VI. Grabbing a Senate Seat with a Little Help from his Trilateral Friends 235that prompted him to restore the antiwar speech on his web site, though not as prominently as
before, the same antiwar speech which is now touted as evidence of his early and consistent
opposition to the war. Our three “bright line” questions invited him to distinguish himself as an
authentic progressive on single-payer national health care, on the war in Iraq, and on NAFTA.
And it was our public exposure of the fact and implications of the DLC’s embrace of Obama’s
career which caused him to explicitly renounce any formal ties with the Democratic Leadership
Council. We didn’t do it because we were haters. We were doing our duty as agitators. (Glenn
Ford, “How We Held Obama’s Feet to the Fire in 2003,” The Black Agenda Report)^95
In the fall of 2006, accompanied by the leading black journalists Bruce Dixon, Margaret
Kimberley and Leutisha Sills of CBC Monitor, Glenn Ford left the Black Commentator which he
had co-founded and edited since 2002, and launched Black Agenda Report. The Black Commentator
continued under Bill Fletcher as executive editor. Fletcher is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for
Policy Studies, an important focus of the left wing of the US intelligence community, and the
immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum, a group linked with reparations advocate Randall
Robinson. It would appear that the issue of provoking this split was specifically whether or not to
support Obama for the presidency. Glenn Ford, for his part, has continued to maintain a critical
stance in regard to the Illinois Senator, while Fletcher has gone as far as the traffic will bear in the
direction of backing Obama. Here is Fletcher’s recent quasi-endorsement of Obama:
My conclusion, and I offer this with great caution, is that critical support for Obama is the
correct approach to take. Yet this really does mean critical support. It means, among other
things, that Senator Obama needs to be challenged on his views regarding the Middle East; he
must be pushed beyond his relatively pale position on Cuba to denounce the blockade; he must
be pushed to advance a genuinely progressive view on the rebuilding of the Gulf Coast and the
right of return for the Katrina evacuees; and he must be pushed to support single payer
healthcare. As I emphasized in an earlier commentary, it is up to the grassroots to keep the
candidates honest. Silence, in the name of unity, is a recipe for betrayal. What we have to keep
in mind is something very simple: the other side, i.e., the political Right, always keeps the
pressure on. If we do not pressure, in fact, if we do not demand, the reality is that the Right will
come out on top. To do the right thing, we must assess and appreciate Senator Obama for who
he is and what he is - politically - rather than engage in wishful thinking. To do anything else is
to be disingenuous to our friends and our base. Senator Obama, if elected President, will be
unlikely to reveal himself to have been a closeted progressive. Yet, with pressure from the base,
he may be compelled to do some of what is needed, despite himself and despite pressures to the
contrary. (Bill Fletcher, Jr., The Black Commentator)OBAMA IN 2004: BOMB IRAN – AND PAKISTAN
Already in the 2004 Senate race, Obama displayed the incongruous and bizarre combination of
nominal opposition to the Iraq war, while explicitly recommending a much wider regional
conflagration involving Iran and Pakistan, amounting essentially to the beginnings of a new world
war. Obama expounded his war plans to the editorial board of the Chicago Tribune in late
September 2004:
U.S. Senate candidate Barack Obama suggested Friday that the United States one day might
have to launch surgical missile strikes into Iran and Pakistan to keep extremists from getting
control of nuclear bombs. Obama said the United States must first address Iran’s attempt to gain
nuclear capabilities by going before the United Nations Security Council and lobbying the