Baiting Obama
By Steve Weissman
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Monday 21 April 2008
Bill Ayers is one of the more interesting people I've known, and I would love
to discuss how, in the heat of the Vietnam War, he went from running a Summerhill
school in Ann Arbor to bombing government buildings as a leader of the Weather
Underground. I could even explain why I thought then - and still think - that
Bill was wrong to do so.
The Rev. Jeremiah Wright is a provocative theologian, whose heated rhetoric
bears a striking similarity to some of the later speeches of another black preacher,
the Rev. Martin Luther King. We could all learn from studying King's words,
and those of the Reverend Wright, and decide for ourselves where we agree and
disagree.
White workers in the rust belt, whether bitter or offended, could similarly
teach us a great deal, especially when political scoundrels such as Dick Cheney
sing the praises of "Guns, Guts and Glory" as they send a disproportionate
number of those hard-pressed workers, their sons and their daughters to fight
and die for the freedom of Big Oil in Iraq.
But using "bittergate," Wright and Ayers to drag down Barack Obama
has nothing to do with fair-minded debate and discussion. Nor is all this a
needed vetting of Obama, as Hillary persists in saying. The current noise is
nothing less than the predictable rebirth of an American political tradition.
Call it redbaiting, witch-hunting or McCarthyism, the old slime is back and
the reasons go far beyond the demands of Gotcha journalism and electoral combat.
As anyone addicted to surfing the web knows, right wing Internet web sites,
Fox News, and right wing talk radio have for some time been smearing Obama as
a secret Marxist, Leninist elitist, secret Muslim and hater of Israel. Many
of the attacks have specifically raised the specter of Bill Ayers and the Reverend
Wright. The poison reached The New York Times on April 14, when the neo-conservative
columnist William Kristol led a stinging attack on Obama with six paragraphs
on Karl Marx and his description of religion as "the opium of the people."
The ever-smiling Kristol headlined his attack "The Mask Slips."
Within hours, Fox News put the issue to Sen. Joe Lieberman: Is Obama "a
Marxist as Bill Kristol says might be the case?"
"I must say that's a good question," said Lieberman. Quickly gathering
his frayed liberal cloak about him, Lieberman added that he would "hesitate
to say" Obama is a Marxist. "But he's got some positions that are
far to the left of me and I think mainstream America."
None of this was a secret to the Clinton campaign, which kept saying Obama
had not been vetted and would prove an easy target for those nasty old Republicans.
Hillary directed this argument to the super delegates, but I suspect she was
also trying to encourage mainstream journalists to go after Obama with the same
smears the right wing had been using. Then came ABC's prime time debate and
- no surprise - Hillary teamed up with Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos,
Bill Clinton's former press secretary, to red-bait Obama as if he were a reluctant
witness called before HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Those of us of a certain age have seen this movie before, and I could not help
hoping Obama would reply to his self-appointed inquisitors as Woody Allen did
in the 1976 film, "The Front." "Fellas, I don't recognize the
right of this committee to ask me these kinds of questions. And furthermore,
you can go fuck yourselves." But no. Far cooler, Obama did his best to
pivot and turn back to the real concerns of those Joe Lieberman calls "mainstream
Americans," which is exactly the way to go. In time, Obama might also rise
above the fray with his huge smile and that great quip from Ronald Reagan, "There
you go again."
Obama will certainly get plenty of practice. redbaiting is how America's right
wingers and their conservatized liberal allies have long fought to kill progressive
social and economic change. Accuse the change-makers of being godless Commie
pinkos. Berate them for associating with godless Commie pinkos. Damn them for
not doing enough to root out all the godless Commie pinkos and their sympathizers,
whether from the State Department, Hollywood, the unions, the media, charitable
foundations, under their beds or wherever else the beasts of the night might
lurk.
Don't laugh, it works. In the late 1940s, President Harry Truman proposed universal
health care. right wingers branded it "Communistic" and smothered
it at birth. We still don't have decent health care for everyone, and even John
Edwards feared to suggest anything as "Socialistic" as a single-payer
system. Better to find "a pragmatic compromise" existing insurance
companies and HMOs might accept, as Hillary did so successfully in the 1990s.
Desegregate the races? Heaven forbid! Billboards and leaflets all over the
South showed photographs of Martin Luther King attending "a Communist training
school," and many white liberals shied away.
Organize workers into unions? Not on your life! Employers and their paid-for
politicians branded the organizers as "Reds" and used flag-waving
American Legionnaires to beat early unionists to a pulp or ride them out of
town on a rail.
In a similar, if less violent, vein, Hillary now sounds like a card-carrying
member of what she used to call "the vast right wing conspiracy."
McCain has wasted no time trying to link Obama to Hamas. And, should Obama become
president, he will run into wall-to-wall redbaiting as he tries to bring about
such terribly Marxistical reforms as universal health care, well-paying jobs,
more progressive taxation, serious regulation of Wall Street speculators and
an end to our military occupation of Iraq.
As for my old friend Bill Ayers, I haven't seen him in nearly 20 years, but
I doubt he has his neighbor Obama's ear. When asked about Ayers in the ABC debate,
Obama identified him as an English professor. William Ayers is a widely respected
and very outspoken education maven, and if Obama has spent any serious time
with him, the senator would surely have known Bill's life-long passion has been
to find more effective ways to teach our children.
A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France.
A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France.
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