A reasonably evenhanded biography of Barack Obama, published last year, describes him as “an exceptionally gifted politician who, throughout his life, has been able to make people of wildly divergent vantage points see in him exactly what they want to see.” The biographer, David Mendell, reports that “the higher he soared, the more this politician spoke in well-worn platitudes and the more he offered warm, feel-good sentiments lacking a precise framework.”

Now, less than four months before Election Day, with growing disquiet among significant portions of Obama’s progressive base, the current negative reactions can’t be dismissed as potshots from the political margins. Even the New York Times, in a July 4 editorial headlined “New and Not Improved,” has expressed alarm: “We are not shocked when a candidate moves to the center for the general election. But Mr. Obama’s shifts are striking because he was the candidate who proposed to change the face of politics, the man of passionate convictions who did not play old political games.”

But on July 8, Obama made a valid point — even if it wasn’t exactly the point he was trying to make — when he disputed “this whole notion that I am shifting to the center” and argued: “The people who say this apparently haven’t been listening to me.” Overall, his career as a politician has embraced conciliation and compromise rather than pushing against centrist corporate agendas…

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Speaking in a time of war, Martin Luther King Jr. said: “Somehow this madness must cease.”

Forty-one years later, young soldiers are returning to the United
States from terrifying zones of carnage. The old claims of a justified
war have melted away. So have the promises of a humane society back
home.

Statistics about the war dead tell us very little about human
realities. And familiar downbeat numbers about health care — 47 million
Americans with no health insurance, perhaps an equal number woefully
under-insured — tell us very little about the actual consequences or
other options.

“The shocking facts about health care in the United States are well known,” Yes! Magazine
noted in the autumn of 2006. “There’s little argument that the system
is broken. What’s not well known is that the dialogue about fixing the
health care system is just as broken.”

That’s an apt description. For all the media focus and political
rhetoric on health care, the mainline discourse is stuck in a
corporate-friendly rut. But there are signs that a movement for a
rational, humanistic health care system in this country is now gaining
strength…

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With 223 days left in his presidency, George W. Bush laid more flagstones along a path to war on Iran. There was the usual declaration that “all options are on the table” — and, just as ominously, much talk of diplomacy.

Three times on Wednesday, the Associated Press reports, Bush “called a diplomatic solution ‘my first choice,’ implying there are others. He said ‘we’ll give diplomacy a chance to work,’ meaning it might not.”

That’s how Bush talks when he’s grooving along in his Orwellian comfort zone, eager to order a military attack.

“We seek peace,” Bush said in the State of the Union address on January 28, 2003. “We strive for peace.”

In that speech, less than two months before the invasion of Iraq began, Bush foreshadowed the climax of his administration’s diplomatic pantomime…

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In politics, as in so many other aspects of life, anger is a combustible fuel. Affirmed and titrated, it helps us move forward. Suppressed or self-indulged, it’s likely to blow up in our faces.
With the race for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination coming to a close, there’s plenty of anger in the air. And the elements are distinctly flammable. As Bob Herbert just wrote in the New York Times, “the Clinton and Obama partisans spent months fighting bitterly on the toxic terrain of misogyny, racism and religion.”

Herbert doesn’t spread the blame evenly. And, as an elected Obama delegate to the national convention, I don’t either. But at this stage in the nomination process, the returns of blame aren’t merely diminishing — they’re about to go over a cliff.

The anger that’s churning among many Hillary Clinton supporters is deserving of respect. For a long time, she’s been hit by an inexhaustible arsenal of virulent sexism, whether from Tucker Carlson, Rush Limbaugh or Chris Matthews…

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Barack Obama’s triumph on Tuesday night was a victory over a wall that pretends to be a fly on the wall.

For a long time, the nation’s body politic has been shoved up against that wall — known as the news media.

Despite all its cracks and gaps, what cements the wall is mostly a series of repetition compulsion disorders. Whether the media perseveration is on Pastor Wright, the words “bitter” and “cling,” or an absent flag lapel-pin, the wall’s surfaces are more rigid when they’re less relevant to common human needs and shared dreams.

“We’ve already seen it,” Obama said during his victory speech in North Carolina, “the same names and labels they always pin on everyone who doesn’t agree with all their ideas, the same efforts to distract us from the issues that affect our lives, by pouncing on every gaffe and association and fake controversy, in the hopes that the media will play along.”

And how, they’ve played along. From the front pages of “quality” dailies to the reportage of NPR’s drive-time news to the blather-driven handicapping on cable television, the ways that media structures have functioned in recent weeks tell us — yet again — how fleeting any media attention to substance can be.

News outlets spun out — “pouncing on every gaffe and association and fake controversy” — as media Obama-mania about a longshot candidate morphed into Obama-phobia toward the candidate most likely to become the Democratic presidential nominee. The man who could do little wrong became a man who could do little right. The lines of attack were spurious and protracted enough to be jaw-dropping…

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Seventy-six years ago, to many ears on the left, Franklin D. Roosevelt sounded way too much like a centrist. True, he was eloquent, and he’d generated enthusiasm in a Democratic base eager to evict Republicans from the White House. But his campaign was moderate — with policy proposals that didn’t indicate he would try to take the country in bold new directions if he won the presidency.

Yet FDR’s triumph in 1932 opened the door for progressives. After several years of hitting the Hoover administration’s immovable walls, the organizing capacities of labor and other downtrodden constituencies could have major impacts on policy decisions in Washington.

Today, segments of the corporate media have teamed up with the Clinton campaign to attack Barack Obama. Many of the rhetorical weapons used against him in recent weeks — from invocations of religious faith and guns to flag-pin lapels — may as well have been ripped from a Karl Rove playbook. The key subtexts have included racial stereotyping and hostility to a populist upsurge.

Do we have a major stake in this fight? Does it really matter whether Hillary Clinton or Obama wins the Democratic nomination? Is it very important to prevent John McCain from moving into the White House?

The answers that make sense to me are yes, yes and yes…

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While the Iraqi government continued its large-scale military assault in Basra, the NPR reporter’s voice from Iraq was unequivocal this morning: “There is no doubt that this operation needed to happen.”

Such flat-out statements, uttered with journalistic tones and without attribution, are routine for the U.S. media establishment. In the “War Made Easy” documentary film, I put it this way: “If you’re pro-war, you’re objective. But if you’re anti-war, you’re biased. And often, a news anchor will get no flak at all for making statements that are supportive of a war and wouldn’t dream of making a statement that’s against a war.”

So it goes at NPR News, where — on “Morning Edition” as well as the evening program “All Things Considered” — the sense and sensibilities tend to be neatly aligned with the outlooks of official Washington. The critical aspects of reporting largely amount to complaints about policy shortcomings that are tactical; the underlying and shared assumptions are imperial. Washington’s prerogatives are evident when the media window on the world is tinted red-white-and-blue…

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It’s kind of logical. In a pathological way.

A country that devotes a vast array of resources to killing
capabilities will steadily undermine its potential for healing. For
social justice. For healthcare as a human right.

Martin Luther King Jr. described the horrific trendline four decades
ago: “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on
military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching
spiritual death.”

If a society keeps approaching spiritual death, it’s apt to arrive.
Here’s an indicator: Nearly one in six Americans has no health
insurance, and tens of millions of others are badly under-insured.
Here’s another: The United States, the world’s preeminent warfare
state, now spends about $2 billion per day on military pursuits.

Gaining healthcare for all will require overcoming the priorities of
the warfare state. That’s the genuine logic behind the new “Healthcare NOT Warfare” campaign…

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