Obama Could Have Been

Today, and not for the first time, Obama sounded like Nixon or Reagan. In a good way. If he pulls it off, then he will have been a moderately good President. But even to those of us to whom he was only ever better than the alternatives, he could have been a great President.

Obama was, at least potentially, the true heir of Eisenhower’s ending of the Korean War, his even-handed approach to Israel and the Palestinians, his non-intervention in Indochina, his denunciation of the military-industrial complex, and his still-inspiring advocacy of nuclear power as “atoms for peace” 10 years after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings: civil nuclear power as the ultimate beating of swords in ploughshares. In 1960, John F Kennedy branded Eisenhower and Nixon as soft on the Soviets.

But then, in 1954, Eisenhower had written to his brother, Edgar N Eisenhower, that, “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H L Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid.”

Obama was, at least potentially, the true heir of Nixon’s suspension of the draft, his détente with China and with the USSR, and the ending of the Vietnam War by him and by Ford, an old stalwart of the America First Committee who went on to sign the Helsinki Accords.

Obama was, at least potentially, the true heir of Nixon’s declaration that “I am now a Keynesian in economics”, or, as Milton Friedman bitterly put it, “We are all Keynesians now”.

Obama was, at least potentially, the true heir of Nixon’s belief in wage and price control as surely as in the Clean Air Act and in the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, as surely as in the War on Cancer and in the War on Drugs, as surely as in Title IX (banning sex discrimination in federally funded education) and in the desegregation of schools in the Deep South.

Alas, Nixon was the first President to authorise abortion at the federal taxpayer’s expense. But a Democratic-dominated Congress later legislated to ban that, Carter signed that ban into law, and Obama insisted on its inclusion in the ObamaCare legislation, where it may be read in black and white. Claims to the contrary are outright lies. By contrast, Romney not only legalised taxpayer-funder abortion in Massachusetts, but, through Bain Capital, he derives an income from it to this day. Read that last sentence over again. Such was the man whom the Republican Party nominated for President in 2012.

Obama was, at least potentially, the true heir of Nixon’s insistence that the United States should launch no war over the Soviet Union’s treatment of its Zionist dissidents, who have turned out to have been just as unpleasant in their own way as were many other categories of those who happened to dissent from the Soviet regime, and who now constitute a significant obstacle to peace in the Middle East, where they are busily engaged in denaturalising both the indigenous Christians and the ultra-Orthodox Jews.

Nixon was forced out over something that no one really found shocking then any more than we would find it shocking now, although I suppose that we ought to mourn the passing of a world in which they felt obliged to pretend that they were shocked by it.

He was forced out by the motley crew that had sought to replace Johnson with Bobby Kennedy as the Democratic nominee in 1968: the not always mutually exclusive categories of Friedmanites and Trotskyites, Israel Firsters and white supremacists; in the California primary, Kennedy had denounced Eugene McCarthy’s support for public housing as a “catastrophic” proposal to move black people into Orange County.

Obama was, at least potentially, the true heir of the Nixon and Ford Administrations’ stark contrast to the pioneering monetarism and the Cold War sabre-rattling of the Carter Administration, which was particularly bad for abusing the noble cause of anti-Communism by emphasising Soviet human rights abuses while ignoring Chinese and Romanian ones.

Carter, who was not above electorally opportunistic race-baiting, even happily allowed the Chinese-backed Pol Pot to retain control of the Cambodian seat at the UN after Phnom Penh had fallen to the rival forces backed by Vietnam and therefore by the Soviet Union.

But Carter, for all his unsung prophetic calls against materialism in general and oil dependence in particular, had had the nerve to brand Ford as soft on Communism for his entirely factual statement that Yugoslavia, Romania and Poland were “not dominated” by the Soviet Union.

Obama was, at least potentially, the true heir of Reagan’s withdrawal from Lebanon in 1983, and his initiation of nuclear arms reduction in Europe, for all the heavy Trotskyist influence over his foreign policy.

Obama was, at least potentially, the true heir of the condemnation of the Israeli bombing of Iraq in 1981 by Reagan and by almost all members of both Houses of Congress, including many of the most hardline Evangelical conservatives, Cold War hawks or both ever to sit on Capitol Hill.

Obama was, at least potentially, the true heir of James Baker’s call to “lay aside, once and for all, the unrealistic vision of a Greater Israel” in order to “foreswear annexation, stop settlement activity”, and of Baker’s negotiation of the voluntary disposal of all nuclear weapons by Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine.

Obama was, at least potentially, the true heir of Republican opposition to the global trigger-happiness of the Clinton Administration.

And Obama was, at least potentially, the true heir of George W Bush’s declaration that “Russia is no longer our enemy”, together with his removal of American troops from Saudi Arabia after 11^th September 2001, thus ensuring that there has been no further attack on American soil, despite his foreign policy’s having been subject to an even heavier Trotskyist influence than Reagan’s had been, as well as to a far heavier, very closely related ultra-Zionist influence.

With or without Obama himself, that which in 2008 was the Obama Coalition is, at least potentially, another movement in the tradition of the American Anti-Imperialist League that endorsed William Jennings Bryan, and of the America First Committee of Norman Thomas (Presbyterian minister and anti-Communist campaigner to build a Farmer-Labor party, denounced by Trotsky), Sargent Shriver (Peace Corps and Special Olympics founder, McGovern running mate, and pro-life Catholic), and Shriver’s future brother-in-law, John F Kennedy.

Hillary Clinton obviously could not be the candidate of that Coalition. Thank goodness, then, for Rand Paul.