2009-03-04 Obama's Violin

• when: 2009/03/04 (2009/03/04)
• author: Paul Street
• source: Black Agenda Report
• topics: Barack Obama/criticism American oligarchy
• URL: http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/obamas-violin-whos-playing-whos-being-played
• title: Obama's Violin: Who's Playing, Who's Being Played?
• summary: «This article reviews Barack Obama's record since the day of his election. That record, we shall see, is deeply consistent with his record-setting corporate election funding, including more than $900,000 from Goldman Sachs and $37.5 million from "FIRE" (the finance, real estate, and insurance industries), and with the fact that, like George W. Bush in 2004, small donors (people giving a total of $200 or less) accounted for just a quarter of his total campaign finance haul.»

Excerpt

It matches former Clinton administration official David Rothkopf's early post-election observation that Obama was following the "violin model: you hold power with the left hand and you play the music with the right."

It fits New Yorker writer Larissa MacFarquhar's description (in May of 2007) of Obama as a "deeply conservative" individual who "values continuity and stability for their own sake, sometimes even more than he values change for the good" and Ryan Lizza's portrait (also in The New Yorker, in July of 2008) of Obama as someone who has been "marked" at "every stage of his political career" by "an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions."