The More Things Change

A nice post at EconoSpeak pokes some serious holes in Obama's message of unity and change by looking at his intellectual roots. EconoSpeak notes that one of Obama's main advisers is Cass Sunstein, a well-known constitutional scholar at University of Chicago. Sunstein has been aggressive in his defense of Obama, lodging numerous interpretations and ripostes in defense of Hope's Messenger. I already commented on the conservatism of Obama's 'visionary minimalism,' but when one starts to put together his team of 'intellectuals' one really does wonder about the 'change' he speaks of. Sunstein is not just a pragmatist, he also supports some of the most retrograde aspects of the jurisprudence around the war on terror. For instance, he supports the idea of 'unlawful combatants,' under which individuals can be indefinitely detained and tried by military tribunals, even though this designation arises out of a hideous, pathetic and bizarre Supreme Court decision (ex Parte Quirin) from World War II. Indeed, in his letter to the American Prospect linked to above, Sunstein makes no effort to address how badly decided ex Parte Quirin was, and how awful the parallel case, In re Yamashita, also was. Sunstein hides behind the idea that 'this is what the law says' to defend his basic argument that "President Bush's choice stands on firm legal ground insofar as he seeks to use military commissions to try people who planned and participated in the September 11 attacks (and similar actions)." We are, of course, seeing the fruits of these military commissions now. As with the original case, ex Parte Quirin, these commissions are designed not to bring criminals to justice, but to cover the government's ass and conceal misdeeds (especially, in this case, evidence acquired by torture.)

Sunstein's judicial pragmatism doesn't look so much like the good kind of unity so much as an unwillingness to rock the boat. As EconoSpeak notes in his criticism of Obama's unity message, there is a bland 'willingness to listen to all sides' and then there is a real diversity that comes with the clash of all kinds of opinions: "We need to really extend the conversation to the vast regions beyond the pale of approved discourse. The resulting zone of consensus will be moderate by the standards of intelligent human thought but extreme with respect the political constraints we live under today."

This is exactly what Obama will not do. Indeed, for all of those anti-war lefties who think Obama is also the messenger of Peace, they might think about his intellectual inspiration in foreign policy. Samantha Power
one of the most dogged, unflagging defenders of humanitarian intervention, was personally tapped by Obama to advise him on foreign policy. Alongside the leftover bits and pieces from Bill Clinton's neoliberal, humanitarian foreign policy team, Power's inspiration is not so much change for the future as throwback to the 1990s - that period of sanctions, inspections and continuous bombing of Iraq, as well as interventions in Somalia, Haiti, ex-Yugoslavia.

If Obama's current intellectual inspirators are anything to go on, the more things change, the more they will stay the same.