Is Obama a neo-con in drag?

If a relatively mainstream progressive group such as EFF can say Obama is worse than Bush on such an important key issue, which also happens to be a key issue that he swore he would reverse during the campaign, and respected left scholars such as Zinn and Chomsky can point out the deeply rooted flaws in his economic policies (Zinn) and his foreign policy (Chomsky), I think it's fair to say that the coin toss called "voting for Obama" is turning out to be a two-sided coin at best, with one side as neo-conservative, and the other as neo-liberal. (This is most likely why the EU left doesn't distinguish between neo-cons and neo-liberals; Bush, Blair, Clinton, Obama and so on are all “neo-liberals,” which is to say, globalizationists or more exactly, pro-multinational capitalists.)

Further, while Obama is definitely not Bush, the fact that he's proving to be the sort of person who is doing things that would most likely get the left out in the streets if he was, means that regardless of whether you supported Obama during the general election or not, it's your responsibility to hold him accountable. In fact, that was the pact coming from the majority of voting progressives leftward; since we really have no real presidential options on the November ballot, other than symbolic gestures (Nader, McKinney) or voting for someone who could would be very likely would be worse (McCain), especially with Palin and her ultra-right successionist buddies along for the ride, we have no choice within the electoral process other than to vote for Obama in the general election. What was made very clear though was that this was not a blank check – if the Administration reneged on their promises, or worse yet, turned out to be a stealth version of the Bush administration, people would not stand for such a mess, and would take to the streets to reclaim their power. What the initial foreign policy assertions, economic assertions, and now, civil liberties assertions of the Administration are proving is that Obama is even more of a neo-liberal in his views than what he asserted during the campaign, which is more than a disaster, it's potentially cataclysmic in scope, and clutching our ankles and either hoping that it will get better, or ranting about how opposing Obama is ceding power to the neo-cons, is a pointless exercise at best.

Lastly, debating whether or not Obama's apparent duplicity was obvious from the outset to some parties and not to others is primarily a sidebar at this point, and as I'm sure is clear, this is no time to get distracted over such a thing. We all need to be working together, rather than debating over who was right first. It's well past time for a deepening of the cascade of movements in the US, such that we actually can build some real alternatives, rather than staying stuck in our respective sociopolitical subcurrents. To keep going the way we've been going is suicide – and not even of the revolutionary variety, it's more like letting ourselves be thrown off a cliff by some clowns in suits. This is hardly the kind of “Change” that people voted for in 2008! Time to get to work, peeps.