IX: Obama’s Triumph of the Will: The 2008 Primaries 317that might be a foreign policy manifesto for Barack Obama... The most intriguing part of
Brzezinski’s book is what I would describe as the Obama manifesto. (David Ignatius, “A Manifesto
for the Next President,” Washington Post, March 14, 2007) It has also long been known that Zbig
does the thinking for Obama; the London Economist last year hailed “a new brain for Barack
Obama! It’s 78 years old and it still works perfectly. It belongs to Zbigniew Brzezinski, the peppery
ex-national security adviser to Jimmy Carter.” (“A New Brain for Barack Obama, Economist.com,
March 14, 2007) Obama’s campaign has long been attacking Bush from the right, criticizing the
current regime for not exploiting 9/11 to impose savage economic austerity, as seen in Samantha
Power’s “monster” interview. We now have good evidence that Obama will flay the American
people alive with his elitist economic policies. Obama had committed a major error by showing his
hand. Would voters react in time to stop him?
OBAMAKINS AND NEOCONS SUPPORT THE SAVIOR
One area where Obama enjoyed strong support was at the arch-reactionary, Rockefeller-funded
University of Chicago, and especially among the neocons of the law school there. A middleman
between these neocons and the Obama campaign was evidently Cass Sunstein, who was considered
something of an antiwar liberal. Sunstein expressed his support for Obama in oblique but
unmistakable terms: ‘The University of Chicago Law School is by far the most conservative of the
great American law schools. It helped to provide the academic foundations for many positions of
the Reagan administration. But at the University of Chicago, Obama is liked and admired by
Republicans and Democrats alike. Some of the local Reagan enthusiasts are Obama supporters... he
appreciates the virtues and power of free markets. I do not deny that skeptics are raising legitimate
questions. After all, Obama has served in the Senate for a short period (less than four years) and he
has little managerial experience. Is he really equipped to lead the most powerful nation in the
world? Obama speaks of “change”, but will he be able to produce large-scale changes in a short
time? What if he fails? An independent issue is that all the enthusiasm might serve to insulate him
from criticisms and challenges on the part of his own advisers — and, in view of his relative youth,
criticisms and challenges are exactly what he requires.’ (Cass Sunstein, Huffington Post, March 5,
2008)
TEXAS: OBAMA PLAYS THE RACE CARD ONCE AGAIN
Obama confesses in his memoirs that he has a very good understanding of how the race card can
be used by a black candidate in an election where white votes were also important; he cites the
example of Chicago’s first black mayor, Harold Washington: ‘Black politicians less gifted than
Harold discovered what white politicians had known for a very long time: that race-baiting could
make up for a host of limitations. Young leaders, eager to make a name for themselves, upped the
ante, peddling conspiracy theories all over town - the Koreans were funding the Klan, Jewish
doctors were injecting black babies with the AIDS virus. It was a short cut to fame, if not always
fortune; like sex, or violence on TV, black rage always found a ready market.’(Dreams 203) Obama
himself played the race card with brutality, but under a mask of moderation; he also knew the
importance of letting his surrogates and backers do a lot of this dirty work. One example is
Obama’s response to Clinton’s Texas television ad about the 3 AM phone call to the White House,
which was meant to raise doubts about Obama’s reliability in national security emergencies. Obama
found a bizarre surrogate who was able to turn the whole thing into a race issue, where Obama
thought he had the advantage: The Clinton campaign had produced a television ad which depicted a
family scene with parents watching over their sleeping children. Then the camera shifted to the