Counterpunch | Garrow’s mammoth biography is a tour de force when it comes
to personal critique, professional appraisal, and epic research and
documentation. His mastery of the smallest details in Obama’s life and
career and his ability to place those facts within a narrative that
keeps the reader’s attention (no small feat at 1078 pages!) is
remarkable. Rising Star falls short, however, on ideological
appraisal. In early 1996, the brilliant left Black political scientist
Adolph Reed, Jr. captured the stark moral and political limits of what
would become the state and then national Obama phenomenon and indeed the
Obama presidency. Writing of an unnamed Obama, Reed observed that:
“In Chicago…we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program – the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance.”
Garrow very incompletely quotes Reed’s reflection only to dismiss it
as “an academic’s way of calling Barack an Uncle Tom.” That is an
unfortunate judgement. Reed’s assessment was richly born-out by Obama’s
subsequent political career. Like his politcio-ideological
soul-brothers Bill Clinton and Tony Blair (and perhaps now Emmanuel
Macron), Obama’s public life has been a wretched monument to the dark
power of the neoliberal corporate-financial and imperial agendas behind
the progressive pretense of façade of telegenic and silver-tongued
professional class politicos.
Reed’s prescient verdict more than 12 years before Obama became
president brings more insight to the Obama tragedy than Jager’s
reflection five years into Obama’s presidency. Obama’s nauseating taste
for supposedly (and deceptively) non-ideological “get things done”
“pragmatism,” “compromise,” and “playing it safe” – for “accepting the
world as it is instead of trying to change it” (Jager) – was not simply
or merely a personality quirk or psychological flaw. It was also and far
more significantly a longstanding way for “liberal” Democratic
presidents and other politicos to appear “tough-minded” and stoutly
determined to “getting things done” while they subordinate the
fake-populist and progressive-sounding values they mouth to get elected
to the harsh “deep state” facts of U.S. ruling class, imperial, and
“national security” power. A “pragmatic,” supposedly non-ideological
concern for policy effectiveness – “what can be accomplished in the real
world” – has long given “liberal” presidents a manly way to justify
governing in accord with the wishes of the nation’s ruling class and
power elite.
