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/]