Obama pragmatism hardly change

President-elect Obama will never please the pitifully few leftists in America. But does he have to whore after the right-wing?
Take the case of Rev. Rick Warren. Surely any administration that boasts of change would not pick an adamant foe of abortion to give the inaugural invocation.
And not just any foe. Warren endorsed intolerance and discrimination in the California Constitution, urging a ban on gay marriage. He compares same-sex marriage with incest, pedophilia and polygamy.
That is yesterday thinking, not tomorrow thinking.
Or take the Obama choices as military and diplomatic leaders and advisers: mostly hawks and recycled Clintonites. They are the very people who got the nation into two wars.
It’s as if people voted for Obama in disdain for John McCain and got McCain. Obama is keeping Republican Bob Gates as secretary of defense and naming Gen. Jim Jones as national security adviser. Jones, a close friend of McCain, would resume the Cold War by expanding NATO.
Indeed, you know Obama’s choices are bad if right-wingers like Karl Rove and Rush Limbaugh pronounce them good.
Then there is hawkish Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. And Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief-of-staff designate, who pushed the disastrous NAFTA in the Clinton White House.
The story is the same on the economic front. Tim Geithner as treasury secretary and Larry Summers as head of the National Economic Council are old Clinton hands. They are corporate Democrats who espoused deregulation and boosted globalization.
Enough of pragmatic politics. The nation needs boldness, not pragmatism, not business as usual, not the same-old, same-old. Obama needs backbone to stifle the absurd reactionary bleats of “lurching to the left.”
Even Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a soi-disant progressive, says “the country must be governed from the middle.” Straight out of the Democratic Leadership Council playbook!
And how about Eric Holder, attorney general-designate? He has endorsed extension of the heinous provision of the Patriot Act allowing federal agents to demand library and bookstore records.
Ken Salazar at Interior? Too much of a dealmaker. After eight years of environmental devastation under Bush, the country needs an environmentalist not a business tradeoff guy.
Sure, all the Obama appointments are bright. So were “The Best and Brightest,” the sardonic title of David Halberstam’s book about the men who led the nation into the morass of Vietnam. Intelligence is worthless without wisdom.
Obama has so many decisions to make to undo the horror of the Bush regime. But the No. 1 priority should be ending the nation’s two costly, endless and hopeless wars.
People out of work and struggling to buy food and medication may feel differently. But withdrawal from the occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan is essential to restore the worldwide faith in and moral authority of America.
Chris Hedges of the online Truthdig calls the wars state-sponsored terrorism, defying “every ethical and legal code.” America is the real rogue nation.
Paul Roberts in Progressive rightly urges the halting of gratuitous wars and a slash of “unnecessary military spending, which exceeds that of the rest of the world combined.”
On the up side, the Obama choice for labor secretary, Hilda Solis, is a keeper. She has been an unfailing advocate of workers’ rights, fighting to increase the paltry minimum wage. As a California congresswoman she voted for card-signing unionizing.
Solis is everything Bush was not.
Obama’s green team sounds like another keeper, one that will reverse the rabid Bush anti-environmentalism. Obama chose Steven Chu, Nobel physicist, to run the Energy Department and Carol Browner to coordinate energy and climate-change policies.
Leon Panetta as CIA director? California Sen. Dianne Feinstein complains that he lacks intelligence-gathering experience. Actually, that is a plus. The nation needs a director to abandon spying, torturing, assassinating and overthrowing governments in favor of its original mission of collecting intelligence.
Obama needs courage to do what is right. Among them are rapprochement with Cuba: lifting the embargo, extending diplomatic recognition and ending travel restrictions by Americans.
To end forever the one-sided, pro-Israel policies of America, including the daily outrages toward the Palestinians. He needs steel to forge a two-nation policy, demanding an end to the occupation of Palestinian lands while facing down the potent Jewish lobby.
On his first full day in office Obama needs to end the military’s stupid policy of don’t ask, don’t tell.
None of this is to gainsay the hope that Obama brings to the White House: putting science over Bush politics, putting intelligence over Bush boobishness and putting competence over Bush cronyism.
But, overall, too many of his choices have the stench of centerism for a guy who had promised hope, change and fresh thinking. Obama had to run to the center to win the nomination. As president, he does not -- and should not.