If Only They'd Hissed Barack Obama

What a contrast between the French demonstrations and the vast and exciting marches here against proposed immigration laws, as against the limp turnouts against the US war on Iraq!

Across a few explosive weeks the first two series of protests have surged up in numbers and political impact. In France there were a million on the streets. Just in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago, half a million. In Paris Dominique de Villepin, the author of the hated law loosening curbs on employers' right to fire new hires, is fighting for his political life. In Congress, US senators revised the language of their bill in step with the magnitude and passion of the rallies.

Meanwhile, though two out of three here in the USA disapprove of the war in Iraq, there's no energetic political leadership from above, no irresistible shove from below.

Reason? There's no draft. There's no reason to fear that your number will come up and in a few months you'll be in a truck on a road outside Baghdad, waiting for some sort of bomb or missile to blow you apart. No draft, hence no burgeoning antiwar movement, going from strength to strength, terrorizing the politicians. What's the degree of separation between most of us and the 120,000 US military in Iraq? My accountant, who has monitored my relations with the IRS for the past 24 years, just told me his son, whom I knew to be in the USMC, is in Fallujah, with seven months to go. My friend Bill Broyles' son David has served two tours there. There are also the parents in Military Families Speak Out I share platforms with.

So how do we narrow the degrees of separation? By vets counseling students against enlisting, by inviting the parents in MFSO to speak locally against the war. Remember, the antiwar movement reached its peak last year because Cindy Sheehan connected millions to the war. Also--this is crucial--her vigil outside Crawford allowed for buildup. She didn't fold her tent in a day. There was a five-day buildup in Seattle, in the great anti-WTO battles there, in 1999. UPFJ has a peace rally in New York scheduled for April 29. The war's coming home indeed, in the form of people dreadfully wounded in body and spirit. Thousands of tragedies that will unwind, often violently, for years to come. But for now, for the most part, it's pictures on TV, not tears and terror on the hearthrug.

The Democrats in Congress aren't too worried about pressure from their antiwar constituents, even though the mere possibility of a primary challenge by Cindy Sheehan put the wind up Diane Feinstein. The awful six-termer, Jane Harman, faces a primary challenge from Marcy Winograd in Southern California, after a couple of unions defied orders and endorsed Winograd. Meanwhile, at the other end of the country in Connecticut, Senator Joe Lieberman faced a decidedly cool audience at a big Democratic dinner at the end of March and got bailed out by his brother senator from Illinois, Barack Obama, who told the crowd to haul out their check books and make sure Lieberman gets returned for another term.

What kind of a signal is this? Here is Obama, endlessly hailed as the brightest rising star in the Democratic firmament, delivering (at a closely watched political dinner, with Lieberman's primary opponent, Ned Lamont, sitting in the crowd) a ringing endorsement to his "mentor," Lieberman, Bush's closest Democratic ally on the war in Iraq, and overall pretty much a symbol of everything that's been wrong with the Democratic Party for the past 20 years. What a slimy fellow Obama is, as befits a man symbolizing everything that will continue to be wrong with the Democratic Party for the next 20 years. Every time I look up he's doing something disgusting, like distancing himself from his fellow senator Dick Durbin for denouncing the torture center at Guantanamo, or cheerleading the nuke-Iran crowd.

How many degrees of separation do I have from people without green cards, people who just come across the border, people awaiting relatives coming across the borders, the guy behind the bar in an Irish pub, the fellow in the gas station, the woman at the cash register?

It's a one degree world, same as it is in France, where two-thirds of all French people don't want a society where the thin end of the wedge is a young people getting the boot as soon as they get within eyesight of some form of job security, and the thick end is the familiar terrain of adult employment in the US job market today in many states: zero protection, zero safety net, zero union representation, zero pension and zero health benefits. It's why illegal immigration is functional for US capitalism and why, when the Republicans have milked the nativist vote through next November, we'll see some sort of bracero program in place.

Try to pass a bill--as the House of Representatives is now doing--that makes a significant chunk of the population co-conspirators in the commission of a felony, and you're going to get some action, and so they did: student walkouts that have put maybe 1.5 million on the streets in the past few weeks. Out of these rallies and marches and tussles with the school authorities and cops will come some of the leaders and organizers of the next 20 or 30 years. This has been their baptism of fire.

The horrible part of the story is that this is a moment when the antiwar movement should be at full effective stretch. A couple of weeks ago Tony Swindell, a newspaper editor in north Texas, wrote to me as follows: "Begin paying attention to stories from Iraq like the very recent one about US Marines killing a group of civilians near Baghdad. This is the next step in the Iraq war as frustration among our soldiers grow--especially with multiple tours. I served in Vietnam with the 11th Light Infantry Brigade, Americal Division, and My Lai was not an isolated incident. We came to be known as the Butcher's Brigade, and we also were the birthplace of the Phoenix Program.

"There's a numbness in my guts as I see the same nightmares becoming reality again in Iraq and I wonder what's happened to America's soul. Is this what we want, another generation suckled on the poison of another renegade leadership? Gooks have become ragheads, every adult male is an insurgent eligible for torture and every Iraqi home filled with men, women, and children is a free-fire zone. The atrocities against Iraqi civilians are slipping under the media radar screen, but they're going to explode in America's face not too long from now."

There is some sort of slow motion, semi-mutiny going on in the Democratic Party in bits of the country at the moment, and much of its rather tepid steam comes from the antiwar movement, aghast at the complicity of so much of the Democratic leadership in the war. But set the tempo of this mutiny next to what has been happening in France or on the streets of Los Angeles, and like Swindell one feels numbness in one's guts. The peace movement hasn't got fire in its belly. If it had, Obama, the rising star, would have passed up the invitation to go pitch for Lieberman, and two-thirds of the crowd would have hissed him when he did. As things are, they gave the new star a big cheer, instead of treating him the way the folks in Lancashire did Condoleezza Rice.