The Candidate Redux

In 1972 Robert Redford starred in a movie about a liberal urban storefront lawyer doing advocacy work for the poor who was talked into running for governor. It didn't hurt that the Redford character, McKay, was the son of a former governor of the state in which he was to run, and the guy who talked him into running was a well-known power broker with extensive media connections.

McKay starts off as a leftist idealist, but by the time his consultants and handlers get through crafting his image, he finds that he discarded his principles one by one as he naively sauntered down the primrose path to power, and that in the end his commitment to social justice has somehow been transformed into "caring."

Jeremy Larner, a former speechwriter for the 1968 presidential hopeful Eugene McCarthy, wrote the script and won an oscar for "The Candidate," whose theme is as pertinent to politics today as it was in '72. Bill McKay was not the first and certainly not the last progressive politician who has sadly discovered that getting ahead politically entails at least a partial sacrifice of one's principles.

Enter Barack Obama.

Obama burst onto the national scene like a fireworks exhibition when his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention made him the overnight political equivalent of a rock star. Prior to that he was an obscure and virtually unknown state senator toiling in the Illinois legislature.

The appeal of "The Audacity of Hope" wasn't just in its articulate, intelligent, and gracefully crafted message; Obama, the messenger, was immediately recognizable as the politically-correct progressives' wet dream. Young, handsome, black, the son of an African immigrant and a native Kansan, and with his impeccable progressive credentials intact and a matter of public record thanks to his work in the Illinois legislature, Barack Obama appeared as nothing less than the young Moses, destined to lead his long-suffering people out the nightmare of supply-side Egyptian bondage.

Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate that fall in a walk after his Republican opponent, Jack Ryan, dropped out of the race due to a sex scandal. Since then he has become one of the major disappointments of the 109th Congress, his formerly progressive approach to most major issues having dissolved in a blurry miasma of timid, delicate, anemic and vapid stands on the Iraq War, the impoverishment of the middle class, and the long-term consequences of petroleum dependency.

In the past year Obama has been criticized harshly by author/bloggers such as Alexander Cockburn and David Sirota, and this month is scrutinized in a major magazine piece, "Barack Obama Inc.," by Ken Silverstein in the November Harper's.

Silverstein documents Obama's changes of position, comparing his pre-Senate stands on issues such as the war with his current pronouncements, including his rejection of John Murtha's withdrawal plan with the comment that the U.S. needs to exit Iraq "in a responsible way -- with the hope of leaving a stable foundation for the future," which substitutes platitudes for his earlier opposition to "a dumb war."

Obama helped defeat a measure that would have capped credit-card interest rates at 30 percent, reversing his long-standing opposition to predatory financial practices aimed at the poor and middle classes, and his favorite solution to the energy quandry is ethanol, a certifiable hoax which costs more petroleum energy to produce than it saves and primarily benefits gigantic agribusiness firms like Archer, Daniels, Midland, whose production centers are in midwestern states such as Obama's Illinois.

Silverstein concisely synopsizes the reasons behind Obama's transformation: "After a quarter century when the Democratic Party to which he belongs has moved steadily to the right, and the political system in general has become thoroughly dominated by the corporate perspective, the first requirement of electoral success is now the ability to raise staggering sums of money. For Barack Obama, this means that mounting a successful career, especially one that may a include a run for the presidency, cannot even be attempted without the kind of compromising and horse trading that may, in fact, render him impotent."

That Obama has become a major player in national politics so quickly is phenomenal, but not surprising, considering the way he's played his cards. And in the final analysis, it's not the candidate, but the system in which all candidates are trapped that's at fault for having leeched the courage of his convictions from the young senator's agenda.

"(I)t is startling to see how quickly Obama's senatorship has been woven into the web of institutionalized influence-trading that afflicts official Washington," Silverstein says. "He quickly established a political machine funded and run by a standard Beltaway group of lobbyists, P.R. consultants, and hangers-on...Obama's top contributors are corporate law and lobbying firms."

It's as if we can hear Obama asking his consultants and contributors the same question Robert Redford's movie character Bill McKay asked his handlers at the successful conclusion of his first campaign, "What do we do now?"

And here I thought it was the leaders who were leading us.

Silverstein's story is not online yet. It's available in the November issue of Harper's magazine, now on newsstands, and should be posted on the publication's updated website within the next few days.