Barack Obama loses his base with rightward drift

A month after he won the White House, Barack Obama is drawing a chorus of approval from conservatives who spent most of this year denouncing him as a man of the extreme left. "Reassuring," says Bush's master-strategist, Karl Rove, of Obama’s cabinet selections.

In Rupert Murdoch's Weekly Standard, mouthpiece of the neo-cons, Michael Goldfarb, reviewed Obama's appointments and declared happily that he sees "nothing that represents a drastic change in how Washington does business. The expectation is that Obama is set to continue the course set by Bush in his second term."

But on the liberal-left end of the spectrum, where Obama kindled extraordinary levels of enthusiasm throughout his campaign, the mood is sour. "How... to explain that not a single top member of Obama's foreign policy/national security team opposed the war?" Katrina van den Heuvel, editor of the Nation, asked on Monday.

She went on: "For Obama, who's said he wants to be challenged by his advisors, wouldn't it have made sense to include at least one person on the foreign policy/national security team who would challenge him with some new and fresh thinking about security in the 21st century?"

Suddenly a familiar spectre is shuffling back under the spotlights – Iran

Similar sentiments came from another well-known left-wing reporter, Jeremy Scahill, who wrote on Tuesday: "The assembly of Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, Susan Rice and Joe Biden is a kettle of hawks with a proven track record of support for the Iraq war, militaristic interventionism, neo-liberal economic policies and a worldview consistent with the foreign policy arch that stretches from George H W Bush's time in office to the present."

Suddenly a familiar spectre is shuffling back under the spotlights. A long piece on Obama's foreign policy advisors last Tuesday carried the headline, "Are Key Obama Advisors in Tune with Neocon Hawks who want to Attack in Iran?"

The author, Robert Dreyfuss, sketched in the political backgrounds of advisors to Obama and concluded that "Tony Lake, UN ambassador-designate Susan Rice, Tom Daschle, and Dennis Ross, along with leading Democratic hawks like Richard Holbrooke, close to Vice-President-elect Joe Biden or Secretary of State-designate Hillary Clinton, have made common cause with war-minded think-tank hawks at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), and other hardline institutes."

More mouldy cabbages are being hurled at Obama’s picks at the Pentagon

These Obama-hawks, Dreyfuss gloomily told his readers, reckon that talks with Iran about its nuclear programme will fail. On the heels of this failure they urge "a kinetic action" in the form of a savage bombing campaign by the US Air Force.

Criticisms of Obama's foreign policy team are if anything outstripped by indignation over his economic team. Michael Hudson, a former banker, now an economic professor and adviser to the radical Congressman Dennis Kucinich, complained that Obama was meekly following the advice of banker and former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, putting Rubin's proteges in key Obama administration posts.

"Larry Summers, who as head of the World Bank forced privatisation at give-away prices to kleptocrats; Geithner of the New York Fed; and a monetarist economist from Berkeley, as right-wing a university as Chicago. These are the protective guard-dogs of America's vested interests," said Hudson.

More mouldy cabbages are being hurled at Obama's picks at the Pentagon, starting with the familiar visage of Robert Gates, already in occupation of the top job having been put there by George Bush Jr to replace Donald Rumsfeld. Winslow Wheeler, for many years a senor Republican staffer in Congress, has a solid reputation as one of the best-informed of all the observers of that vast sinkhole of fraud and waste, the US Defence Department.

During Gates' tenure, Wheeler complains, "things have only gotten worse. What about Obama’s National Security Advisor, former US Marine General Jim Jones? He is a man of great stature, physically and figuratively, in Washington," Wheeler says tartly. "He is a Washington 'heavy' but if you look at his record, nothing much ever happened. Things went south in Afghanistan pretty rapidly when he was Supreme Commander of all Nato forces in Afghanistan. When he was Commandant of the Marine Corps, a lot of the marines' over-priced, under-performing hardware programmes were endorsed and continued happily along. He seems to have been mostly a place-holder when he had these very senior and important positions."

One striking feature of these complaints is that if the complainers had their suspicions about Obama during the campaign, they kept their mouths firmly shut. Across eight presidential campaigns, since Jimmy Carter's successful run in 1976, I've never seen such collective determination by the liberal left to think only positive thoughts about a Democratic candidate. Indeed, some of the present fury may stem from a certain embarrassment at their own political naivety.

In fairness to Obama, beyond the vaguely radical afflatus of his campaign rhetoric about "change", he never concealed his true political stance, which is of the centre-right. In every sense of the phrase, he can say to his left critics, "I told you so." Indeed he did.

In his salvoes against Obama's economic team, Michael Hudson brought up one ominous parallel. Jimmy Carter won the presidency in 1976, after eight years of Richard Nixon. The hopes of the liberal left were similarly high. Almost immediately Carter dashed their hopes with hawkish foreign policy appointments.

Two years after Carter took over the Oval Office, I interviewed William Winpisinger, president of the Machinists' Union and one of the most powerful labour leaders in America. I put a tape recorder on his desk and asked, "Is there anything President Carter could do to redeem himself in your eyes?" Winpsisinger eyed the tape recorder bleakly and said, "Die."

A year later Carter was grimly fighting a liberal-left challenge to his re-nomination by the Democrats for a second term. The challenger was Teddy Kennedy. Though Carter beat back the Kennedy threat, he was seriously weakened and lost his re-election bid.

One can surmise that one reason Obama has made Hillary Clinton Secretary of State is to head off a Kennedy-type challenge. But if things go badly wrong in the eyes of the liberal left, Obama can expect political trouble in the not-too-distant future. The trouble with slogans like 'change' is that they are like zeppelins. The wind can whistle out of their pretensions with lethal speed. ·