Between Marx and Blackbeard: A road map to 21st century governance

Somewhere between the force fed collectivism of Marx and the privatizing pirates of Blackbeard’s progeny in the American Right, the next generation of leadership will rise and assume the reigns of power in the United States. The rise of the new leadership will have to understand that neither revolutionary collectivism, nor piracy’s modern incarnation—privatization—is the solution to the national financial forest fire, which threatens both the US and the world with an economic meltdown.

Many self-proclaimed pundits in the United States have made a great living pontificating about what they think Black America is, wants and thinks. More insulting than most of their empty-headed, self-serving rhetoric is the blind, narrow-minded and often totally inept “analysis” of black people, “black culture” and media-proclaimed “black leaders.”

Never mind reality, never mind the deep differences in class, experience, attitude, socio-economic status, education, etc. No, all that matters is the color of one’s skin and the supposed universitality of blackness and black people. “You black” and that is the only thing we need to know about you.

The talking heads on the pseudo-news shows , as well as a host of empty heads in the streets, continue to see the world through their limited race-tinged world-view. In particular, they can not separate Senator Barack Obama from their small-minded definition of what it means to be a “black man.” Senator Obama, like untold numbers of high-achieving blacks before him, confuses the snot out of America’s race-bound dinosaurs, black and white.

The doomed ones will continue to walk over the cliff, dragged into oblivion by their own self-installed ball and chain. All because they could not get pass their own limited world view and see the complexity of Senator Barack Obama.

Obama is not who you think he is. He is not who you have been told he is. He is not the past or the present. He is America’s future and those who would hold us back and bind us in privatizing piracy or socialist stagnation haven’t a clue.

Obama's preference for reducing healthcare costs while preserving the freedom to choose whether or not to participate in the healthcare system, as against Clinton's (and Edwards's) insistence on mandating participation, is not a one-off discrepancy without broader implications. Rather, Obama's language of personal choice and incentive is a reflection of the ideas of his lead economic advisor, Austin Goolsbee, a behavioural economist at the University of Chicago, who agrees with the liberal consensus on the need to address concerns such as income inequality, disparate educational opportunities and, of course, disparate access to healthcare, but breaks sharply from liberal orthodoxy on both the causes of these social ills and the optimal strategy for ameliorating them. (“The Libertarianism of Barack Obama, Drudgereport.com)


Moreover, Obama—the world traveler, activist, lawyer and senator, as befits a fairly bright graduate of several of the nation’s top universities, is not the naïve, untutored, dilettante that his detractors would paint him. Having begun his professional career as a street activist in Chicago, Senator Barack Obama has boots on the ground experience in economics, labor issues, activism, consensus building and organization.

One of the programs he designed as a wet behind the ears college grad in the mid-1980s is still going strong in Chicago today, more than a generation later. Those who knew him in college and many of his long-time acquaintances say one of his greatest strengths is his ability to synthesize concepts from diverse sources and find solutions that make sense.

As a leader, Obama understands that leadership is not about being a one man band and doing it all, nor does a successful leader spew out orders like a berserker in a china shop. The most successful leaders are those who surround themselves with individuals who know more than they do about various functions, events and philosophies, and then synthesizes a course based on his or her own vision.

The problem with Barack Obama is that too many people want to stick the man in an old suit, woven with antiquated threads of race, false identity and foolish ways. It is time people stopped projecting their own limited intellect and racial straitjackets on the man and listen to what he says, in the light of what he has been doing for the last 25 years.

A deeper analysis of his ideas, not what the lightweight media claims are his ideas, you will discover that they are more than a rehash of old liberal ideas and pie in the sky philosophy. Look at the man’s history, for goodness sakes. He’s never been one to play Pollyanna, nor does he have a history of promoting half-baked ideas or proposing lightweight philosophies.

Obama is an analytical man, a deep thinker whose life experience spans three continents, two great religions and three races. He is equally at home among Indonesians and blacks, as he is among whites and his experiences have led him from a religious school in Indonesia to the Ivy League.

Because he does not fit their idea of what they think he should be as a black man, some blacks say he’s “not black enough” because he didn’t grow up in the projects, on the streets, or in some street corner black Baptist church. On the other hand, you have the white folk who can’t get it through their heads that there are more Muslims in the world than white Protestants and all of them don’t worship at Osama’s footsteps.

Too many people are stuck in the past, hamstrung by antiquated ideas of race, religion and “place.” Older Blacks want to stick the man in the mold of an old time Southern preacher-activist. Younger blacks often claim he’s too white because he can string two sentences together without using curse words or “you know.” And the brain cells of many whites keep misfiring, on the very idea of a black man as the most powerful leader on the planet.

The fact that he has more life experience and education than most of his critics is an irony that has escaped the mainstream media, a media, which has yet to fully conceptualize what “change” really is. For all of the vapid so-called criticism floating in the airwaves over Obama’s call for change, many do not appreciate the complexity of Obama’s version of “change.” Instead of listening, they hear what they want to hear and then spew out their ignorant ramblings as news analysis.

True change is thought-provoking, revolutionary, aggravating, and mind boggling—not to mention threatening, to those who have a vested interest in the status quo. Those who have a vested interest in the status quo, psychologically and/or economically respond in kind and seek to denigrate, neutralize and defuse the agent of change.

Interestingly enough, a few analysts, many who are familiar with the University of Chicago, its top drawer professors and their students, have thrown light on an aspect of Barack Obama. They say he represents a new vision of conducting, creating and instituting public policy.

In other words and in short, Obama's slogan, "stand for change", is not a vacuous message of uplift, but a content-laden token of dissent from the old-style liberal orthodoxy on which Clinton and Edwards have been campaigning. At the same time, Obama is not offering a retread of (Bill) Clintonism, Liebermanism, triangulation, neoliberalism, the Third Way or whatever we might wish to call the business-friendly centrism of the 1990s. For all its lofty talk of new paradigms and boundary shifting, the Third Way in practice amounted to taking a little of column A, a little of column B, and marketing the result as something new and innovative. Obama and Goolsbee propose something entirely different - not a triangulation, but a basis for crafting public policy orthogonal to the traditional liberal-conservative axis. (Ibid)

In essence, the powers that be continue their mischaracterization of Senator Barak Obama as “inexperienced”, “untried,” and, deep in the background you can hear them chanting in a horrified voice, “omigawd, and he’s a Negro.” Obama is “inexperienced” only in the fact that he’s never sat in the Oval Office as boss.

True, he’s never been President. Neither have any of his opponents. But, inexperienced? Hardly.

Steinem and many other Clinton supporters crow about Hillary's unprecedented experience when in fact she's held public office for fewer years than Obama: her six years in the U.S. Senate vs. his 10 years in the Illinois and U.S. senates. Steinem calls Clinton's two terms as first lady "unparalleled on-the-job training" and perhaps it is but not unprecedented in any impressive sense; the Clintons both insisted during the '90s that she played no actual policy-making role. As Chris Rock recently put it, "I've been with my wife for 10 years now. If she got onstage right now, y'all wouldn't laugh at all." (Ibid)

Obama has never claimed to be perfect. In fact, through his books, he’s published so much of his dirty laundry that he’s probably put entire herds of political blackmailers in the unemployment line. Not to say he’s perfect, but, he’s already admitted to using drugs, being confused and angry by his circumstances and turning to drugs and alcohol to get by.

However, unlike certain others who hide in the dope and booze closet, Obama not only admitted his use—he got over the need to ride the dope rocket to oblivion. He is neither a walleyed Marxist, nor a country club conservative. Senator Barack Obama is a realist, but in his world, HOPE is not a fantasy.

Monica Davis is an author, public speaker and columnist. She has an ongoing research project on land loss and document fraud and is working on a documentary film.