Spraying Roundup on Hope

No one told us it would be boring, but it is. We're talking here about the Obama presidency. Having an adulterer and a moron at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. for eight years apiece, plus Dick Cheney down the corridor, spoiled us. Which side of Bill's head did Hillary hit with the lamp? Would George fight his way to the end of the sentence in his daily battles with the English language?

These days, tranquility reigns — or seems to — in the Obamas' private quarters. Senior White House staffers remain loyal and tight-lipped. Small wonder Jay Leno's nightly show is sagging. There was nothing to make jokes about, at least until Sarah Palin went on her book tour.

Carter was another Democratic president who didn't drink or fornicate or steal. But he had Brother Billy and the colorful Bert Lance as his director of OMB, already mired in Southern Gothic scandal by the middle of Carter's first year in office. He had the late Hamilton Jordan as his chief of staff, getting drunk at state dinners and making lewd verbal overtures to the wife of the Egyptian ambassador. Obama's chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, may be foul-mouthed, but thus far, he's run a ship offering about as much drama as the upper executive tier of an insurance company in Ames, Iowa.

Politics are getting duller by the day, too, as the idealists watch their expectations trickling all too swiftly through the hourglass. What's left? Enforcing compulsory purchase of private health coverage — the dream "reform" of those insurance executives in Ames — and savaging the Medicare Advantage plans of low-income seniors. (See Mary Lynn Cramer's savage exposes of the later outrage on the CounterPunch site.) Obama's dipped below 50 percent in public approval, which — so the pollsters tell us — is nothing particularly unusual for a new president at this stage of the game. What's going to stop him sliding down more? Next week, he's scheduled to announce that he's ordering 34,000 more troops to head for Afghanistan.

I heard someone on NPR say this was Obama's compromise between Gen. Stan McChrystal's original demand for 50,000 troops and those who have been saying nix further deployments and bring all the troops home. In other words, we have a typical Obama compromise, making gestures designed to please everybody, but in the end going along with Business as Usual. Like his one on Guantanamo. Pledge to close it down, then drag your feet, continue secret renditions of captives to other prisons like Bagram and finally engineer the resignation of Gregory Craig, the White House counsel who was trying to close Guantanamo, now open until every last prisoner can be sent to replications of Guantanamo somewhere else.

Such decisions are coming thick and fast. Right before Thanksgiving came news that the Obama administration has decided not to sign an international convention banning land mines, which now has support from more than 150 countries.

Obama's blend of opportunism draped in high-minded verbiage is beginning to rile some liberals — the same way Jimmy Carter's similar mix did 30 years ago. The New York Times' Maureen Dowd has turned in two recent acrid columns on the president in the last month. Having spent months in the vanguard of the Democrats' favorite blood sport, flaying Sarah Palin, Dowd suddenly declared that Palin at least speaks from the heart and that Obama should take some lessons from the former governor of Alaska in how to connect with ordinary people at the level of genuine emotional conviction.

Then this week, Dowd wrote an even sharper column charging Obama with callous lack of loyalty to political supporters such as Greg Craig, who jumped ship from the Clinton campaign last year and did Obama great service. Dowd also scored Obama's signal lack of gratitude to Caroline Kennedy, whose endorsement of Obama last year gave him a powerful lift at a crucial stage in the race.

So yes, there's discontent and disillusion on the liberal and progressive side, but will this translate into political difficulties for Obama? Probably not. Obama can blow a hundred campaign pledges, douse with Roundup the crop of hopes he planted last year, and still the liberal sector will stay true and delude themselves that hope — though dormant — still lives. Where else are the liberals to go? African-Americans will never desert him in significant numbers. And remember, the progressive crowd stuck with Clinton through the gutting of welfare, the effective death penalty act, an appalling immigration bill and a hundred other presumptive deathblows.

Like Clinton, Obama is unconcerned by the anguish to his left. His target will be the independents who put him in the White House and who deserted him in the November elections in states like Virginia. Independents, so the pollsters claim, are worried by the deficit. They think Obama's efforts to rekindle the economy and create jobs have been far too prodigal. They want austerity budgets, even as the liberals shout for a new stimulus bill, as the jobless total rises. Obama is already triangulating, just as Clinton did. The prospect is cheerless — looking more and more like the bland, respectable corporate rule of the Eisenhower years.

Alexander Cockburn is co-editor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. He is also co-author of the new book "Dime's Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of Two Evils," available through www.counterpunch.com. To find out more about Alexander Cockburn and read features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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