has never wavered. He has never strayed or in his own words “sold out” to anything but a fervent belief in Marxist ideology. There is no evidence or history of an embrace of capitalism, the free market, supply-side economics, or the notion that America is an exceptional nation or that the idea of America is something that could or should be emulated across the globe. Quite the contrary. Obama has artfully submerged his love for socialism, with occasional blurts that he probably regrets, because that was the strategy employed by socialist community organizers in Chicago.

“It’s tough to build a socialist mass movement without mentioning socialism. Yet that is exactly what these organizers were trying to do. The most difficult problem of all – highlighted in correspondence from Steve Max and Harry Boyte – was that ‘every social proposal that we make must be couched in terms of how it will strengthen capitalism.’ This is a telling admission. While Max and Boyte long for the day when political taboos melt and they can argue for the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act in openly socialist terms, they effectively admit to manufacturing shaky free market rationalizations for measures they support on socialist grounds. So the Midwest Academy’s confidential Committee of Correspondence proves that at least in some cases, deceptive socialist intentions really do stand behind legislation justified in the language of free enterprise.”

Stanley Kurtz, Radical-In-Chief, Barack Obama and the Untold Story of American Socialism

The mid-term election results are an annoying bump in the road to serfdom that Obama and his policy advisors have been driving America down. For Obama, personally, the days ahead will require more skill, more finesse and even occasionally compromising with the “enemy”. But if that is what it takes, then Obama is prepared to accept the challenge and is prepared to carefully tip-toe along the top of the wall between conflicting ideologies because, like other followers of Saul Alinsky, the ends justify the means. And those once upset socialists who griped and moaned at the Democracy Alliance gathering after the election are awfully quiet now. Van Jones has effectively been telling audiences that in order for change to come from the top down (Obama), change has to come from inside and outside and from the bottom up. In other words, Barack Obama needs your help.

So, if you’re looking for a more radical socialist to emerge to challenge Obama, you’re going to be looking for a long time. They’ve got their man in place.

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