http://www.monthlyreview.org/mrzine/pham020908.html

Adhering to the cliched but effective advice “Follow the money” is one of the best ways of knowing what is true and what is smoke and mirrors in politics and society. So kudos for paying attention to money and Obama’s campaign.

But interpreting the money spent is something else. People can always impose their own interpretations on statistics, whether the evidence is good enough to support it or not.

Everyone who is going through a disillusionment phase with Obama needs to learn something (and although I prefer to make this point more gently, I can not avoid it because it needs to be learned fast, and reinforced often). That is, where are you getting these illusions and why do you set yourself up for disillusionment?
Is there something about the word “hope” which causes people to suspend disbelief, or at least critical thinking? The man is a professional politician in a society that requires huge amounts of money at most levels in order to be taken seriously.

I am not writing to be harsh. I could cite other examples of people buying illusions, but won’t. Perhaps at this point it would surprise folks reading this to know that I am an Obama supporter. (And, of interest, perhaps, to the previous commenters, a registered Green.) He’s not my first choice (which would have been Kucinich or Edwards), but he is a better choice than the rest of the pack. (I’d prefer McKinney to Nader at this point, but she hasn’t exactly built coalitions as strong as Obama has.) Of course McCain is sure to make things worse. If elected, Obama will have his most difficult challenges dealing with those who oppose him, and whether the end result of that conflict makes things worse is impossible for me to tell, but I believe he is up to that challenge (mostly).

All candidates are flawed. Looking at their flaws, recognizing and evaluating them as best you can as people you are hiring to do a job, that is the electorate’s job. Discovering flaws – even serious ones – should not be shocking or completely off-putting for anyone who has looked at candidates and issues in an election cycle or three. And, in as diverse a society as ours, where “regular people” come in many varieties of class, social circles, and demographics, and where one person’s important issue is another’s special interest, it is not difficult at all to find “hypocrisy” where you may. Whether it really IS hypocrisy is another thing.

That said, it is great to see writing that crunches some numbers about Obama’s campaign finances. It may be true that Obama makes more choices on the basis of who gave how much to his campaign than we the electorate are comfortable believing.

But I am unsure whether it is true, as the article interprets it, that Obama in fact flip-flopped about FISA. Much as I want to have believed he was against Dubya’s FISA bill (at the least just because anything Dubya wants is likely to be something to oppose), I do not recall anything publicized where Obama said he was going to vote against the bill. Now, I think it makes sense that he would vote against it. I think it is possible he has said stuff that sounded like we would conclude he’d of course be against it. But I do not think it rises to the level of a flip-flop, nor of hypocrisy.

I agree with the line “In reality, big contributors have far more influence in and access to the campaign than the voter who shells out $200 because he or she really believes in Obama’s message of change.” However, even if it is only a matter of degree, the number of people making smaller contributions to this campaign remains larger than any in U.S. history. Do not lose sight of that, even when paying attention to how much big money is piling on the bandwagon.

Obama and his campaign have proven to be shrewd, in a way that capitalist competitors recognize: He has come up with a new and better way to sell his product. Therefore it is no wonder corporations and rich people are now giving money.

My bias is that that often is not a good thing. But it is NOT AUTOMATICALLY a bad thing.

It does mean that wealth still has a disproportionate amount of power, that the system needs to change more, that Obama is no “savior”, and that, in other words, there is lots of work yet to be done to make those changes reality.

But to label the Obama campaign “hypocrisy made flesh”? No more than anyone who has to make difficult decisions, and far less than many.

Thanks for reading.

Vote Ralph Nader 2008.