Obama whistling a new 'change' tune

The past two years Obama has talked about one thing: Change. With soaring rhetoric he positioned himself as the candidate of "change" branding his opponents as retrograde change-a-phobics while inspiring voters to project onto him their hopes for a better world. What resulted was an excited electorate that spoke out loudly for change.

However, over the past few weeks Obama has decisively changed his tune, looking less like the politician of the primaries who rallied millions and more like one whose goal is to resume the neoliberal imperialist work of the Clinton and, yes, Bush regimes.

This change has not been displayed in his oratory, which continues to feature vague nods to "change," but in the discouraging cabinet appointments that have thus far completely undermined his whole political campaign.

Over the past few weeks Obama has named health care industry lobbyist Tom Daschle as Secretary of Health and Human Services, retained Iraq war advocate Robert Gates as Secretary of Defense, named Hillary Clinton, whom Obama once accused of distorting her foreign policy credentials and being grossly uninformed, as Secretary of State, and named free-market and Wall-Street booster Tim Geithner as Secretary of Treasury. And of course there is Lawrence Summers, who served as Treasury Secretary under the Clinton Administration, which Robert Reich, Clinton's own Labor Secretary, has called "one of the most pro-business administrations in American History," as Obama's director of the National Economic Counsel. These appointments represent the resurrection of the failed policies Obama's supporters were hoping to bury. If these supporters look rather silly in light of his recent acts, then so do those right-wingers who warned of Obama's closet socialism. Never has it been clearer that Democrats and Republicans are merely two branches of the same corporate imperialist party, determined to maintain the disastrous status quo.

Charles Tyler

Wheaton