We note with some surprise the Obama campaign’s adoption of the word Forward as its new slogan.
The word has, of course, been a rallying cry of socialists and Marxists for a very long time — so much so that Wikipedia even has an entry about it.
Perhaps this indicates a refreshing frankness on the part of the campaign, a willingness to fly their true colors, so that voters can make a genuinely informed choice — to call, as it were, a spade a spade, on the assumption that socialism is in fact what a lot of Mr. Obama’s essential coalition actually wants.
At the very least: as dog whistles go, that’s a pretty low-frequency one.
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“Forward” is also the command you would expect to hear from one who leads from behind.
Forward is also the state motto of Wisconsin.
Who knew that the Badger State is full of Marxists?
Nice logic. Anyway, Wisconsin in fact does have a long history as a center of socialism and Progressivism.
And speaking of Marxism in the Badger State…
As for that slogan, I guess it seemed better than “Barackward!”
The point of this post is that if you are actually worried about people thinking you are a socialist, you don’t use “Forward!” as your motto, not after the long and memorable association it has had with socialist and communist movements. So either the campaign now is willing openly to embrace that, or they are so gormless and ignorant of history as not to realize what they were doing. (I can certainly imagine that the latter is possible.)
Why should they be worried that Obama would be considered a Socialist? He isn’t one.
That’s a silly question, Peter, and you know it.
Not silly at all. Obama is no more a Socialist than he is a Muslim or a Kenyan. Why base a Presidential campaign on those who are untethered to reality?
Socialism is the economic system in which the government controls the means of production and the distribution of goods and services. The Obama administration does neither.
If you want to look at Presidents with Socialist leanings, you might start with FDR, whose wartime
administration controlled the production and distribution of everything from butter to motor oil. Or Truman, who nationalizehe tel industry and seized steel mills. Or Nixon, who instituted wage and price controls.i
Nobody considers these Presidents to be Socialists, because they weren’t. Nor is Obama. He is conflatedo with Socialism only in the minds of those gullible and uninformed individuals who swallow everything they are fed by the right wing attack machine, no matter how incendiary, calumnious, or flat out wrong.
What is truly silly is the notion that the word forward is somehow a secret code word so the Socialist-in-Chief can play pied piper to the proletarian masses. That idea is so silly that no thinking person would dare conceive it.
Yes, it was a silly question, Peter — and now you’ve only compounded it, with a formatory and defensive guard-dog reaction that completely misses the more subtle and important point. It’s disappointing, and I will charitably assume that it’s due to your having written it at two in the morning.
Why? Because what matters in a presidential campaign is not reality, but how people perceive reality. Regardless of whether or not Mr. Obama is in reality some sort of crypto-socialist (a proposition about which I think reasonable people may disagree, though I realize you don’t even agree with that), his task in this campaign is to manage the perceptions of those voters who aren’t already secure in their decision.
Many of those undecided voters, despite seeing a lot to like in Mr. Obama, suspect that the model he imagines for America more closely resembles European socialism than the system of small government and simple laws imagined by the Founders. These voters will be the hinge of this election, and are exactly the ones Mr. Obama needs to win over.
In order to secure their votes, then, Mr. Obama needs to reassure these swing voters that his aim — especially in a lame-duck term in which he need not worry about re-election, and so will have a much freer hand — is not to move America in the direction of bigger government, more central control, more redistribution of wealth, and so on. (And given his relentless tirades against those who have prospered, and given also that his signature political initiative has been to take under government control one-sixth of the nation’s economy, he has good reason to worry about how he is perceived by undecided voters with an aversion to socialism.)
It is therefore exceedingly curious that, of all the possible slogans the President could have adopted at this point in the game, he chose ‘Forward‘, which has been ubiquitously and indelibly associated with socialist and communist movements for a century or more. (Any competent ad agency could have given him dozens of resonant mottoes to choose from, yet he picked this one.) The only reason I wrote this post was to point out that this is obviously a calculated strategic choice, and to reflect on what that indicates. (The depressing alternative, of course, is that the choice was made in complete ignorance of the slogan’s history.)
Let me make sure I have this right. A Presidential campaign should fought on some people’s perception of reality, no matter how divorced from the truth that perception may be. By that logic, when half of Republican primary voters believed the nonsense about Obama’s citizenship, his campaign slogan should have been “I’m an American! I really am!”
Or for those who somehow are able to complain about Obama’s twenty year membership in Reverend Wright’s church, and then complain that he’s really a secret Muslim, his photo ops should all have a crÁ¨che in the background?
Should John Kerry’s campaign slogan have been “I have three purple hearts!” because enough people were fooled by Karl Rove and the swift boaters to believe that he was anything but a war hero?
Obama has never been a Socialist and never will be, but Socialism is a scary word which his opponents throw around with abandon to fool those who don’t know what the word means. Why should Obama get down to their level?
The assertion that using the word forward is “is obviously a calculated strategic choice” because the same word was also used a century ago by a nineteenth century German newspaper — at least according to a Wikipedia entry, which is being considered for deletion — is preposterous. One has to wonder what strategic interest is being served by associating your campaign with a scare word. It is also absurd. By the same logic, the Wisconsin state motto is a dog whistle to Socialists, Bill Gates is appealing to carpenters because he named his product Windows, and Steve Jobs is a farmer.
While Obama has never engaged in “tirades against those who have prospered” — and in fact has routinely praised success — he has advocated raising the top marginal tax rate to where it was under Clinton, which then is mischaracterized by his opponents as class warfare. Nor does Obamacare — whose provenance is those Marxist Leninists at the Heritage Society — “take under government control one-sixth of the nation’s economy” any more than the enactment of Medicare, Medicaid, or VA hospitals did. Regardless of what one may think of Obama’s tax agenda or Obamacare, they have nothing to do with Socialism. A country like Germany has a much more progressive tax rate than anything Obama contemplates, along with much more generous social welfare programs, yet is a leader among the Capitalist developed world.
The larger picture is this: when the right wing held the levers of power under the Bush administration, it screwed the pooch for eight long years: one disastrous war and another bungled one, the loss of American prestige around the world, and the worst economic disaster in eighty years. Now that Obama is actually fixing these problems — combat troops are out of Iraq, Afghanistan is winding down, the economy is on an even keel, and we’re no longer the laughingstock of the world — how are they going to run against him? Not with new ideas: the current Republican platform is not appreciably different than George Bush’s playbook. So they use the right wing media to disseminate demonstrably false propaganda: he’s not a citizen, he’s a Socialist, he goes around the world apologizing to our enemies, and so forth.
As for what Obama will do when “he need not worry about re-election, and so will have a much freer hand:” his opponents have consistently portrayed a dark world when our freedom destroying President will be in his second term. Even though he hasn’t done a single thing about gun control — which his administration can rightly be faulted for — nonetheless the NRA cooks up fears among its followers that come January, government thugs will take away your guns. Somehow the Republican opposition, which is routinely opposed every agendum he has proposed, will acquiesce in allowing our Founding Fathers-hating President to indulge his innermost desire to make us more like North Korea.
The great chess master Aron Nimzovich once complained to a tournament director when his opponent was smoking a cigar. The director had the opponent put out his cigar. Nimzovich complained again. The director asked why. “Because he looks like he wants to smoke.”
Yeah, yeah. [checking watch…]
Peter, if you aren’t aware A) that Forward! has been a socialist/communist motto for a very long time; B) that Mr. Obama, in order to win swing voters, presumably has an interest in countering the perception of himself (whether correct or not) as temperamentally inclined in the direction of socialism; and C) that in light of those two very simple points it is politically interesting that he chose this historically freighted slogan instead of a zillion other possibilities — which, I must remind you again, was the only point of this post — then we have nothing more to talk about here.
You can fulminate all you want about how Mr. Obama is no socialist, how awful the Bush administration was, what loathsome, lackwit hell-spawn all Republicans are, etc., etc. — by all means, please feel free to give us another few thousand words on the subject, if you can think of any you haven’t deposited here before — but all of that notwithstanding, I still say that for those who take an interest in political strategy, the choice of this slogan, at this time, in this presidential race, was a curious and interesting one.
That’s all.
The only thing propping up our phony economy is zero percent interest rates and quantitative easing. As for the second part of the quoted tripe — ROTFLMAO.
Yes, that “laughingstock” part is particularly rich. Here’s a quote from a much-reviled former NRO contributer:
Contributor?
Your suggestion is that the world held us in greater esteem when we were bombing Iraq, torturing detainees, bungling Afghanistan, and in general trying to bully the rest of the world?
We’re still bungling Afghanistan, as witness that report. (And as witness attacks in the capital the other day while our president was paying a visit.) You think those people aren’t laughing at us as they sluice away our money while we send our soldiers to die protecting them?
You can’t buy respect. And you don’t earn it by abasing yourself before bullies, thugs, and thieves.
I completely agree. The best way to describe Afghanistan starts with the word cluster. However, I’m not sure what the alternative is. When he came into office, Obama was faced with the choice between leaving – thereby ceding the country to the Taliban, abandoning those who fought with us, and giving up our military and intelligence presence – and staying, with the inevitable loss of blood and treasure. It is also a political loser: either he is tarred with cut-and-run or he is blamed for the casualties which come with the quagmire he inherited. There are no good options, only a lot of really bad ones.
It is also true that a country doesn’t earn respect by abasing itself before bullies and tyrants. I would add, however, that this is something we have been doing for decades, provided the country in question has a lot of oil and/or serves our geopolitical strategic interests.
The way a country does earn respect is to have lofty ideals and abide by them. Things like the rule of law, denouncing the use of torture, not invading countries based on phony intelligence, and – to borrow a phrase – having a decent respect for the opinions of mankind. These ideals were entirely absent during the Bush administration, but have subsequently been restored.
We’re still leaving – just a few bodies and billions poorer — and the Taliban, who have patiently bided their time, will simply step forward as we step back. What we have done in Afghanistan has been like trying to dry the beach with a push-broom.
I’m all for a decent respect for the opinions of mankind, but only when those opinions are worth respecting. But that, of course, requires discrimination.
I agree about no good options, and said so in these pages a while back.
The right option would have been to go in after 9/11 with tremendous force, winkle OBL out of Tora Bora, smash the Taliban bloody, and leave, with the promise that next time we wouldn’t be so nice.
The idea that we could ever build a Western democracy in this seventh-century snakepit was the purest folly.
All true.
So did you learn how to make perfect McDonald’s style French fries at home?
As I recall, the subject of our ridicule was the word “laughingstock” not “esteem”. The world’s esteem is as worthy of our estimation as the steaming horseshit emanating from the left.
As is his custom, le petit Henri exemplifies the truism that those who are incapable of forming an effective argument resort to name calling and ad hominem.
I did just see an article about making french fries; it was just today someplace, I think. Where was that?
You saw it on Yahoo.
French fires?
As is his wont, the petty Peter personifies the Obama-like sensitivity of one who can dish it out but who can’t take it.
BTW, “petty Peter” means “little schmuck” in Yiddish, but that is merely a coincidence. I try to avoid such obvious pejoratives in my ad hominem.