After President Obama�s announcement of an escalation of the Afghanistan war, I received an email from an outraged colleague of mine.� She was outraged not only with Obama, but also with me, given that I had been an advocate of critical support for then Senator Obama in his Presidential campaign.� She called upon me to denounce President Obama and to admit that I had allegedly misled people.

I was a bit taken aback by the note.� I responded by indicating that I had been critical of Obama before his election and after his election.� I stood by my position of critically supporting him in his election for all the reasons indicated in earlier columns for BlackCommentator.com, not the least of which being the possibility of utilizing the energy that emerged around his campaign in order to galvanize broader progressive change.

Leaving aside, however, the suggestion of my denouncing President Obama�as if that were a meaningful act�I found myself thinking about this colleague�s note and her� suggestion that I was being sentimental in not being harsher in my criticisms.

You, the readers of BlackCommentator.com will have to be the judge of whether I have been sufficiently �harsh� in my criticisms, but there is actually a more important question here:� how should one criticize the Obama administration?� This may seem like a very simple question, but let me expand on my question a bit.� How should one criticize the Obama administration in light of the fact that the political Right launched an irrationalist campaign against the first African American President of the United States and his administration that is so obviously racist, anti-progressive, fear-based, and demagogic?

Part of the difficulty for many liberals, progressives and leftists is that the context in which we are struggling is different from anything that we have addressed, at least at the national level.� The political Right, with all of its symbolism, is tapping or attempting to tap into the most racist sentiments among white Americans as a means of defeating the Obama administration.� In addition, and very ominously, the political Right, or at least sections of it, plays with the idea of the need for a military coup to oust the President.

This setting has led many liberals, progressives and leftists to remain relatively if not totally silent in the face of Obama administration policies that should receive absolutely no support.� This setting has led large sections of Black America to refuse anything close to a public criticism of the Obama administration for fear of being viewed as a traitor and a collaborator with the devils of the political Right.

The fact of our complicated political circumstance means, among other things, that we on the Left cannot act as if nothing has changed since November 2008.� Obama is not George Bush in black-face, even when there are policies that overlap, and despite the fact that he leads an empire.� There is a different political alignment, and for that matter certain very definite openings.� But it is also not illogical to recognize that the political Right will attempt to take advantage of criticisms of the Obama administration that come from the Left in order to further their own objectives.

This is not a new scenario, though it is different for most of us.� A similar situation existed in the early years of the Franklin Roosevelt administration in the 1930s, a point I tried to briefly make in one of my commentaries from last week.� Roosevelt was criticized by both the Right and the Left.� How did the Left criticize Roosevelt?� That is where things get interesting.� The criticism was largely through mass action in support of progressive causes and legislation, some of which was advanced by the Roosevelt administration.�� Workers took advantage of what, by today�s standards, may appear to have been a miniscule change in the law that gave them the right to organize unions.� They began a process of organizing across the country, an effort, by the way, which followed upon several years of organizing by unemployed workers who were seeking jobs and relief.

The example I keep coming back to, however, and one that I believe remains deeply relevant, was the formation of the National Negro Congress in 1936.� This, initially very broad effort, emerged out of discussions among African Americans regarding how the New Deal was not sufficiently benefiting African Americans.� Roosevelt had made a series of compromises with white supremacist Democrats in the South in order to get legislation passed.� The NNC, as part of its agenda, challenged these and other compromises.

Progressives, whether African Americans or non-African Americans, need to be advancing an agenda that serves the needs of masses of people.� This will mean that there will inevitably be clashes with the Obama administration, whether over foreign or domestic policy.� Denunciations of Obama and/or his Administration are secondary to mobilizing forces that can press for change.� We have to be the ones that point out what needs to be done, whether in the form of a demand for Medicare for All or getting the USA out of Afghanistan.

Neither despair nor rhetorical denunciations are relevant in genuine mass politics.� The point is that it falls upon us to make the change possible that we believe in�and know needs to happen.

BlackCommentator.com Executive Editor, Bill Fletcher, Jr., is a Senior Scholar with the Institute for Policy Studies, the immediate past president of TransAfrica Forum and co-author of, Solidarity Divided: The Crisis in Organized Labor and a New Path toward Social Justice (University of California Press), which examines the crisis of organized labor in the USA. Click here to contact Mr. Fletcher.