by
Bill Van Auken
22 January 2009

The inauguration speech delivered by President Barack Obama Tuesday
has been the object of near-delirious praise from the mass media and
the editorial pages of the major US dailies. Even those forced to
acknowledge that the 18-minute address was flat in its delivery,
banal in much of its content and lacking any oratory that will be
long remembered insist that it mattered little what Obama actually
said. The important thing was his very presence on the steps of the
Capitol—and that of the massive crowd on the Washington Mall—
symbolizing "change."

Eschewing genuine analysis and dedicating its coverage instead to
self-delusion and deluding others, the media almost universally fails
to grasp the immense contradiction between the sentiments that
brought nearly two million people to Washington for the event and the
politics that underlay what Obama actually said.

Those standing in the cold came to celebrate the exit from the
political stage of a hated president, George W. Bush, and what many
hoped would be the beginning of fundamental change. The speech
itself, however, was crafted in large measure to appease the
Republican right and signal continuity with its essential policies.

Most glaring in this regard were the first substantive lines
describing the crisis enveloping the United States as Obama assumes
the presidency. Before even referring to the profound economic crisis
that has claimed some 3 million jobs and is destroying hundreds of
thousands more every month, Obama took his cue from Bush, painting
terrorism as the nation's preeminent challenge.

"Our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and
hatred," he declared.

With these few words, Obama gave his assurance that the "global war
on terror" will remain the lasting legacy of Bush, Cheney and Co.,
providing the continued pretext for aggressive war abroad and the
violation of democratic rights at home.

Contained in this formulation is the continuation of all the lies and
political intimidation methods utilized by the last administration to
foist the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq onto the American people.
Principal among them is the fraudulent claim that the American
military has been sent to occupy these countries and kill large
numbers of their citizens in order to fight terrorism, when, in fact,
the real reason for these wars is the drive for American imperialist
hegemony over the vast energy reserves of Central Asia and the
Persian Gulf.

Continuity, rather than change, is the hallmark of the incoming
administration'

s attitude towards both of these wars. To the extent
that a partial drawdown of troops is to be carried out in Iraq, it
will be done under the timetable worked out by the Bush
administration and for the purpose of escalating the counter-
insurgency war in Afghanistan. Overseeing the process, moreover, will
be Bush's secretary of defense, Robert Gates, as well as the senior
commanders picked by the Republican president.

By invoking an undefined "far-reaching network" of worldwide terror
Obama kept in place the ideological pretext for wars yet to come,
potentially against Iran, Pakistan or countries as yet unnamed.

This element of the speech won firm approval from the virulently
right-wing editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. In its lead
editorial, the Journal applauded Obama for his "clear declaration
that we are indeed fighting a `war'" against terrorism. It
continued: "Many of his supporters on the left, and around the world,
have been hoping that Mr. Obama will return US national security
policy to its pre-9/11 assumptions. The Democrat was warning our
adversaries—and some of our allies—that his foreign policy will have
as much continuity as change, and that he isn't about to jettison
policies that protect Americans."

In other words, the speech reassured the predominant sections of the
American financial elite, whose interests the Journal consistently
defends, that policies of militarism and aggression that it sees as
vital to maintaining and advancing its global aims will continue
unabated.

As for Obama's "supporters on the left"—i.e., the majority of the
American people who want an end to war and voted for him in large
measure to achieve that aim—they have once again been politically
disenfranchised by the two-party system.

The speech received general applause from the media pundits of the
right. Former Nixon speech-writer Peggy Noonan noted that Obama
used "language with which traditional Republicans would be thoroughly
at home."

Most popular among this socio-political layer were the sections of
the speech suggesting that the economic collapse precipitated by Wall
Street is the fault of the American people as a whole, who now must
accept sacrifice in the interests of the nation. In particular, they
fastened on the lines about a "new era of responsibility" and the
financial meltdown being the result of "greed and irresponsibility on
the part of some but also our collective failure to make hard choices
and prepare the nation for a new age."

Columnist George Will, who hosted Obama at a pre-inauguration dinner
with other right-wing commentators, praised in particular his use of
the Biblical phrase, "The time has come to set aside childish
things," interpreting it as an admonition to the vast majority of the
American people for demanding "more goods and services than they are
willing to pay for." Driven by his contempt for working people, Will
happily endorses the demand that they give up such "childish things"
as the belief that they have a right to a job, a home, health care
and a decent income.

Similarly, the Wall Street Journal noted approvingly in its main
article on the inauguration, "The implicit message is that it isn't
sufficient to blame the Bush administration, or Wall Street or the
man down the street for today's economic pain, but to accept that a
whole nation is complicit in it."

This indeed is the implication of Obama's words. How are workers, who
have faced an ever more uphill battle to make ends meet off of
steadily declining real wages, "complicit" in the financial fraud and
criminality that have dominated Wall Street, generating obscene
fortunes for those at the top, while dragging the economy into ruin?
This neither Obama nor his right-wing admirers bother to explain.

Absent from Obama's speech was any reference to the most salient
feature of modern-day American life: the uninterrupted growth in
social inequality. Only by deliberately ignoring the reality of a
society in which the top 1 percent controls 40 percent of the wealth
and where a CEO makes 344 times the income of an average worker could
the Democratic president weave into his speech the false and deeply
reactionary notions of "collective failure" and "equality" of
responsibility.

The meaning of these arguments is unmistakable. The advent of Obama
will signal no reprise of the New Deal or the Great Society. There
will be no revival of social reformism, but rather a turn to fiscal
austerity and counter-reforms directed against what little remains of
a social safety net in America, embodied in such programs as Social
Security and Medicare.

The central political aim of the new administration, like the one
that it is replacing, will be protecting the interests and wealth of
a narrow financial elite, who will be bailed out at the expense of
millions of American workers and their families.

As this policy unfolds—and as the economic crisis deepens—the media
attempts to cast Barack Obama as the personal embodiment of change
will inevitably fall flat. The reality that the new American
president is an utterly conventional politician, the product of a
corrupt political machine and the faithful servant of the financial
and corporate interests that funded his election campaign will begin
to set in.

At that point, the stark contradiction between the aspirations and
objective interests of the large numbers of working people on the
Washington Mall Tuesday and the class nature of the Obama
administration will find its expression in the eruption of social
struggles directed against this government itself.