Obama: three comparisons: MLK, JFK, FDR

The coming sharp turn to the Right

Chris Cutrone

In previous articles I have addressed the Presidential campaign of Barack Obama in terms of the historical precedents of MLK, Jr. (the end of “black politics”) and JFK (Iraq and the election). Now I wish to address the final and perhaps most important but problematic comparison that might be available, FDR.

MLK, Jr., JFK and FDR span the political imagination of the preceding generation, the “baby-boomers” who came of age in the 1960s, the time of the “New Left.”

Obama has been received primarily as a combined incarnation of MLK, Jr. and JFK, an unstable phenomenon against which Hillary Clinton tried to rally early in the primaries by distinguishing its two different aspects. This is what was behind her provocation that it not only takes a movement to make social change but also political leadership, that the reforms MLK, Jr. called for would have come to nothing without LBJ. — By bringing in LBJ, Hillary avoided, wisely, trying to usurp the mantle of JFK from Obama. Her attack didn’t exactly have the desired result, but it did raise the question of whether MLK, Jr. can run for President — whether Obama was a “movement” candidate or a politician of the elite.

As it turned out, Obama was happy to pose as JFK instead of MLK, Jr. And this is the most accurate comparison one can make historically to Obama. But the need for a new “foreign policy” that Obama represented, with his version of the “best and the brightest” to be brought to bear, like JFK, in the face of a tottering international situation (recognized by Paul Street in his characterization of JFK as having run against Nixon and the legacy of Eisenhower from the Right, in “John Kennedy, Barack Obama and the ‘Triple Evils That Are Interrelated’,” at blackagendareport.com July 23, 2008), has become much less important now, with the combination of the pacification of Iraq and the recent financial collapse on Wall Street. Whatever illusory hopes the 1960s generation might have had that this time McGovern would win have vacated the political stage (or have become irrelevant as props being wielded by the stage-hands on the “Left”). There is an emerging consensus that Obama is the most “liberal” candidate fielded by the Democrats since 1972.

But there is an earlier history that haunts the boomers’ imagination as they struggle to get behind the Obama effect. If Obama is the “candidate that comes along once in a generation,” as the Kennedys (Caroline and Ted) put it, he is not of their generation. The tasks of the historical moment Obama expresses are quite different from the 1960s.

With the financial meltdown a great shift has taken place. The Clintons are now posing as elder statesmen in their endorsement of Obama as a standard-bearer for the needed changes. Bill Clinton has accepted his part of the responsibility for the trajectory that has brought the U.S. (and world) to its present impasse. The election of Obama would mark the end of a significant historical period, definitively closing the post-1968 era; Obama’s election will be the most potentially significant at least since Reagan’s in 1980.

But prior to the recent, dramatic events in the economy that have cast the election in this light, an earlier moment of necessary reform was already being recalled, the 1930s. In its April 7, 2008 edition, The Nation magazine published a forum of articles on the 75th anniversary of the New Deal. In “Race and the New Deal Coalition,” Adolph Reed wrote:

[T]he fact is, most New Deal programs were anything but race-neutral — or, for that matter, gender-neutral — in their impact. Some, like the initial Social Security old-age pension program, were established on a racially invidious, albeit officially race-neutral, basis by excluding from coverage agricultural and domestic workers, the categories that included nearly 90 percent of black workers at the time. Others, like the CCC, operated on Jim Crow principles. Roosevelt’s housing policy put the weight of federal support behind creating and reproducing an overtly racially exclusive residential housing industry.

Reed’s point was that without the contemporary social movements, the New Deal government policy reforms would not have been “progressive” in the ways they have been remembered. Reed went on to write that,

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