Not everyone on the left drinks Koolaid. Adolph Reed has been speaking out against Obama since 1996. His last broadside was shot off before the Pennsylvania primary, but much of it is still timely.
He's a vacuous opportunist.I’ve never been an Obama supporter. I’ve known him since the very beginning of his political career, which was his campaign for the seat in my state senate district in Chicago. He struck me then as a vacuous opportunist, a good performer with an ear for how to make white liberals like him. I argued at the time that his fundamental political center of gravity, beneath an empty rhetoric of hope and change and new directions, is neoliberal.....
And, as many Progressive readers may know, I’m hardly a Clinton fan. I’m on record in last November’s issue as saying that I’d rather sit out the election entirely than vote for either her or Obama. At this point, though, I’ve decided that she’s the lesser evil in the Democratic race, for the following reasons: 1) Obama’s empty claims to being a candidate of progressive change and to embodying a “movement” that exists only as a brand will dissolve into disillusionment in either a failed campaign against McCain or an Obama Presidency that continues the politics he’s practiced his entire career; 2) his horribly opportunistic approach to the issues bearing on inequality—in which he tosses behaviorist rhetoric to the right and little more than calls to celebrate his success to blacks—stands to pollute debate about racial injustice whether he wins or loses the Presidency; 3) he can’t beat McCain in November. (emphasis added)
Those of us who noticed Obama's emptiness from the first moment we saw him have trouble understanding what anyone sees in him. While conversations with Obamatons can often make one feel like Kevin McCarthy in Infasion of the Body Snatchers (the original, where he got away, not the remake where he got run down by a car), bad Democrats can remind themselves that Clinton did, in fact, win self-described Democrats by several points. Obama won on points, not on momentum; the pods took over the Democratic leadership but never got to the people themselves.
Jun 17, 08 11:26 PM