Barack Obama and Loretta Lynn
“Transformational Politics”... That's what we desperately need today. And that was the title of a 250-page treatise that young Barack Obama co-wrote in the early 1990s when he was a student at Harvard Law School. Thanks to a forthcoming book by historian Timothy Sherik (excerpted in the Sunday New York Times), we know that young Obama had a radical vision for transforming the Democratic Party and American politics, inspired by the gay, ex-Communist, civil rights leader Bayard Rustin.
Rustin had a class-based vision for reviving the New Deal coalition of working-class whites and racial minorities, calling it "the March on Washington coalition," even though the other organizers of that legendary 1963 protest (which featured Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have Dream" speech) shunted Rustin to the side because of his radical and sexual politics.
Like Rustin, young Obama believed that America's racial and cultural fractures were exploited by Republicans. The way around this was to put class interest first, uniting working people against the power elite rather than dividing them. Today, as Sherik points out, taxes aimed at the super wealthy, labor unions and a livable minimum wage are hugely popular issues with the American people. While phony Trumpian populists cling to cutting the capital gains tax, a revived March on Washington coalition would eat the rich -- and thereby undercut Trump's white nationalist appeal.
But instead of taking the political path to solid majority rule that he laid out as a law student, President Obama sold out working people of all colors, continuing Bill Clinton's disastrous Wall Street tilt and filling his administration with banksters like Larry Summers and Timothy Geithner. Obama said later that he also learned about "the intricacies of power" at Harvard.
Too bad that Obama, who was so good at quoting 1960s revolutionaries like King, didn't take to heart a line from Italian novelist Ignazio Silone that Tom Hayden was fond of quoting: "What would happen if men remained loyal to the ideals of their youth?"
Today Obama and his wife, Michelle, are bringing a biopic on Bayard Rustin to the Netflix screen. But they are doing nothing to advance Rustin's working-class vision within the Democratic Party.
Last week, the media celebrated the life of country singer Loretta Lynn, who died at age 90. I know nothing about Lynn's politics. But she was a strong woman, a coal miner's daughter. The Democratic Party should be attracting her hard-scrabble fans, too, in a March on Washington coalition that brings together working people of all colors.
