Adolph Reed is perhaps one of America’s most incisive thinkers, scholars and activist. However, when one thinks of today’s black public intellectuals, unlike Henry Louis Gates, Cornel West or Michael Eric Dyson, on the left, or Shelby Steel or John McWhorter or Thomas Sowell, on the right, Reed’s name infrequently comes up. Despite being an author of several books and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and activist, he is often under the radar. This is due to the fact that unlike the aforementioned “market intellectuals” who either sell attitude or provide glib rationalizations for audiences that have become markets, Reed tries to inform people of what they really need to know rather than what they what they want to hear.

In the May 2008 issue of The Progressive magazine, in which he writes a monthly column, he offered a trenchant argument regarding Barack Obama. We spoke for about forty-five minutes one Wednesday morning.

Norman Kelley: You have taken a pretty tough position on Obama. You have termed him: (a) “vacuous opportunist”; (b) a “performer with a good ear for how to make white liberals like him”; and then described him as: (c) a “neo-liberal.” Let’s go over those in some detail. If you hadn’t met him directly, you were in Chicago the same time that Obama came on the scene, right?

Adolph Reed: Right. I’d worked closely with his opponent [Alice Palmer] on the [Illinois] state race, who was the incumbent. There a set of unfortunate dynamics that played out there, which I don’t want to bore readers with, but we wind up having some negotiations with him. She had actually introduced him around as her successor and, primarily at the urging of people like myself and others in her inner circle, she decided to take back her commitment and hold onto her state senate seat.

So we were around the Obama people, as well as his broad camp of supporters at Hyde Park, there were a couple of fairly open meetings where we tried to discuss a way of solving this issue and couldn’t. And it turns out that what Obama did was get her thrown off the ballot by challenging her signature petitions.

That’s one interesting thing about Obama; he’s only had one real opponent for elective office prior to this [campaign] and that’s when he ran against Bobby Rush for a congressional seat and lost very, very badly.

Kelley: You also called him a performer who has a good ear for how to make white liberals like him. What’s your example of that?

Reed: Well, I guess the way I would put it in a different context is that he has a talent, and I think maybe his greatest talent, for saying enough of what the constituency that he’s talking to at the moment want to hear and saying it persuasively that he can leave them believing that’s he with them, while at the same time packing enough qualifiers so that he can deny the next day that’s what he’s actually meant. We saw him do that in the AIPAC speech even though he didn’t pack the qualifiers around it. He was very clear that Jerusalem should be the capital of Israel, and he said a couple of days later, “Oh, no, that’s not exactly what I meant.”

Kelley:  That sounds like a talent that people said about Bill Clinton.

Reed: Absolutely. He’s a black fulfillment of Clintonism, and I should put that in a different way: he is a fulfillment of Clintonism so thoroughly partly because he is black, at least nominally. Because you remember, Clinton, at least for some of us, had this infuriating practice and knack for connecting emotionally, or emotively, with black audiences. So he gets props for being able to connective emotively with a black audience while at the same time speaking through the black audience to a white racist audience, ultimately, telling black people they needed to take personal responsibility. He shilled for that hideous crime bill at a black church in Memphis and that kind of thing, and Obama can get a way with being even more vicious and victim blaming than Clinton because he is black.

And he’s done that consistently as well; the Philadelphia speech, the Houston speech where he’s going about “We have to stop feeding our children Popeye’s Chicken for breakfast,” the haughtiness at the NAACP. As I said in another interview last week, I might accept that this isn’t beating up on a racialized imagery of the black underclass, that’s attacking poor black people in a victim-blaming way, if he would go and tell the hedge fund operators that he talks to that that shouldn’t feed their kids the equivalent of Popeye’s Chicken in the morning or they need to be responsible fathers.

Kelley: You also used the term neo-liberal to describe him. Let’s explore that.

Reed: This connects in a certain way because what Obama has to offer is not a policy program that addresses inequality; he never talks about inequality. He’s talk about opportunity and responsibility…

Kelley: Which are Republican talking points…

Reed: …If you noticed when he met with evangelicals a few weeks ago, he pledged to them he would give them more HHS [Health and Human Services] and HUD [Housing and Urban Development] budget because government can’t solve the problems that afflict poor communities in inner cities. And this has been part of his rap from the very beginning, this line that structural problems are too big, that real solutions come the neighborhood, grassroots and from churches
and NGOs, and that’s like a hallmark of neo-liberalism.

In his meeting with evangelicals he got behind all the faith-based stuff; he basically gave them a promise to give them more of the budget than the Bush administration had while reiterating the claim that government can’t provide social services effectively. He has never taken a position on any kind of redistribution and his fiscal and economic policies are, as [New York Times columnist] Paul Krugman has pointed out, were to the right of Clinton who had begun as the DLC’s standard bearer. His foreign policy is no less imperialist than Bush’s foreign policy. Like Kerry before him, his argument is that the war on terrorism hasn’t been fought efficiently enough. He’s on record for wanting to expand it; to redeploy troops to Iraq to Afghanistan and even into Pakistan.

What’s interesting about this is that I noticed that Tom Hayden, who been slurping down that Kool-Aide on an IV for sometime, seemed to notice last month finally that Barack Obama wants to expand the war. Well, Obama said that more than a year ago. I mentioned that in my November column in the Progressive. So one of the things that is interesting and mind-boggling, and I don’t mean interesting in a good way, is the will to believe in Obama even from people whose political identification is with the left, liberal-left and have been for sometime.

Kelley: So, you don’t see the Obama campaign as a potential opportunity, opening a door, for progressive forces to set the national agenda?

Reed: Well, I know one isn’t, technically, suppose to answer a question with a question, but I’ll start out with one. If we can’t get him to pay attention to us now when he needs our votes, why do we think he’ll pay attention to us when he’s elected, if he’s elected? I’m feeling less and less likely that he’ll be elected. This is like the logic of the 2 a.m. booty call. We’re saying in effect, “Well, I know he’s always out in public with her and he seems happy, but he’s told me that he really wants be with me.” There’s no reason to believe past a certain point that if this is what he does, this is what he really will do.

Kelley: So, what does this say about left of center, progressive organizing? The left doesn’t seem to be able to make politicians pay attention to issue it considers important, so the left is forced to go along with the lesser of two evils. There doesn’t seem to be any substantive organizing on the left.  This has been the most organized that the left has been in a while. What’s been going on?

Reed: Well, I think you hit the nail on its head. The election season is too late to think about; it’s already happened.  It’s a little bit like what happens with these urban renewal projects: by the time we find out about them, it’s too late to do anything about them except to try and find some way to negotiate the best possible terms of surrender, and this is the way this election stuff is.

[To read the full interview, go to www.devilsadvocatedivision.blogspot.com/]