    
Tonya
"Cyniquian" Level Poster
Username: Tonya
Post Number: 6563
Registered: 07-2006
Rating: 
Votes: 3 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, February 04, 2008 - 07:02 am: | 
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Obama is just another machine politician
Hope and change? The Illinois senator is offering nothing new, argues Charles Laurence
So, Barack Obama looks more and more like a Hillary Clinton-beater after a national Zogby poll published yesterday puts him within a tantalising point of the former First Lady. And his prospects seem all the better because he is taking votes from Hillary's core support of women and blacks, while appealing to a new generation of young voters.
Obama has hijacked Bill Clinton's pitch of 'Hope and Change', and it is working on Americans who take their politics from bumper stickers and paid TV spots. But do they know really who they are voting for?
The 46-year-old Senator from Illinois says he is the Washington outsider. Really? He may have only a couple of years' Senate experience, but his greatest asset is a well-calculated role in the Democratic Machine. From Illinois to Iowa, he has always kept ahead by staying in line with the power brokers and casting the right vote. or none at all.
He claims to be committed to change. But he flip-flopped on President Bush's 'war on terror' Patriot Act, which curbs civil liberties, targets immigrants and has unleashing domestic spying. At first - in 2003 - he joined the chorus condemning it as a step towards the prediction that "when fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross." By 2006 he was voting for its re-authorisation.
At least he voted: he has abstained on an astonishing 166 issues to avoid leaving a trial which might impede his presidential ambitions.
He once told the National Organisation of Women that he did "not support" the repeal of the Defence of Marriage Act. But with gay and new-generation votes at stake, he now believes "in the need to fully repeal the Defence of Marriage Act". In Chicago, he wanted to ban handguns. Now he supports gun 'freedom'. Once he opposed capital punishment. Now, inevitably, he wants more care taken with the lethal injections.
This is not change; this is business as usual, the careerist maneuvering of an oily old-style politician, albeit dressed in a fresh coat of paint.
Last year, Harper’s magazine published an 8,000-word expose of how Obama transformed himself from the pot-smoking student with an identity crisis into Washington's 'corporate candidate' for high office.
It revealed that the conservative lobbyists Kirkland and Ellis, representing General Motors, had given Obama $70,000. The US branch of the European bank UBS donated $165,000; Exelon, America's biggest nuclear plant operator, $160,000; Goldman Sachs of Wall Street chipped in $143,000, Citigroup $50,000 and Morgan Stanley $40,000.
In return, Obama voted in the Senate for the tort law reform which would curb the ambulance-chasing lawyers who crimp corporate profits, a cherished goal of big business.
It is hardly surprising that Bill Clinton, speaking in Nevada ahead of this Saturday's caucuses, should paint Obama as the "establishment" candidate who would bring only the "feeling of change".
"One candidate says you should vote for me because I've not been involved at all in the struggles of the past and therefore we need to turn over a new leaf and [try] something absolutely new. And if you want the feeling of change, then that is the person you should support," Clinton told the crowd.
"The other candidate says vote for me because I spent a lifetime making change, raising hopes and fulfilling dreams for other people," he said about his wife, now behind the Illinois senator in latest state polls.
Barack Obama may prove to be a good President. He meets the essential criteria of charisma, the ability to be the hail-fellow-well-met in a bar and the empathetic listener in the schoolyard. But Americans should not be hoodwinked into believing he's any different from other men hungry for political power.
He is a careful, calculating, self-serving politician who says what he believes the majority wants to hear, who has no true heart or statesmanship. Personal ambition drives him: he is of the same stripe as Tony Blair, Nicolas Sarkozy - and George Dubya Bush.
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/?storyID=12068 |
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