Vol. 81/No. 22      June 5, 2017

 

Obama’s contempt for working people is ‘colorblind’

 
Below is an excerpt from the chapter “Growing class stratification and the ‘enlightened meritocracy’” in Are They Rich Because They’re Smart: Class, Privilege and Learning Under Capitalism by Socialist Workers Party National Secretary Jack Barnes. Copyright © 2016 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.

In comparison to other Democratic and Republican primary candidates, [Barack] Obama was cautious and disciplined during the [2008] campaign. He was determined not to let carelessness scotch his ambitions. That’s why his slips are revealing.

There were his widely publicized remarks at a fund-raiser in April 2008, for example, where he was speaking to a small group of supporters at a home in San Francisco’s exclusive Pacific Heights neighborhood. The Democratic candidate was so at ease in that company that he let down his guard. His class prejudices poured out for all to hear.

Working people in the small Pennsylvania towns where Obama had just been campaigning, he said, and in “a lot of small towns in the Midwest,” have been seeing job opportunities decline for a long time. “They fell throughout the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are going to regenerate, and they have not. And its not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” …

But Obama’s words in Pacific Heights registered more than just a momentary “slip.” That’s been confirmed time and again throughout his presidency. For example, speaking in 2011 to another exclusive gathering of wealthy backers, this time in Brentwood, California, the Democratic president remarked contemptuously: “When I talk to ordinary folks, they are not always paying attention. If you ask them about Medicare, they’ll say, ‘I love that program but I wish government wouldn’t get involved in it.’”

During Obama’s January 2016 “State of the Union” address, with a thinly veiled observation about those attracted to Republican candidate Donald Trump, he said: “As frustration grows, there will be voices urging us to fall back into our respective tribes, to scapegoat fellow citizens who don’t look like us, or pray like us, or vote like we do, or share the same background.” (What “same background” do most workers, whatever our skin color, “share” with the big majority of those at top levels of the executive, judicial, and legislative branches of the US capitalist government today, and its proliferating “regulatory” agencies and bureaus?) …

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When it comes to workers who are Black, Obama’s attitudes are just as contemptuous, if not more so.

Take, for example, his remarks on Father’s Day in June 2008 at Chicago’s Apostolic Church of God, which has an overwhelmingly African American congregation. Much of the news coverage of that church service focused on the Democratic candidate’s remarks about absent fathers, but he said a lot more than that. He scolded members of the congregation not to “just sit in the house and watch ‘SportsCenter’…. Replace the video game or the remote control with a book once in a while.”

“Don’t get carried away with that eighth-grade graduation,” Obama said at the Chicago church. “You’re supposed to graduate from eighth grade.” …

And then he scornfully added, “We need fathers to recognize that responsibility doesn’t just end at conception. That doesn’t make you a father. What makes you a man is not the ability to have a child. Any fool can have a child. That doesn’t make you a father. It’s the courage to raise a child that makes you a father.” …

A few months earlier, again speaking to a largely African American audience, Obama had lectured those in attendance about feeding their children “cold Popeyes” for breakfast — unlike he and Michelle in the White House, we presume. …

The hypocritical and fraudulent character of Obama’s 2008 Fathers’ Day lecture about “the foundations of our families” getting “weaker” became even clearer a few weeks later, when he took part in a televised presidential forum in southern California at the Saddleback Church of Rev. Rick Warren. When Warren asked him about “the most significant position you held ten years ago that you no longer hold today,” Obama immediately pointed to his support for the abolition of Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) by the Clinton administration and Congress in 1996. Obama said that he “was much more concerned ten years ago when President Clinton initially signed the bill that this could have disastrous results.”

But by August 2008 — a few months before the November presidential election, and a few weeks before the explosion of the world financial crisis and its unfolding consequences for workers’ jobs and conditions — Obama was “absolutely convinced” that Clinton’s “welfare reform” had to remain “a centerpiece of any social policy.”
 
 
Related articles:
‘Deplorable’ workers are true target of liberals’ fury
 
 
 
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