Obama in Schenectady, NY., to Repeat Promises of 2008:
On January 21, at 13:05 pm, President Barack Obama was in a GE factory in upstate New York using the same sentences, words, and preacher’s cadence to re-elocute the promises and outright “untruths” with which he mercilessly misled young and older liberal voters in 2008.
With his too-cool-to-rule, rhythmic, sideways and forward sway, and cool-clipped words (His favorite, t’ for to), he added the odd “funny” missed by the hand-picked audience of workers paid time and a half to be pictured in the President’s photo op and message-massage. A year and a half or so into a predictably disastrous presidency, Obama is, as has been his want, proclaiming his successes, celebrating his promises kept but unkept, re-guaranteeing the impossible, and skirting over the why and how of the financial collapse of 2007 – 2008.
Here We Go Again
Obama’s campaign machine has been seriously gearing up for the last year. With key administration figures and friends shifting to positions in Chicago, his de facto campaign headquarters, as early as a year ago, this man is determined, once again, to say what he needs to say to grab another term as President. Even the shooting of Representative Giffords was none too afar or sacred for him to make what my friend David Gergen from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard called “a rally, a campaign speech, not a service for the slain”.
Though He knows everything, is always the brightest person in the room and determined, even nastily, to prove it, he “got it” in November. Soon after the dumb folk spoke, He brought in a pro-business senior advisor. He is now using the word “jobs” in every second sentence whether the word fits or not and, with more fervor than ever, references and re-references the freak recession that he inherited and that we are now, apparently, soaring out of, to new and more obscene heights of consumption for all.
In spite of what this man so blithely states to those he assumes cannot and do not read or think, the recession, a violent pop of an exploited consumer-credit bubble that still has the global financial system on the brink, was initiated by individuals, many of whom came to work for Obama in 2008. They were and are the derivative sellers, the non-ponzi Bernie Madoffs who made 300 million a year, with quarterly bonuses of 24 million – even after the bail-out. They could spare the time and the money to work in Washington for a while – and, has always been the way of Washington and Wall St., return to Wall St. using the cachet of Washington to head up Goldman, an enriched AIG or Bank of America. As a big and determined money-maker himself (Add Michelle, and it’s themselves), the only quasi-job Obama ever held was acquired via an indicted slum landlord and major client at a boutique law firm in Chicago. Obama’s job was to help the now jailbird put people out on the street in order to recruit new suckers into substandard lodging. The same rich crook and multimillionaire then bought Obama a house on a huge spread of property in a part of Chicago he could only have dreamed of or, as those very few who know Obama have explained, that Barack felt he deserved. Unable to practice law (both Obama and his wife lost their licenses right out of law school for lying on their bar applications), Mrs. Obama was working as an advisor to a major hospital complex in Chicago. When Obama’s campaign ramped up, her salary went from $700,000 to 1.2 million dollars from a Friday to a Monday.
Barack Obama should be an intriguing figure. I dare say he has never evoked this genre of interest from those of us who study personality types for a living and who, concurrently, keep a firm grasp on history and its lessons. This is a man who, like most megalomaniacs, understands the overlapping super-power of celebrity and political power. Nor does he underestimate the role his references to (and clear delight in) his “cool ride” (air force one) and his “beastly wheels” (the presidential limo) have on young voters. Some of the facts, beyond and transcending of the smoother than naturally smooth, empty Oba-messaging, are as follows:
- The most declaratively “transparent” candidate in American history has been the most secretive president.
- The same proponent of “open government” has centralized power in Washington through the creation of commissions and agencies run by friends and cronies from Chicago, “suburbed” to Wall St.
- The “black man who wasn’t” (quote from Jesse Jackson) rallied the increasingly disenfranchised African-American community to inauguration and then abandoned them, refusing even to pay lip service to a constituency that guaranteed him the presidency.
- The man who stood where a history-making figure stood in Bonn, 1933, with an impossible message of renewal, one that would be propelled from the backs and then the souls of an historically persecuted minority, declared, with disturbing similarity to the historic figure, “I am the one. The river has come home to the sea, and to the land. We are now whole.”
- Obama, the contemporary figure in Bonn, won the Nobel peace Prize in 2009 for being……..a “black” President.
- No other President in modern history has quashed so many ghastly scandals, scary ones, that one can only assume sufficiently frighten the media that it and its representatives don’t dare touch the man or his Chicago “mafia”.
Behind the scenes, Obama is well-known for his crabby comments about the American electorate. His contempt was public and pointed during his campaign and beyond. However, one cannot be certain that the “shellacking” Obama took in November, 2010 was a sufficiently clear indication that the not-so-dumb American electorate, a sufficient number of voters, have caught on to the fact (as have leaders around the world) that this man has nothing to do with service and everything to do with ego and status – the latter promising easy, wealthy futures for himself, his wife, and his daughters. Let’s hope that it is not just the vocal extremists who want to rid the country of his unique brand of incompetent conceit. There are much more serious reasons for sending this man back to his Chicago environs. Moderates or conservative liberals like this author are just too….civilized to, say, scream loud enough to make his transgressions the stuff of headlines. We are not part of the "birther movement”, nor do we proclaim or care about his status as a Muslim. However, we do know about (but dare not refer to) the over-the-top scandals that never became part of the national conversation, the disappearance of old church buddies who came forward with stories of cocaine and distinctly un-mainstream sexuality, the disbarment of both Barack and Michelle (and why), and, among many other political career killers, the stream of loud, flip-flopping broken promises that form a straight, bold-thick, dotted line from Obama’s campaign to his shivering delight in his “new digs” (the White House).
As an imperfect conservative-liberal, give me a normatively tricky, kind-hearted, well-meaning centrist Republican (with a family) for President any day. I wept along with millions on the day of the inauguration in January, 2009. But, for me, it was not the equivalent of a shared, nondenominational, religious celebration. It was a horrifying portent of what was to come – a nation and its varied people saw itself and themselves differently that day. They, everyone, was somehow better. The future-now held the promise of the world becoming new and improved. Within six months, what I feared and mourned most on inauguration day, came to pass. Both the backbone and the hearts of a nation were broken in ways unforeseen by the current working (and non-working) population. It had all been well-articulated, superbly choreographed, way too good to be true theatre. Or, as some of us heard and saw by merely listening and watching (including a popular frontrunner and her husband) it had been a symphonic orchestration of intoxicating lies touching the tender, shaky but universal need for hope.
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