Senator Obama, Trade and the Big Picture

Posted on 06/14/2008 at 5:03 pm by Bob Cesca

Naomi Klein:

Barack Obama waited just three days after Hillary Clinton pulled out of the race to declare, on CNBC: “Look. I am a pro-growth, free-market guy. I love the market.” Demonstrating that this is no mere spring fling, he has appointed the 37-year-old Jason Furman, one of Wal-Mart’s most prominent defenders, to head his economic team.

On the campaign trail, Obama blasted Clinton for sitting on the Wal-Mart board and pledged: “I won’t shop there.” For Furman, however, Wal-Mart’s critics are the real threat: the “efforts to get Wal-Mart to raise its wages and benefits” are creating “collateral damage” that is “way too enormous and damaging to working people and the economy … for me to sit by idly and sing Kum Ba Ya in the interests of progressive harmony”.

Furman won’t last long with the campaign or (hopefully) the Obama administration. Not with talk like that. As for the Senator’s “I love the market” quote, what else was he supposed to say on CNBC where everything is about crazy insane rich white guys and the only other time a black man has been seen on that network was… frickin’ NEVER?

Regardless, the Senator is going to say some things during the general that you and I might not always agree with. Senator Obama is a liberal, but he’s also a pragmatist. His pragmatism is going to be frustrating sometimes, but it’s mostly a good thing. It allows him to be more honest than most politicians of recent memory (see his Philadelphia Address on race, or this, or, “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK.”).

But don’t lose sight of the larger picture. He’s rewriting the way politics is played — for the better — and continuing the goals of Howard Dean from four years ago (he’s less liberal than Dean, but so what). He’s creating a new paradigm for transparency and accountibility and respectability. No-one in our lifetime has been better suited to accomplish these goals, and no-one is better suited to wipe away a considerable amount of the stink left behind by the Bush administration.

Discuss…

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  • ceu

    Agreed – but there are going to be a lot of young people who are going to be disillusioned when Obama is shown to be a pragmatist rather than being in lockstep with all of their ideals. Those of us of a certain age are well aware that no candidate is in agreement with any group’s every belief and we know that we have to vote for the person who agrees with our views the most number of times. AND we need to keep stressing that the president will be making the nominations/appointments to a Supreme Court where the liberal/sane members are aging rapidly – and that the SCOTUS could have a huge, longlasting impact on our lives.That said, I don’t like Furman heading Obama’s economic team. Wal-Mart has its own way of creating “collateral damage” and its critics are, in no way, a bigger threat. Frankly I wouldn’t mind seeing someone like Robert Reich heading that team.

  • http://www.axisofbalance.com KidDynamo0

    First off, I am one of those young people you are talking about ceu. I am not under any false sense that Obama will open up the heavens and be in lockstep with all my more liberal views. However, I am going to go against what I always do when I hear news like this about Obama. I generally go…”WTF is he thinking…damn that’s a ginormous mistake”…etc. Then we almost always come to find out that it was a good idea and that he was thinking in the long term all along. So I think we should just hang back and see what he does. Also, I thought that Furman was just appointed to his team and not head of it. If Obama is forming a financial team that has multiple perspectives on it, I think that is the right choice. Remember he also has some very progressive members on that team as well. Maybe he wants to get them in a room and hash out a solution that is good for corporations and regular people just the same. That is the sign of good leadership. But we will have to wait and see.

  • ceu

    KidDy, please be aware that I was in no way “talking down” to young voters or young people. I’m thrilled that so many new voters have registered and are pumped about this election. What I would hate to see is people getting turned off to it when they realize that Obama’s views might not coincide with theirs 100% of the time. There are those who will say “WTF is he thinking…damn that’s a ginormous mistake…I’m not voting ’cause he’s just like the rest of the DC politicians who have lied to us in the past just to get elected.” And I think that would be a mistake.

  • http://peaceandwisdom.net Chris Dornan

    I also thought Klein’s piece significant, by far the most interesting critique of Obama’s economic policy/pose.Yes, we are all going to have to give up something to get a unifying presidency. That is as it should be.

  • http://dansolomon.com dansolomon

    Well, I don’t think Furman’s going anywhere. It’s not like he made his opinion about Wal-Mart a secret until Obama selected him as economics director; talk like that isn’t going to get him fired, it got him the job in the first place.I don’t like a lot of Obama’s economists, but I like some of them a lot, and that’s better than what you get from most Presidential candidates. There are definitely center-right people like Liebman (who advocates privatizing social security) and Furman (although Paul Krugman vouches for him on everything except Wal-Mart, to my surprise), but there are also non-ideologues like Goolsbee, true centrists like David Cutler, and, crucially, center-left thinkers like Jamie Galbraith and Jared Bernstein.My take on it, based on the crew he’s assembled, is that he’s looking for a range of economic views and wants to make sure that he’s got a varied group to listen to. Jamie Galbraith isn’t going to sign on to be -anyone’s- token leftist, so I’m optimistic that the fact that Liebman and Furman may have his ear doesn’t mean that they’re dictating his policy.–d