Louis Proyect writes: After a brief period of relative optimism tied to the “green shoots” of recovery, the woes of the Great Recession continued into 2012 and forced the hucksters running Obama’s re-election campaign to hoist a new message up the flagpole and see if anyone would salute.

That new message amounted to undraping a 60 foot tall bronze statue of Obama as muscular Commander-in-Chief after the fashion of Reagan chopping wood or George W. Bush in a flight suit. If those precious swing voters, perceived as white and centrist, could not be assuaged by a non-existent recovery, then maybe they would vote for Obama since he was able to deliver on at least another element of Teddy Roosevelt’s record, namely his willingness to use the “big stick” against weaker nations.

The campaign kicked into high gear with a speech that the president gave on Memorial Day a couple of weeks ago. It is filled with what the great Edmund Wilson called “patriotic gore”. This paragraph, in particular, sounds like it could have been lifted from the preview to a Rambo movie:

You persevered though some of the most brutal conditions ever faced by Americans in war. The suffocating heat. The drenching monsoon rains. An enemy that could come out of nowhere and vanish just as quickly. Some of the most intense urban combat in history, and battles for a single hill that could rage for weeks. Let it be said — in those hellholes like Briarpatch, and the Zoo and the Hanoi Hilton — our Vietnam POWs didn’t simply endure; you wrote one of the most extraordinary stories of bravery and integrity in the annals of military history.

Activist Jack A. Smith, an editor at the radical newsweekly The Guardian in the 1960s who soldiers on for the cause of peace in upstate N.Y., commented on Vietnam war revisionism in the Hudson Valley Activist Newsletter:

The Pentagon has just launched a multi-year national public relations campaign to justify, glorify and honor Washington’s catastrophic, aggressive and losing war against Vietnam — America’s most controversial and unpopular military conflict.

President Barack Obama opened the militarist event, which was overwhelmingly approved by Congress four years ago, during a speech at the Vietnam Wall on Memorial Day, May 28. The entire campaign, which will consist of tens of thousands of events over the next 13 years, is ostensibly intended to “finally honor” the U.S. troops who fought in Vietnam. The last troops were evacuated nearly 40 years ago.

One of the more disgusting passages in this altogether disgusting speech had to do with the peace movement’s alleged abuse of returning GI’s:

You were sometimes blamed for misdeeds of a few, when the honorable service of the many should have been praised. You came home and sometimes were denigrated, when you should have been celebrated. It was a national shame, a disgrace that should have never happened. And that’s why here today we resolve that it will not happen again.

David Sirota, one of the nation’s more principled liberals and hence a trenchant critic of Obama, told Salon.com readers:

It’s undeniable that chronic underfunding of the Veterans Administration unduly harmed Vietnam-era soldiers. However, that lamentable failure was not what Obama was referring to. As the president who escalated the Vietnam-esque war in Afghanistan, he was making a larger argument. Deliberately parroting Rambo’s claim about “a quiet war against all the soldiers returning,” he was asserting that America, as a whole, spat on soldiers when they came home — even though there’s no proof that this happened on any mass scale.

In his exhaustive book titled “The Spitting Image,” Vietnam vet and Holy Cross professor Jerry Lembcke documents veterans who claim they were spat on by antiwar protestors, but he found no physical evidence (photographs, news reports, etc.) that these transgressions actually occurred. His findings are supported by surveys of his fellow Vietnam veterans as they came home.

Keep in mind that Obama’s speech sounds exactly like the kind of thing that John McCain would have written–a product of his captivity in Vietnam and his yahoo Republican Party politics. That this Ivy League “liberal” could spew out the same kind of rightwing bullshit, while in all likelihood knowing that it is bullshit, epitomizes the political impasse facing voters. You vote for someone enlightened and you end up with a Chuck Norris wannabe. It really doesn’t matter what you voted for, after all. The people who run the country have their own agenda and it doesn’t include you. [Continue reading…]

David Bromwich writes: I went to see Barack Obama speak in New York, in spring 2007, at a preliminary ‘sounding’ for donors and assorted others. This was a few weeks after he announced his candidacy, and the audience of a hundred or so, in a spacious Upper West Side apartment, were brought in close enough to let everyone have a glimpse. Impartial curiosity was the mood about Obama then. There was no fuss at his entrance; he shook a few hands, chatted with the friendly strangers, and stayed within himself. He talked for something under half an hour, and what we heard was an attitude more than a programme.

It was a bad time, he said. We had to get the country going in the right direction. The wars were taking a heavy toll and drawing us away from our responsibilities towards each other. He spoke fluently and agreeably, without passion. George W. Bush had lately ignored the advice of the Baker Commission to withdraw from Iraq, and had ordered the ‘surge’ of additional troops headed by General Petraeus; there was a feeling close to despair among the arts and media crowd in the room, but Obama mentioned none of that: you might have thought the year was 1992 and his opponent George H.W. Bush. What struck me was his proficiency at blending in. Yet his sense of crisis was impersonal and oddly minimal. A woman with a worried look said afterwards: ‘I’m not sure he’s what we need.’

The glamorous Obama who emerged in 2008 – the greetings to whole cities with a celebrity shout, ‘Hello, Miami!’, the faithful cry of ‘Fired up, ready to go!’: none of this seemed to fit the man we heard, though his 2004 convention address had given hints of another side that accounted for the loyalty of his warmer enthusiasts. But as it has fallen out, most of his presidency has been conducted in the style of that living-room talk. Ceremonial speeches like the State of the Union or the occasional solemn bulletins from the Oval Office or orations such as he offered after the Tucson shootings in 2011 have marked episodic returns to the grand style, but when you hear those speeches you wonder what office he thinks he occupies, and in what country. The dignified and commanding presentation suits a theatrical impulse that lies deep in Obama’s idea of his proper powers – an impulse he has always recognised, which, at most times in his life, he has taken great care to repress.

One reward of David Maraniss’s biography of Obama’s first 27 years is that it confirms a hunch about Obama’s self-invention. His vagabond life with a bohemian intellectual mother, and the charismatic and reckless father who went back to Africa, belong to an early childhood that the Maraniss book recalls in detail and others have explored too, but those years explain less than has been supposed. Young Barack was always cared for, and from the age of ten, his education saw a passage with apparent ease through elite institutions. The Punahou school in Hawaii is one of the top preparatory schools in the United States, Occidental College in Southern California is a small liberal arts school of high quality, and for his last two years Obama transferred to Columbia. By the age of 22 his ambition encompassed the presidency – a hope that emerged with matter-of-fact seriousness in a conversation with a New York friend. During his last year at Columbia, and at a low-level corporate job that followed, Obama brooded over his need to acquire a black identity – a sign was the copy of Ellison’s Invisible Man which he took with him everywhere. He had never thought of himself as black before. The two girlfriends of those years whom Maraniss has traced, and an unnamed third in his first year in Chicago, were white, and so were many of his friends.

Obama’s memoir Dreams from My Father condensed several partners into one, and offered a scene of mutual alienation between the hero and his girlfriend over divided reactions to a play about black Americans. Here, Maraniss indicates, an incident from another time and place, with another person, was transferred for the sake of narrative economy. It went down more easily to have his temporary estrangement from white society follow a single arc with a single romantic foil. More generally, the data of Obama’s early years, Maraniss has found, are so stretched and tweaked in his memoir, the incidents and characters so altered and transposed that Dreams from My Father is best thought of as a ‘work of literature’ rather than personal history. [Continue reading…]

M.J. Rosenberg writes: Back in 2007-8, I was an outspoken promoter of Barack Obama’s nomination and election. I believed he had both the skills and the progressive views that would make him another FDR. Additionally, as the first black president, his election would be a hugely significant milestone in the history of a country cursed by racism from the very beginning.

I was right only on that last point: race. Obama’s presidency changes America forever. No matter how successful or unsuccessful his presidency is judged to be, or whether he wins a second term, the very idea that the United States elected Barack Hussein Obama shows that a clear majority of the country accepts the revolutionary (for Americans) fact of racial equality. Yes, America is still cursed with racism but Obama’s face among the 44 presidents depicted in every child’s history book or on the post office wall, changes America in a profound way.

Unfortunately, I do not believe he has been a particularly good president. Former Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said of FDR that he was a born leader because, although he had a “second class intellect,” he had “a first class temperament. ” In my opinion, Obama is the opposite.

He is a brilliant man but he does not have the temperament for the presidency. He is reclusive, avoiding the glad handing of Congress that is necessary to get individual members of the House and Senate to feel personally close or loyal to him. He is not a fighter, always seeking to conciliate the opposition rather than defeat it. He refuses to use the presidency as a “bully pulpit” (in Theodore Roosevelt’s phrase), reaching over Congress and the media to rally the people behind him.

Worst of all, his critical policy decisions have been informed by timidity.

His two most significant efforts — reviving the economy and health care reform — were both hobbled by a lack of boldness and propensity for preemptive compromising. His stronger actions, as on gay equality and on immigration, were only undertaken after he had lost the strong mandate he was elected with and needed to solidify his base in advance of re-election

Obama’s foreign policy record is even worse. Between intensifying drone attacks, staying the course in Afghanistan, keeping Guantanamo open, and aligning our Middle East policies with Israel, Obama’s foreign policy is pretty much a continuation of George W. Bush’s.

In short, for progressives like me, Obama is a big disappointment. Nonetheless, it is absolutely critical that he be re-elected.

If M.J. wanted win this argument among the rest of us who have been particularly disappointed by Obama’s foreign policy record, he would need to show why with Obama as president there is less chance that the U.S. will go to war with Iran. That’s a difficult argument to make and thus it’s not surprising M.J. makes no mention of Iran.

A lot of the support Obama got in 2008 derived simply from antipathy for everything George Bush represented, but then we discovered that the opponent of torture preferred summary executions and that far from being the opposite of Bush, Obama turned out to be more like Bush 2.0.

Does he now deserve a second term just because he’s not a Republican?

The only thing that seems reasonable to predict about the 2012 election is that there will be a miserably low turnout. And the one person who will bear the primary responsibility for that will be the man who took a cynical ride on the hope of millions of Americans.