| BARACK OBAMA And the Future of American Politics Paul Street Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2008 |
Rating: 4.5 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-1-59451-631-3 | ||||
| ISBN-10 ? | 280pp. | HC | $23.95 | |
| Page x: | "The 'Obama phenomenon' to date, this book shows, is richly continuous with previous centrist Democratic presidencies and presidential campaigns..." |
| It seems that "rich" or "richly" is Mr. Street's favorite modifier. |
| Page xv: | "...the Deomocratic Party's politics..." |
| Spelling: S/B "Democratic". |
| Page xxiv: | "'Reasonable tone' was code language with a useful translation for Obama's new elite business-class backers: friendly to capitalism and its opulent masters." |
| "Opulent" seems the wrong word here. |
| Page xxxii: | "Along the way, as the Obama campaign has known quite well, the nation's hyper-potent corporate media consistently has had more control..." |
| Number error: S/B "have had". |
| Page xxxiv: | "Chomsky's perceptive observation of the 2004 presidential election holds rich relevance for previous and subsequent "quadrennial electoral extravaganzas" in the United States." |
| Again with the "richness". |
| Page xxxvi: | "The 'Obama phenomenon' to date, this book shows, is richly continuous with previous centrist Democratic presidencies and presidential campaigns..." |
| These two commas are not needed. |
| Page 57: | "His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community..." |
| This is OK if "bootstrap" is an adjective. I've only seen it used as noun or verb. |
| Page 70: | "Obama's perpheral relationship with Chicago education professor Bill Ayers, a former 1960s radical..." |
| Spelling: S/B "peripheral". |
| Page 70: | "This interesting statement, richly loaded with ideological and policy meaning..." |
| If I drank half a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue, I would be richly loaded. |
| Page 80: | "Keeping the provisos that the future remains open and contingent and that a President Obama could be more progressive than candidate Obama, in this chapter I examine Obama's record to suggest that it probably would." |
| This is ambiguous. I think Street means "that it probably would not." For his very next sentence is: "Even as he won large majorities of black votes in the Democratic presidential primaries, Obama has given racial justice advocates a large number of reasons to question how committed he is to racial equality and to suspect that his concept of racial justice tends to abandon nonaffluent and truly disadvantaged blacks in favor of more privileged African Americans who, like himself, have benefitted from the past victories of the Civil Rights Movement." |
| Page 92: | "Roy Brooks' surplus poker chips are irrelevant hangovers from 'days gone by.' They are weapons of racial oppression in the present and future." |
| This is contradictory. Something that is irrelevant cannot be a weapon. Perhaps there's a word missing from the first sentence. |
| Page 187: | "Barack Obama... could make all the populist-sounding primary-campaign noise he wished in Iowa about Maytag's terrible abandonment of working families in Galesburg." |
| Galesburg is in Illinois, not Iowa. Nothing prevents Obama from speaking about lost jobs wherever he is (and they are.) But it seems unusual that Obama (or any campaigner) would refer to the troubles of a neighboring state this way. It's also unclear from the text when Obama made this statement. Galesburg's Maytag plant did close — in September 2004, two years after the company announced it would ship those jobs to Mexico and Iowa. Maytag in fact was founded in Newton, Iowa but rival whirlpool acquired the company in April 2006 and a month later announced it was closing down Newton operations. See Galesburg Maytag plant shuts down in the Newton Daily News archive of Maytag stories. |
| Page 189: | "People from within that opulent and highly class-conscious category of Americans..." |
| Opulent again... |
| Page 197: | "Here liberal and progressives can learn from the right..." |
| Typo: S/B "liberals". |
| Page 199: | "...the party's most genuinely progressive viable candidate..." |
| Clumsy word order: S/B "most viable genuinely progressive candidate". |
| Page 207: | "...along with Obama's visage and video splices from his victory speech before eighteen thousand raucous fans in Saint Paul, Minnesota's Xcel Energy Center..." |
| Oy! Obama delivered his victory speech at the Democratic convention, and the Democratic convention was held in Denver, Colorado. (I put this goof down to campaign-reporting fatigue.) |
| Page 217: | "He would rescind U.S. support for such state-terrorist allies in the so-called U.S. Global War on Terror as Saudi Arabia and Columbia..." |
| I'm sure this S/B "Colombia". |
| Page 222: | Compare "...noted Left social critic Charles Derber..." with "The left sociologist Kim Scipes..." |
| Inconsistent capitalization (or else some folks are more Left than others...) |
| Page 277: | "hidden primary, 174, 189, 199." |
| Index error: the term also appears on page xv of the Preface. |
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