Obama, As Predicted

Those who bought into the slogans ‘Hope' and ‘Change' last fall should have read the fine print. We were warned.

Barack Obama's deluded liberal fans love to say that his election to the presidency was an improbable long-shot. They're still pinching themselves about the existence of a black U.S. president. "Who would have thought it?" they still ask.

Well, I did, for one. As one of Obama's earliest[2] and most persistent left critics, I actually thought a first black U.S. chief executive in the form of Barack Obama was a likely occurrence (in 2012 or even 2008) once John F. Kerry was defeated in November of 2004. My expectation that Obama would be "Empire's New Clothes" is no small part of why I wrote an inordinately large number of essays and ultimately a book on the Obama phenomenon between the summer of 2004 and the 2008 election.[3]

Always good to see the "not left enough for me" outlook, even if the author is approaching insane levels of denial. One critical question is not whether 0bama would have voted for the Iraq war in 2004, it's whether he would have voted for military intervention in 1998, when it was first proposed under Clinton. As a seemingly more or less honest lefty the author probably should have asked that question.

The question "Is 0bama a socialist?" could be debated endlessly and is really quite irrelevant. The pertinent question is "Are 0bama's actions and policies socialist?" and the answer for many of them is a resounding "Yes!" - the government takeover of General Motors being a case in point. Here the government took control of the Board, ousted the Chairman, asked for no guidance or permission from the existing stockholders - it was a classic case of government possession, not control, of the means of production. How that isn't socialist is more a matter of debating the number of angels on the head of a pin.

The government's (successful so far) attempt to position itself as a competitor in the medical insurance market simultaneously with being its regulator is a slightly less direct but perfectly valid case in point, more of a "we aren't there yet, but we're solidly on the road to socialism." Again, the action isn't debatable, only the label.

Insofar as this "peace" candidate continued Bush's policies in Iraq and Afghanistan, that is a perfect case of a slick politician telling gullible activists what they want to hear and backing out on it once he got what he wanted. One cannot even muster sympathy for that pack of fools, but one can at least remind them that the reason he did so was that he realized the political consequences of pursuing an immediately disastrous course of action, substituting instead one that might allow him to escape the blame later. That's how foreign policy is conducted by the amateurs that 0bama is and has around him. A vote for that is a vote for plausible deniability as a foundational principle of foreign policy, nothing more. It's better than a toxic ideology, one supposes, but probably not by much.

Anyone who is surprised - the author is not - at 0bama being a corporate politician probably didn't examine his list of donors very closely. This is like garlic to the vampires of the Left, but I'll have to remind them that being beholden to corporate unions is not one whit different, nor is being beholden to corporate racial and ethnic interests. Anyone who doesn't recognize a Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton in that role hasn't seen their suits, limousines, and private jets. One may add environmental interests to that list and Al Gore as a shining example. If that isn't corporatism, we'll need a new label.

The real difficulty with the Left at the moment is that it offers nothing better than becoming the ruling class it deplores. 0bama has done so and they haven't benefited sufficiently. My heart aches.

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