Team Obama is a slap in the face to his own base

There is precious little among the President-elect’s choices to reward the progressives who worked their hearts out to put him in office

FIRST POSTED JANUARY 9, 2009

As far the progressive Obama base is concerned, the President-elect's appointments have offered one bitter pill after another, starting with Rahm Emanuel (the only man in the Illinois Congressional delegation to vote Yes to the war on Iraq), moving on to Hillary Clinton (another Yes on the war), defence secretary Robert Gates (who stays on from the Bush era) and the whole economic team.

There was a brief ray of hope when Larry Summers didn't return to Treasury. Then he bobbed up as director of Obama's economic recovery team, formally known as the National Economic Council, based in the White House.

What is Obama's progressive base getting by way of reward? The pickings are very slim. The whole raison d'etre of Obama's campaign in the primary phase – the period when the progressive constituency has to be allured - was to turn the page not only on Bush time but on Clinton time, to move on.

So... here comes Hillary Clinton, given the extra privilege of staffing the lower positions at State with her own people; here come Clinton's economic team of Summers and Robert Rubin (informal

Ken Salazar, who was handed Interior, is a born heel-clicker to the Money Power, always hatching deals with the coal industry and big ranching interests

advisor) plus Summers's former deputy Timothy Geithner, now installed as Treasury secretary.

Nowhere has business-as-usual been more glaringly given the green light than at the Department of Defence. Anyone looking for change in America's political economy has to take on the Pentagon, a vast and steadily widening crater of corruption and Augean waste.

Obama has simply kept on Gates, who first made his name faking intelligence estimates at the CIA in Bush Snr's day. Nominated as Gates's number two, presumptively as Gates's successor, is William Lynn.

Appointed by Clinton as a Pentagon reformer in 1998, Lynn - in the words of famed Pentagon employee/assailant Chuck Spinney - "managed to construct a logically inconsistent and morally indefensible strategy to protect the unworkable status quo".

Dashed by the disasters at State and Treasury, the progressives look for comfort to the Departments of Agriculture and Interior, which supervise vast slabs of the homeland.

At Ag they get the former governor of Iowa, Tom Vilsack, who opposed Obama in the primaries and who is best known as being a fanatic lobbyist for genetically engineered biocrops and ethanol. He's Monsanto's pin-up boy and comes factory-guaranteed as a will-do guy for the agro-chemical complex.

For a moment hope glowed from the transition team's office in Chicago as the panel listened attentively to those lobbying for Raul Grijalva for Interior. Grijalva is a US rep from Arizona who is first-rate and has done more than anyone in recent years to root out scandal in Bush's scandal-sodden sojourn as custodian of the nation's forests, energy reserves and public waters.

In the end, however, Interior went to Colorado's senior senator, Ken Salazar. He's a born heel-clicker to the Money Power, always hatching deals with the coal industry and big ranching interests.

Are there any encouraging Obama picks? Certainly California congresswoman Hilda Solis is a promising pick as Labour Secretary. Solis is the daughter of poor Latin American immigrants; her father, a Mexican, was a shop steward with the International

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Did anyone really expect anything else, i find it amusing that all the press who feted Obama as the second coming are finally seeing that all he really is. is a politician. He's been tied up in the establishment for years, did anyone really think the he got as far as he has by being some kind of different maverick politician.

Posted by Gary O'Brien at 9:30am on January 9, 2009

Wholly predictable indeed. Obama will be as big a disappointment in the US as Blair was in the UK. Just wait for the sleaze and corruption to be seen.

Posted by Alan Dawes at 11:18am on January 9, 2009

People that are insecure, act in this way.

Posted by Bob Visser at 11:55am on January 9, 2009

Huge numbers voted Democrat last year because they wanted their country back. The name of that country is America. She is the country that long led the world in protecting high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs both against the exportation of that labour to un-unionised, child-exploiting sweatshops, and against the importation of those sweatshops themselves. And she is the country that could until very recently say that she led the world in that she "did not seek for monsters to destroy". For she is the country of big municipal government, of strong unions whose every red cent in political donations buys something specific, of very high levels of co-operative membership, of housing co-operatives even for the upper middle classes, of small farmers who own their own land, and of the pioneering of Keynesianism in practice. At the same time, those same voters made it clear at exactly the same polls that (in Florida and California) they wanted back the country where marriage only ever means one man and one woman, that (in Colorado) they wanted back the country that does not permit legal discrimination against working-class white men, and (in Missouri and Ohio) that they wanted to preserve the country where gambling is not deregulated. The name of that country is America, too. The betrayal of those voters by Obama where appointments are concerned has already cost the Democrats a Senate seat in Georgia, and thus a filibuster-proof Senate majority. Midterm meltdown awaits.

Posted by David Lindsay at 2:44pm on January 9, 2009

Can we give this president a chance? He has to be President for all Americans, not just for us "progressives" (and yes, I am one of you). Otherwise change will not happen and we will all be left with a lot to complain about, as usual. That is the easy way, the righteous way. Let's help with the hard work, healing America and moving forward together.

Posted by MHF at 4:41pm on January 9, 2009

The only politician who promised change, with definite policies to back those changes was Dr Ron Paul. Obama and McCain - same dog, different collar.

Posted by Alan Pond at 6:01pm on January 9, 2009

I would consider myself a grassroots Obama supporter, but I am mystified as to why people, who probably never even considered voting for him, should be so cynical about his appointments. Do we really expect him to fill government positions in this unprecedented critical time in America's history with people who have no idea how things work in Washington? Surely you need to know this before you could even think of effecting change. Give the fellow a chance, for God's sake. As to the post who talked about sleaze and corruption sounds as if he would have been happier with Mc Cain and Palin. What will disappoint me badly would be to see Obama continue the same one sided, biased, pro Israel view of previous administrations in the Palestinian Israeli conflict. Yolande M. Agble Queens NY

Posted by Yolande Agble at 6:53am on January 11, 2009

Mr. Cockburn, is his cogent yet coherent style has yet again named the poison of political power. When a person enters such a high office as this, this person has a grave and unenviable penchant for forgetting where the votes came from to enter this esteemed office. Mr. Obama, has proven this maxim true yet again. We the progressive left, are now faced with more of the same as far as governance goes. We are not rewarded for the hard work and sweat that we put into the election of a seemingly untried individual. We the people, must now demand that the policies and procedures that come about in the next four years, happen in a way that will further the progressive movement in the US. Policies must change if the US of A is to be regarded at all in any serious way as meeting the challenges that face our world in the near term. We cannot wait for the administration to figure out that they are not responsive to the people, we must take to the streets and make our voices heard in as loud and clear a voice as possible. We are at the crossroads when it comes to the governance of the US of A. We can no longer rest on our laurels, winning the Second World War, cannot sustain this country any longer, our policies have heightened the tensions between the Western World and the Middle East. We can no longer blindly capitulate to the American-Israeli-Political Action Committee. There must be changes in how our nation relates to the Islamic World and its adherents. This is especially glaring in the current Israeli/Palestinian conflict, where American policy has brought about the slaughter of innocnent men, women and children without impunity and with no modicum of sensiblility or guilt on the part of either America or the Israelis. Furthermore we can no longer be assured that we are safe, in our homes, businesses and jobs, because of the economic policies of the Bush 43 administration. Much more can be said, but suffice it to say, America can no longer stand business as usual and survive another 4 years.

Posted by nrobi at 2:36pm on January 12, 2009

The previous comments highlight exactly why people are cynical, appointing people who know how things work in Washington will ensure that nothing changes. We have the same in Westminster the main aim of insiders is to get re-elected or their careers are over.

Posted by Gary O'Brien at 2:41pm on January 12, 2009