For a very long time now, I've been extremely skeptical of Barack Obama as a progressive leader--except in the early 20th-Century meaning of the word "progressive," as I wrote some time back. The problem I had was simple: since 2006, I've been looking forward to 2008 as a high-potential realigning election, characterized by a sea-change in politics, which necessarily means a wholesale rejection of the conservative Republican worldview.
It's not just that realigning elections require such an overthrow. They don't, necessarily. But the last 40 years has been an eerie twilight era, in which a substantial majority of people have been center-left on a substantial majority of the issues, but the elected leadeship--and the predominant political discourse--has been just the opposite.
I've looked at this disconnect in terms of Gramsci's concept of hegemony--an acculturated understanding of the world determined by those who control the dominant instutions of society. I like to refer to it as "ideology in drag as common sense." A similar hegemony prevailed in the 1920s, before first the Great Depression and then the New Deal washed it utterly away. Something similar was needed now, I believed--and was possible, given the collosal failures of the Bush regime--failures on a scale not seen since Herbert Hoover's presidency.
But instead of any of this, Barck Obama offered an eager embrace of the very Versailles media that stood as one of the key enforcers of this decrepit status quo. People gave all sorts of explanations and justifications for this, but everything offered seemed utterly inadequate or beside the point. Obama might be modestly, or even solidly liberal, but he was no progressive leader. And what's worse, he could not even be a successful modestly liberal president, so long as he continued to identify with and echo the hollow shiboleths of Versailles media.
I put this argument out various different times, and got a wide variety of responses, none of them, generally anywhere close to a satisfactory answer--because, it seemed to me, virtually no Obama defender or apologist really understood the problem. There was, I thought, one possible way out, though I never offered it myself. I was waiting for Obama's supporters to offer it. They never did. And so now, circumstances have forced me to name it myself, because--for a moment, at least, it appeared altogether possible that Obama himself was about to take that way out: choosing his own way, time and place to break with that Versailles media consensus, doing so in such a way that the consensus itself is sufficiently shattered to give him vastly more room in which to manuever.
Now, I'm not saying that this is what will happen when Obama goes on Fox. The Fox preview spin is that he does nothing of the sort. But there was at least some possibility--as an Obama staffer tried to spin TPM.
The essential point here is that Fox News is not all that different from anyone else when it comes to the avalanche of baseless frivolous accusations hurled at Obama in recent weeks--ones that perfectly reflect Glenn Greenwald's observations in Great American Hypocrites about how all Democratic politicians are attacked. But Fox News is different when it comes to the extremity of its self-indulgence. Face it, if Chris Matthews were on Fox News, he'd be stuck on the nigh shift... forever.
This is why Obama could--potentially--go on Fox News, and counterattack the very essence of the Versaille narratives deployed against him, and yet gain a fair amount of Versailles support, because his supporters could act as if he's only attacking Fox News, and not their own identical behavior. After all, the time has long since passed when the Versailles narrative should have flipped. If nothing else, Katrina should have done it. There should have been the recognition then that this "President" is as dangerous to America as Nero was to Rome. The problem holding people back is fear--fear, and humiliation. For to admit that Bush's America is all a house of cards is to admit two things for the Versailles media: first, to admit that they had a hand in it, and second, even worse, to admit that they, too, were conned.
This can be seen quite clearly in the mass denial of the New York Times story about the Pentagon's infiltration of all the major news outlets--including the Times itself. It is simply unthinkable, and unacceptable to face the fact, not just that one has conned others out of their very being as Americans, but that one has been conned, and, indeed, been a willing and eager participant in conning oneself.
By going on Fox News, and challenging them, and them alone, Obama could break out of this deadlock of humiliation. He could open the door for others in the media to embrace him and reject Fox--recalling, for example, his success in disarming most conservatives with his speech on race. In doing so, of course, Obama would be facilitating the same sort of willing self-deception that got the Versailles media into this fix in the first place. Only the direction of their willing self-decption would have changed.
But, then, that's the way it was in the Emperor's New Clothes, now wasn't it?
We'll know soon enough if this is how it all plays out. But I just wanted to go on record ahead of time--for all those who still believe in Obama as a bold, visionary leader, and a shrewd tactician, to boot--this is what he could have done by going on Fox News at this time.
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