The Hope of Obama

By Stephen Zunes, AlterNet. Posted November 6, 2008.

Barack Obama's resounding victory has brought even this cynical observer of Democratic Party politics to dare to hope, believing that -- as a child of the Eisenhower era -- I will soon be witnessing the most progressive presidential administration of my lifetime.

This hope, which I fully realize may prove to be naive, rests upon Obama's personal history as a community organizer, his base of support in the party's left wing, and the remarkable shift in internal Democratic Party politics in recent years.

Obama's Background

There are a number of aspects of Obama's personal history which would seem to indicate empathy for those less fortunate. One, of course, is the fact that he is a black man in a racist society. Another is that he grew up in Indonesia (a poor Asian country) and Hawaii (the most racially diverse and economically stratified state.)

More significant, however, is Obama's political history:

Though the desperate lies and hyperbole from the Right regarding Obama's supposed far-left roots and radical associates are easily dismissible, Obama does come out of a progressive grassroots tradition.

At Occidental College in the early 1980s, he became immersed in the anti-apartheid movement. His first public speech was at an event sponsored by the Students for Economic Democracy, part of a national student advocacy group set up by former California State Senator and progressive activist Tom Hayden. Though there have certainly been student activists from the late 1960s who later moved well to the right, left-wing campus activism was not nearly as trendy during Obama's college years, which were during the heyday of the Reagan Era, when College Republicans were often the largest and most visible political group on many campuses.

Upon graduating from Columbia University, while most of his classmates were pursuing lucrative careers elsewhere, Obama began working in working-class black neighborhoods of South Chicago as an organizer for the Developing Communities Project, then reeling from the collapse of the steel industry. His salary was only $13,000 a year, plus $2,000 to purchase a beat-up Honda Civic for transportation, recognizing, in his words, "There was something more than making money and getting a fancy degree."

Rejecting Chicago's tradition of taking advantage of personal connections with elected officials to elicit a few crumbs, Obama instead embraced the organizing tradition of Saul Alinsky and other community activists of confronting officials with resolute citizens demanding accountability.

Later, as the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, Obama was recruited by hundreds of top corporate law firms and was offered a prestigious clerkship for a federal appeals court, but he turned them all down to return to South Chicago to continue working to empower people to challenge the system. (By contrast, his fellow Ivy League law school grad Hillary Clinton was then in Arkansas serving on the board of Wal-Mart.)

In the buildup to the 1992 elections, as an alternative to the national Democratic Party's emphasis on fighting for the small number of undecided voters in the middle, Obama -- as director of Project Vote! -- instead worked to expand the party's progressive base through registering traditionally underrepresented poor and minority voters, resulting in unexpectedly large Democratic victories in Illinois that year.

This history is indicative of someone who not only is cognizant of the impact government policies have on disadvantaged segments of society, but who recognizes that power ultimately comes from below.

Obama's Progressive Base

From the beginning of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, it was obvious that Obama's policy positions were not nearly as progressive as those of Dennis Kucinich or even John Edwards, and Obama did not differentiate himself much on major issues in the subsequent contests with Hillary Clinton. At the same time, public opinion polls indicated that, with some minor exceptions, Obama supporters overwhelmingly identified with the left wing of the party -- and in particular, with the peace movement -- than did Clinton supporters.

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Stephen Zunes is a professor of Politics and chair of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco and serves as a senior policy analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus.

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