Political 'Monsters' Make Peace
Press Action
Monday, December 01, 2008
http://www.pressaction.com/news/weblog/full_article/monster12012008/
"In Ohio, they are obsessed and Hillary is going to town on it, because she knows Ohio’s the only place they can win. She is a monster, too—that is off the record—she is stooping to anything." - Former Barack Obama campaign adviser Samantha Power speaking in March 2008
Barack Obama announced today he will make uber-hawk Hillary Clinton his Secretary of State and retain current President Bush cabinet member Robert Gates, another uber-hawk, as his Secretary of Defense. Those announcements should finally put to rest any hope that an Obama administration would bring substantive change to the White House on foreign policy issues.
Samantha Power’s “monster” is now located in Chicago in the form of the Obama presidential transition team. Obama and his advisers are stooping even lower than many of the most skeptical political observers believed they would go in terms of creating a business-as-usual approach to governing, one that closely resembles its predecessor’s fundamental policies.
The fact that this “monster” of an administration will have the backing of the U.S. Congress, mainstream media and American people, including many liberal and left-wing activists, on key foreign policy and national security state issues makes the next four years even more frightening.
On the liberal Web site Daily Kos, the reaction to Obama’s selection of Clinton and Gates was generally positive. Many Daily Kos readers said Obama should be admired for inviting his former rival, Clinton, to join his cabinet. Here’s what one Daily Kos reader wrote in response to Obama’s announcement:
“I think Obama has figured out the peace-making thing, which as Lincoln, Gandhi, and MLK said, is to make your enemy your friend. Obama has helped me to get over my Bush hatred, and now with Clinton, he’s showing us how to really get over competition and infighting. I can’t say enough how much Obama’s leadership-by-example has helped me deal with my political, unhelpful anger.”
This is a common reaction among liberals to the business-as-usual makeup of Obama’s incoming administration. And it reveals how many Bush bashers only hate him—or hated him in the case of this Daily Kos reader—because he’s a Republican or because he’s inarticulate or because he doesn’t exude hope. They aren’t Bush policy haters. Because if they were, they would be up in arms over Obama’s plans to make it a smooth transition from Bush to his administration, keeping many of the same policies and some of the same leaders in place when he assumes power in January.
With regard to Obama welcoming Clinton to his administration, the two Democrats were enemies only in the sense of competitors vying for the same prize—their party’s nomination. They weren’t political enemies in the real—and deadly—way Martin Luther King and the racist politicians and business leaders across the United States were in the 1950s and 1960s. Obama and Clinton share identical worldviews. Since Obama’s election on Nov. 4, it has been the hope of the delusional left that Obama would pick a liberal-leaning cabinet to balance his rightward-leaning policy positions. Of course, Obama did not grant them their wish.
The Daily Kos reader also refers to “unhelpful anger,” the type that gets bottled up inside you, preventing a resolution to the situation producing the anger. But not all anger is counterproductive. There’s also healthy anger, the type of rage that motivates you to fight for a sane and safer world.