[Fresh Ink] An Open Letter to Barack Obama from Ralph Nader

[Richard Menec]

An Open Letter to Barack Obama

Between Hope and Reality

By RALPH NADER

Dear Senator Obama:

In your nearly two-year presidential campaign, the words "hope and change," 
"change and hope" have been your trademark declarations. Yet there is an 
asymmetry between those objectives and your political character that 
succumbs to contrary centers of power that want not "hope and change" but 
the continuation of the power-entrenched status quo.

Far more than Senator McCain, you have received enormous, unprecedented 
contributions from corporate interests, Wall Street interests and, most 
interestingly, big corporate law firm attorneys. Never before has a 
Democratic nominee for President achieved this supremacy over his Republican 
counterpart. Why, apart from your unconditional vote for the $700 billion 
Wall Street bailout, are these large corporate interests investing so much 
in Senator Obama? Could it be that in your state Senate record, your U.S. 
Senate record and your presidential campaign record (favoring nuclear power, 
coal plants, offshore oil drilling, corporate subsidies including the 1872 
Mining Act and avoiding any comprehensive program to crack down on the 
corporate crime wave and the bloated, wasteful military budget, for example) 
you have shown that you are their man?

To advance change and hope, the presidential persona requires character, 
courage, integrity-- not expediency, accommodation and short-range 
opportunism. Take, for example, your transformation from an articulate 
defender of Palestinian rights in Chicago before your run for the U.S. 
Senate to an acolyte, a dittoman for the hard-line AIPAC lobby, which 
bolsters the militaristic oppression, occupation, blockage, colonization and 
land-water seizures over the years of the Palestinian peoples and their 
shrunken territories in the West Bank and Gaza. Eric Alterman summarized 
numerous polls in a December 2007 issue of The Nation magazine showing that 
AIPAC policies are opposed by a majority of Jewish-Americans.

You know quite well that only when the U.S. Government supports the Israeli 
and Palestinian peace movements, that years ago worked out a detailed 
two-state solution (which is supported by a majority of Israelis and 
Palestinians), will there be a chance for a peaceful resolution of this 
60-year plus conflict. Yet you align yourself with the hard-liners, so much 
so that in your infamous, demeaning speech to the AIPAC convention right 
after you gained the nomination of the Democratic Party, you supported an 
"undivided Jerusalem," and opposed negotiations with Hamas-- the elected 
government in Gaza. Once again, you ignored the will of the Israeli people 
who, in a March 1, 2008 poll by the respected newspaper Haaretz, showed that 
64% of Israelis favored "direct negotiations with Hamas." Siding with the 
AIPAC hard-liners is what one of the many leading Palestinians advocating 
dialogue and peace with the Israeli people was describing when he wrote 
"Anti-semitism today is the persecution of Palestinian society by the 
Israeli state."

During your visit to Israel this summer, you scheduled a mere 45 minutes of 
your time for Palestinians with no news conference, and no visit to 
Palestinian refugee camps that would have focused the media on the 
brutalization of the Palestinians. Your trip supported the illegal, cruel 
blockade of Gaza in defiance of international law and the United Nations 
charter. You focused on southern Israeli casualties which during the past 
year have totaled one civilian casualty to every 400 Palestinian casualties 
on the Gaza side. Instead of a statesmanship that decried all violence and 
its replacement with acceptance of the Arab League's 2002 proposal to permit 
a viable Palestinian state within the 1967 borders in return for full 
economic and diplomatic relations between Arab countries and Israel, you 
played the role of a cheap politician, leaving the area and Palestinians 
with the feeling of much shock and little awe.

David Levy, a former Israeli peace negotiator, described your trip 
succinctly: "There was almost a willful display of indifference to the fact 
that there are two narratives here. This could serve him well as a 
candidate, but not as a President."

Palestinian American commentator, Ali Abunimah, noted that Obama did not 
utter a single criticism of Israel, "of its relentless settlement and wall 
construction, of the closures that make life unlivable for millions of 
Palestinians. ...Even the Bush administration recently criticized Israeli's 
use of cluster bombs against Lebanese civilians [see www.atfl.org for 
elaboration]. But Obama defended Israeli's assault on Lebanon as an exercise 
of its 'legitimate right to defend itself.'"

In numerous columns Gideon Levy, writing in Haaretz, strongly criticized the 
Israeli government's assault on civilians in Gaza, including attacks on "the 
heart of a crowded refugee camp... with horrible bloodshed" in early 2008.

Israeli writer and peace advocate-- Uri Avnery-- described Obama's 
appearance before AIPAC as one that "broke all records for obsequiousness 
and fawning, adding that Obama "is prepared to sacrifice the most basic 
American interests. After all, the US has a vital interest in achieving an 
Israeli-Palestinian peace that will allow it to find ways to the hearts of 
the Arab masses from Iraq to Morocco. Obama has harmed his image in the 
Muslim world and mortgaged his future-- if and when he is elected 
president.," he said, adding, "Of one thing I am certain: Obama's 
declarations at the AIPAC conference are very, very bad for peace. And what 
is bad for peace is bad for Israel, bad for the world and bad for the 
Palestinian people."

A further illustration of your deficiency of character is the way you turned 
your back on the Muslim-Americans in this country. You refused to send 
surrogates to speak to voters at their events. Having visited numerous 
churches and synagogues, you refused to visit a single Mosque in America. 
Even George W. Bush visited the Grand Mosque in Washington D.C. after 9/11 
to express proper sentiments of tolerance before a frightened major 
religious group of innocents.

Although the New York Times published a major article on June 24, 2008 
titled "Muslim Voters Detect a Snub from Obama" (by Andrea Elliott), citing 
examples of your aversion to these Americans who come from all walks of 
life, who serve in the armed forces and who work to live the American dream. 
Three days earlier the International Herald Tribune published an article by 
Roger Cohen titled "Why Obama Should Visit a Mosque." None of these comments 
and reports change your political bigotry against Muslim-Americans-- even 
though your father was a Muslim from Kenya.

Perhaps nothing illustrated your utter lack of political courage or even the 
mildest version of this trait than your surrendering to demands of the 
hard-liners to prohibit former president Jimmy Carter from speaking at the 
Democratic National Convention. This is a tradition for former presidents 
and one accorded in prime time to Bill Clinton this year.

Here was a President who negotiated peace between Israel and Egypt, but his 
recent book pressing the dominant Israeli superpower to avoid Apartheid of 
the Palestinians and make peace was all that it took to sideline him. 
Instead of an important address to the nation by Jimmy Carter on this 
critical international problem, he was relegated to a stroll across the 
stage to "tumultuous applause," following a showing of a film about the 
Carter Center's post-Katrina work. Shame on you, Barack Obama!

But then your shameful behavior has extended to many other areas of American 
life. (See the factual analysis by my running mate, Matt Gonzalez, on 
www.votenader.org). You have turned your back on the 100-million poor 
Americans composed of poor whites, African-Americans, and Latinos. You 
always mention helping the "middle class" but you omit, repeatedly, mention 
of the "poor" in America.

Should you be elected President, it must be more than an unprecedented 
upward career move following a brilliantly unprincipled campaign that spoke 
"change" yet demonstrated actual obeisance to the concentration power of the 
"corporate supremacists." It must be about shifting the power from the few 
to the many. It must be a White House presided over by a black man who does 
not turn his back on the downtrodden here and abroad but challenges the 
forces of greed, dictatorial control of labor, consumers and taxpayers, and 
the militarization of foreign policy. It must be a White House that is 
transforming of American politics-- opening it up to the public funding of 
elections (through voluntary approaches)-- and allowing smaller candidates 
to have a chance to be heard on debates and in the fullness of their now 
restricted civil liberties. Call it a competitive democracy.

Your presidential campaign again and again has demonstrated cowardly stands. 
"Hope" some say springs eternal." But not when "reality" consumes it daily.

Sincerely, Ralph Nader

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