Why Obama Failed the Left

[kanethenotorious]

The problem isn't only that America is racist, but it's also largely that our economic system creates class division. Therefore putting a (half) Black person at the very top didn't do anything to eradicate those class divisions. Obama described himself of being "on the side" of the occupy protestors. But as the protests were taking place he was (with the help of Hillary Clinton) murdering Muammar Gaddafi. He then insisted that "Assad must go" continuing US imperialism and his intervention in the area helped the formation of ISIS. On foreign policy he was not a retreat from US imperialism. Finally, he preserved the private health care system with a bungled system that keeps big business in power and stands in the way of medicare for all. Obama was not a true leftist, but simply a colored face on a class divided system.

 

[Langbardo]

Define what is Left in this case. It seems that you consider it as an ideology but it isn't ( it's a cluster of ideologies, not a single one); maybe you mean marxism or marxist-leninism.
Your thesis is that that puppet was serving (or had to serve) this given ideology or movement, but he ( err, I don't know if he's still a "He" ...) was serving firstly the Dem Party, thus the PTB above it and was serving the globalist agenda, which is lefty.
Killing Gaddafi is also a lefty thing, since globalism is expression of leftism (and leftism is essentially globalism), and he was standing against that agenda. Killing anyone standing against the exporting of democracy is very lefty. So it* 's clearly a champion of the Left, a champion of cultural marxism, a champion of dystopian dreams, a champion of disasters.

 

[kanethenotorious]

I mean something close to or related to Marxism or Marxism-Leninism but not necessarily the purest form. The true left is opposed to imperialism. Gaddafi was opposed to business interests, so it's in the corporate interests to have him murdered. Obama was serving the military industrial complex.

 

[kanethenotorious]

Obama basically made America trickle down economics and corporate wage slavery with a Black face. He didn't do anything to really get us away from wage slavery. For a Democrat, he was very pro free market and very neoliberal.

 

[Buglord]

Obama's problem was that he is a narcissist and a writer at his core. This showed up in Tablet earlier this month when one of his biographers sat down for an interview.

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/david-garrow-interview-obama

There was also a moment in The Audacity of Hope, which I wrote about in 2008, of a warning: Whatever happens next is on you people, not me. And I was like, that is, on one hand, a stunningly honest and upfront thing to say. It’s also a complete abandonment or rejection of the responsibility that he should be embracing in this moment.
I wouldn’t even say I was troubled by it. I was baffled by it. What does it mean? Who is this guy, and where is this guy coming from? I went back and re-read “Dreams from my Father,” which I bought when it came out, and I came upon the passage where his stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, takes him out into the backyard in Indonesia and teaches him how to fight. And I said, “Wait a minute. I know this scene. Where’s it from?” And then I went back and found the battle royale scene in Invisible Man.

Right, right, right.

And, of course, Ellison’s Invisible Man ends up in a basement by himself, which is how the book begins. But the point of Dreams from My Father is that Obama is going to do the opposite. Instead of ending up in a basement with a bunch of light bulbs and his Louis Armstrong records, he’s going to become the person who will effect large-scale social change here in America. And again, I was like, “What a weirdly writerly thing to do.” This is clearly a highly wrought literary work of self-fashioning by a person who is in dialogue with literary sources. Or, to put it another way: I’m watching this guy make himself up.
It was funny, when I was with Ben Rhodes in the White House, one of the things that Rhodes was at pains to get across to me was that Obama wrote all of his speeches himself. Here’s the legal pad, take a look. I remember thinking, “Well, why would I think otherwise, until right now?”
I mean, of course Obama doesn’t write all his speeches himself. He’s the president of the United States; he’s got a team of seven White House employees who are paid to write speeches for him. But there was obviously a need or an instruction that had been given that Barack Obama was always to be presented as the author of Barack Obama. And by his instruction, the only book that the speechwriters were to consult was the Collected Speeches of Abraham Lincoln, because he was the only other president who deserved to be on the same shelf as Obama.
So the conclusion I’ve come to in time is that that best way to understand Barack Obama is that he is a literary creation of Barack Obama, the writer, who authored the novel of his own life and then proceeded to live out this fictional character that he created for himself on the page. Which is remarkable. So how do you write a biography of a fictional character authored by someone who’s deliberately created and obscured and erased their actual life and replaced that self with a fiction?

This is a massive part of understanding him. He surrounded himself with yes men and pumped himself up big time.

The problem isn't only that America is racist, but it's also largely that our economic system creates class division. Therefore putting a (half) Black person at the very top didn't do anything to eradicate those class divisions. Obama described himself of being "on the side" of the occupy protestors. But as the protests were taking place he was (with the help of Hillary Clinton) murdering Muammar Gaddafi. He then insisted that "Assad must go" continuing US imperialism and his intervention in the area helped the formation of ISIS. On foreign policy he was not a retreat from US imperialism. Finally, he preserved the private health care system with a bungled system that keeps big business in power and stands in the way of medicare for all. Obama was not a true leftist, but simply a colored face on a class divided system.

Another thing to remember is that Obama may be black but he was raised almost entirely outside of the mainland United States. He is a product of American Empire so his support of continued American Imperialism is nothing to consider shocking.