Barack meets Raúl

                                                      





In the eight year of his rock star style Presidency Barack Hussein Obama made his way to Havana to pay homage to Raúl Modesto Castro Ruz.  We read that in anticipation Raúl had ordered his people to spruce up a bit the slum of his long making and it is likely that any of those unruly types who dared to occasionally complain about life in the Socialist Workers paradise were rounded up and dropped into the deep freeze during the President’s Potemkin tour.  Just to show who was boss, Raúl snubbed the American President, sending one of his flunkies to greet him on his arrival on the Havana tarmac.  Hermano mayor for decades enjoyed waving his middle finger at Uncle Sam. This occasion was, however, unique: Obama was the first American President to fly down and willingly get himself dissed in person.

Obama did not even catch a glimpse of the Damas Blancas (the Ladies in White), those brave women who Raúl’s goons regularly beat up for publically asking about the fate of their husbands, brothers and sons rotting as political prisoners in Castro’s vast dungeons. “Just hours before President Obama landed Sunday in Cuba for his historic visit to the communist island, Cuban authorities arrested more than 50 dissidents who were marching to demand improved human rights.”

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/03/20/cuba-dissidents-protesters-arrested-president-obama-visit/82048950/

From the Washington Post: “A group of dissidents known as the Ladies in White was met outside Havana’s Santa Rita church by an organized crowd of Castro loyalists shouting insults and revolutionary slogans. Then, The Post reports, Castro’s secret police pounced on the women and ‘half-dragged, half-carried them to waiting buses,’ while men marching with the women “were chased, thrown to the curb and handcuffed.” As they were arrested, the crowd chanted ‘This is Fidel’s street!  https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/castros-welcome-obama-to-cuba-with-a-slap-in-the-face/2016/03/21/c9d8d2c0-ef6b-11e5-a61f-e9c95c06edca_story.html.  Yes, those Fidelistas had it exactly right:  Cuba belongs exclusively to Fidel and Raúl, not the peons they boss around. It is their personal fiefdom and the clowns who spout that human rights nonsense deserve whatever abuse comes their way from the the guardians of “The Revolution.”

But that was probably just fine with Obama who apparently was willing to bear whatever indignities the regime cared to dispense, and who cares about the dissidents, anyway?  They have universal health care. What else do they want?  He was likely wearing his Che tee-shirt from his college days beneath his suit jacket.  Fidel, Raúl and Che, after all, were the young Hope and Change guys of the Caribbean when BHO was, as they say, just a twinkle in the eye of Barack Sr. Like President Obama during his 2008 Presidential campaign, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrefKCaV8m4), the Castros in 1959 promised a  complete transformation of  their homeland with some smoke and mirrors palaver about free elections and democracy.  And “transformation” is a handy euphemism for exactly what they did, namely make the island into a hell hole (gulags, summary executions and all) that Cubans have for decades been (literally) dying to leave.  It is now a vast slum which not withstanding the 60-year iron fisted rule of Fidel and Raúl is entirely, they claim, the fault of the U.S.    

One suspects that Obama feels much more at home in Havana, yukking it up with a decrepit dictator than in those red states in the U.S and has a much higher regard for Raúl than for any of those Republicans back home whom he likes to speak of as his “enemies.”   Obama’s comfort with Raul, one also suspects has its origins in a deeply shared conviction that the U.S. is a country, as his wife Michelle, so eloquently put it in 2008 that is “just a downright mean.”

(http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2008/03/05/michelle-obama-america-just-downright-mean.) 

Beyond that, for some striking evidence of the President’s affinity for the Castro brothers’ version of Hope and Change we have Obama’s very own testimonial in his autobiography.

"To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students, the foreign students, the Chicanos, the Marxist Professors and the structural feminists and punk-rock performance poets….  At night, in the dorms, we discussed neocolonialism, Franz [sic] Fanon, Eurocentrism, and patriarchy. When we ground out our cigarettes in the hallway carpet or set our stereos so loud that the walls began to shake, we were resisting bourgeois society's stifling constraints. We weren't indifferent or careless or insecure. We were alienated."  [Dreams from my Father, 100-101]

Granted, this was how Obama represented his Marxist bona fides as a youth at the university.  That was then, and now is, well ….  One remains hard pressed to discover much of a difference in conviction and attitude between the twenty-something university student and forty-forth U.S. President.  Since his university days up to the present Obama has continued to choose friends and associates strikingly similar to his university pals – Bill Ayres, Jeremiah Wright, Father Pfleger, Van Jones, and, of course, the race-baiting, riot-fomenting Al Sharpton.  While we hope he is not grinding out his cigarettes in the While House carpet to express his alienation, Obama has demonized policemen (“bourgeois society’s” armed enforcers) and given tacit support to rioters, as in Ferguson, who burned the place down.  In 2011 Obama celebrated American poetry and prose with a gathering of poets, musicians and artists at the White House.   According to the Associated Press he invited Lonnie Rashid Lynn, Jr. aka  “Common,” a notorious hip-hop artist famous for celebrating the killing of police officers and one notorious cop killer in general. http://www.newsmax.com/InsideCover/obama-common-poetry-jeremiah/2011/05/10/id/395900/#ixzz43rTSr0KP   So, Obama, the alienated, Marxist university student, and Obama, the racial polarizing, Castro-enthusiast President seem to be separated only by years.  There is no evidence in word or deed that Barack Obama has ever relinquished the resentment and his affinity for the leftist radicalism that motivated him as a young man: he is just much more sophisticated in managing it. 

One, however, should be careful with comparing Obama and Raúl  Castro.  To be fair to Raúl, as a Marxist, he is the real McCoy, one tough hombre, enduring in his youth the precarious Granma expedition from Mexico and the harsh rigors of the Sierra Maestra mountains as a guerrilla fighter, taking on Batista’s troops, getting shot at, taking hostages and executing them.  In the early days of the Revolution Raúl was even by his older brother's estimate a brutal fellow.  

"As the 'brothers show' developed, Fidel carefully and deliberately nurtured the myth of 'good brother, bad brother.' Whenever he wanted to threaten people with the results of his possible demise, he pointed to Raúl — 'He will be much worse than I,' he warned repeatedly. And he may have been right. Sierra fighters like Lucas Morán called Raúl's front a "small totalitarian state in which discipline was rooted in the terrible drama of death by execution." Geyer, Georgie (2011-02-01). Guerrilla Prince: The Untold Story Of Fi (Kindle Locations 3285-3288). Garrett County Press. Kindle Edition.   

Obama would not know which end of a gun the bullet comes out of, and it is doubtful that the man has an ounce of physical courage.  His Marxism is of the prissy, academic sort with all of its usual hand wringing devotion to the oppressed and its self-righteous, self-congratulatory posturing but is personally squeamish with a preference for softer approaches to coercion and, as he said in 2010  “punish[ing] our enemies and … reward[ing] our friends.”http://www.weeklystandard.com/obama-to-latinos-punish-your-enemies-in-the-voting-booth/article/511932  Like his close friend, Al Sharpton, his style (dropping his “g’s” when necessary) is to demonize his critics and keep the rabble on a slow boil with artful demagoguery while working the system for all of its perks – golf, basketball,  jet-set vacations, celebrity hob knobbing, etc. 

From Havana the Commander and Chief flew to Buenos Aires where he was photographed practicing his Tango steps with a luscious Argentine partner.   When he becomes an ex-President and Hope and Change is long forgotten, when asked about his years at the top he can with a smirk quote Sen. George Washington Plunkett of the old Tammany Hall days: who in his memoirs wrote, “I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em.”

 

Barack Obama -- the Perfect American Stalinist

"If they bring a knife, we'll bring a gun"

                                   Barack Obama

 

The ignominious American decampment from Vietnam and the subsequent collapse of the South Vietnamese government and capitulation to the Communists coincided with the death of anti-Communism in the U.S. The parallelism is striking—military withdrawal abroad; cultural surrender at home. The many Marx-quoting, Castro- and Mao-admirers who occupied chairs in America’s best universities (e.g. the “Alger Hiss Chair of Social Studies,” Bard College) made careers out of pooh-poohing the supposed evils of Communism and smearing anti-Communists. Whitaker Chambers was a psycho, the Rosenbergs were framed, McCarthy’s Communists-in-the-State-Department was a paranoid fiction, and Ho Chi Minh was the George Washington of Vietnam. Anti-communism was now the accoutrement of rubes and crackpots bearing all the marks of unsophistication, narrow-mindedness and chauvinism, and could be responded to with simply a shrug, a sneer or mockery. Anti-Communism was a failure to comprehend the profound dimensions of America’s own moral shortcomings. Communism, of course, had fallen short of its egalitarian, humanistic aspirations, but America needed to be called to account for the growing recognition of the multitude of its past transgressions – especially slavery and segregation.

Because the Communists excelled at pretending to be virtuous and at hiding their iniquities, it came as a big shock to the sophisticates in the West with all of their admiration for central planning when the Soviet Union suddenly collapsed in the early 1990s partly under its own dead weight of stagnation, corruption and incompetence and partly pushed by Ronald Reagan and Star Wars. Seventy plus years of Marxist-Leninist rule had turned Russia into a third world slum and thus revealed the essence of Stalinism – utopian promises; dystopian reality – a “Socialist Workers Paradise” whose vodka-besotted workers could not even produce a decent pair of shoes or blue jeans that anyone wanted to wear.

A Stalinist world is a universe of posturing and pretending where everything is the opposite of what it is officially declared to be. “Plenty” in reality was penury. The promise of liberation from exploitation unfolded in the Gulag and the creation of a massive system of lethal forced labor. The reality of equality became a caste system with the Party apparatchiks and bosses exempting themselves from the burdens and reserving the best of everything for themselves. Stalin’s much vaunted anti-Fascism was no less than a mirror of Hitler’s genocidal mass murder, ethnic cleansing, concentration camps and brutal secret police. From Moscow to Beijing to Havana to Pyongyang it was the same, depressing storyline, a self-glorifying Stalinist proclaiming the perfection of his reign, while the people he ruled over were poor, hungry, scared and longing to escape.          

With the collapse of the Soviet Union America enjoyed in the aftermath an illusory sense of triumph over Communism. The U.S. Cold War “victory” over the Soviets was completely overblown. The economic and technological superiority of the U.S. was vindicated, but culturally the story was much different. American institutions had “flipped”, so to speak. A conceptual framework and vocabulary absorbed from Marx and Rousseau by America’s intelligentsia had been imperceptibly positioned as a filter that altered the basic perception of American history and American society. Institutions came to be viewed not as civilizing, ameliorating forces that helped to keep destructive human impulses in check and to provide large spheres of personal freedom, but rather as instruments of repression, domination and exploitation. 

Such instruments thus had to be dismantled, a process that required “consciousness raising,” on behalf of the exploited and dominated, helping them recognize their plight through an “unmasking” of the beneficiaries of the repressive order. Universities, schools, mainstream churches, the entertainment industry, all embraced a poly-thematic program that focused on the grievances of various “victim-populations”, on the promotion of subjective self-realization through escape from the confines of traditional norms, and the need to permanently atone for the un-erasable guilt of slavery and segregation. Social fragmentation and atomization followed with the explosion of divorce and single parenthood, the normalization of soft-core pornography, rampant drug trafficking and abuse, and a thorough coarsening and vulgarizing of the popular culture.

Eight years into the 21^st century, only 17 years after the collapse of Communism in the Soviet Union, the country that fifty years earlier loathed the very notion of a Communistic-ruled society with its militant atheism, collectivism and unconstrained, ubiquitous secret police, elected as President a man whose personal history, instincts and aspirations are Marxist. As early as twenty years ago it would have been inconceivable that an individual with such extensively documented antagonism and hostility toward the history and institutions of the U.S. would be seriously considered for any national, high office, much less the Presidency.

Obama’s autobiography is a study in self-absorption, self-pity and racial resentment with no detectable appreciation or affinity for anything distinctively or uniquely American. His life’s influences, both personal and intellectual, cited and acknowledged by Obama himself, or undeniably obvious, are all Marxist – Frank Marshall Davis (Dreams from My Father), “Marxist professors,” “Frantz Fanon” (Dreams from my Father), Jeramiah Wright (Obama’s twenty year pastor and mentor), Bill Ayers (Obama’s colleague on the Chicago Annenberg Exchange and suspected ghost-writer of Dreams of My Father). Obama’s influences and associations were all brought up by his critics and opponents during the 2008 campaign but the revelations made no impact. Why? Well, because Communism as a benign, well-intentioned system of social order had become a reflexive, mainstream attitude. While generations of school children had learned all about the Jewish Holocaust, Ann Frank and Hitler’s racism, very few ever heard about the three to five million Ukrainians starved by Stalin, his order for the murder of 22,000 Polish officers at Katyn, Mao’s Great Leap Forward that killed tens of millions of Chinese or Pol Pot’s murder of as many as a fifth of the Cambodian people. Americans were inundated with movies, books, articles and documentaries on the evils of the Nazis but the far more vast crimes of Communism drew little attention. The slant on Communism from the likes of the New York Times has been its idealism and humanism and the heroics of its “anti-Fascism.”  When Fidel Castro finally expires, his New York Times obituary will go on for pages about universal health care in Cuba, ignoring the fact that for decades that while many people have died trying to get out of Cuba, no one has died trying to get in.

When Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire” in a speech in 1983 the outrage from the intellectual class was clamorous and predictable. Eight years later Reagan was vindicated as the Poles, Baltic peoples, East Germans and other countries long subjugated by the Soviets ecstatically threw off the yoke. Reagan’s critics were aghast at the “amiable dunce’s” (courtesy of Clark Clifford) anti-Communism, but people who actually had to live under Communist rule acted out the truth of Reagan’s charge.  Even the suggestion that any of the many aspects about Obama’s past radical associations and perspectives elicited scorn and incredulity from the mainstream media and the opinion makers.     

Obama’s assent to power was neither a fluke nor an accident. His election was inevitable, a consequence of the cultural triumph of the soft Marxism that had been seeping into the corners of America for decades. By 2008 America’s dominant culture-shaping institutions – the schools and universities, the popular culture and entertainment complex, the main stream media and the news syndicates – were solidly Left wing propaganda outlets that: (a) peddled an amoral hedonism steeped in a patois of multiculturalism and moral relativism, and, (b) relentlessly promulgated the rationale for a system of moral blackmail that made white America permanent hostage to the guilt of slavery and de jure segregation. Racism was transformed into something far more complex and multi-faceted than it was originally understood to be, a bigoted belief in the in the innate inferiority of members of a different race.  Racism now permeated every crevice of American society. Protean and ubiquitous it could be direct, indirect, overt, covert, systemic, institutional and only practiced by white people.  Moreover, racism was the only offense such that the mere accusation alone was sufficient to convict. Denial is just more evidence of racism’s invincibility. In 1973 “micro-inequities” were discovered by a Ph.D. from MIT, defined as “as “apparently small events which are often ephemeral and hard-to-prove, events which are covert, often unintentional, frequently unrecognized by the perpetrator, which occur wherever people are perceived to be different.”

One can look back to the 1960s and observe the unfolding of an ironically perverse inverse social dynamic: as the practices of racial discrimination dropped away and attitudes of racial bigotry and white supremacy atrophied and diminished, racism eventually elbowed out every other social malady, becoming ubiquitous, defining America’s character and dominating its history.  The “white man’s burden” had become “white privilege.”         

The ubiquity of American racism gave birth to a new industry comprised of well compensated individuals who are experts in helping make our institutions and work places, as they say, “more diverse,” the main obstacle of which is racial prejudice and bigotry. Some are appointed to multicultural or diversity vice presidencies at universities or companies where they mandate and supervise “sensitivity” training programs and search for “microaggresions”. Others, like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are more ambitious free lancers, consummate publicity seekers who show up anywhere there is a likelihood of spinning a “hate crime” or exploiting racial tensions and make incendiary speeches. Their reputations and livelihoods have flourished by intimidating white people with their racial accusations and extorting apologies and concessions. The America they like to portray is permanently frozen in the early 1960s and every county sheriff is Bull Connor. Every career incentive and motivation for their ilk is for America to be viewed as it was in 1963 because in America 2014 there is no need or demand for people with their “talents”.         

Obama was the right candidate at the right time.  First, he was black and as such a candidate of redemption offering white voters the opportunity to prove, finally, that they were free of racism, a deep moral shame that for decades they had been constantly reminded that they had made and perpetuated.  Second, and equally important, he was a black man of the Left, which made him an immediate object of adoration by the elites who inhabited those spheres of influence in the media, political commentary and opinion shaping, and the entertainment industry.  He was proclaimed by these supposedly mature observers as “a sort of God,” a “Lightworker”, a “genius,” etc. Obama’s political assent unfolded rapidly into a cult of personality, which was particularly remarkable given his utter lack of executive experience and political accomplishments, his record of trimming and going-for-the-groin Chicago-style politics. Certainly, there were plenty of highly successful, articulate and brilliant black Americans of conservative pedigree, but they did not fit the right profile and convey the message of American guilt.  These Americans were marginalized and ridiculed not because of their skin color but because they did not reside on the ideological plantation run by the Leftist overseers.                 

Obama’s 2008 campaign was a masterpiece of 21^st-century Stalinism in its pretending and posturing, a gigantic head fake toward the middle of the road largely a-political block of voters, a wholesome non-threatening change agent spouting clichés no one could disagree with – his administration would be the most transparent, competent, smart, accountable, compassionate, etc., etc. – and a projection of cerebral self-control and GQ cool.  He was also lucky to have an aging harridan and an over-the-hill incompetent as his major opposition in the primary and fall election.   

Now some years after the launching of "Hope and Change" it is obvious to all but the blindly partisan that Obama has turned out to be the polar opposite of what he promised he would be. The post-racial, post-partisan miracle man of 2008 was a mirage. Racial tensions and political polarization are the worst since the Vietnam War. Shortly before the 2010 congressional elections, Obama, dropping his ‘g’s’ told a Univision audience, “We're gonna punish our enemies, and we're gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us,” spoken like a true street organizer with a brass knuckles view of politics. His 2012 campaign, a work of pure character assassination, was the real, “If they bring a knife, we’ll bring a gun” Obama.

Obama’s Presidency is the consummation of 21^st century American Stalinism. First for him politics is war, the object being not to electorally defeat the opposition but to discredit it, to destroy it. This approach is rooted in the foundational premise of Marxism, “All history is the history of class struggle.” For Obama, the opposition is a corrupted class of exploiters, characterized primarily by their greed and racism.  Such morally benighted types are not the kind of people with whom you can share power. And so the second Stalinist feature of the Obama Presidency, abuse.  Stalinists, self-perceived, are the “good guy”, the virtuous ones, the smart ones.  Those who oppose and disagree are corrupt and/or stupid, and as such deserve to be reviled.  Republican’s from the beginning of Obama’s first term were, as he called them, “the enemy.”  He routinely attributed the basest motives for their politics and policies. They wanted “dirtier air and polluted water.”  In a speech early in 2013 Obama said:

“They [The Republicans] have a particular vision about what government should and should not do, so they are suspicious about government’s commitments, for example, to make sure that seniors have decent health care as they get older. They have suspicions about Social Security. They have suspicions about whether government should make sure that kids in poverty are getting enough to eat or whether we should be spending money on medical research. So they’ve got a particular view of what government should do and should be.”

This is just one of many examples of the politics of character assassination. As Peter Wehner wrote in Commentary. “During the 2012 election, Obama’s vice president said Republicans want to put African-Americans “back in chains’ while Obama’s top aides and allies implied Governor Romney was a felon and flat-out stated that he was responsible for the cancer-death of a steelworker’s wife.”

The third Stalinist feature of Obama’s Presidency is the flagrant dishonesty. Remember, Stalinism is a pretend-world where what is proclaimed and promised is the opposite of reality. In the fall of 2013 this was dramatically illustrated during the roll out of ObamaCare as thousands of Americans were being dropped from their health insurance policies and the promise of Obama was seen for what it was, a deliberate lie, calculated to ensure his 2012 re-election.  President’s weekly address, June 6, 2009: “If you like the plan you have, you can keep it.  If you like the doctor you have, you can keep your doctor, too.  The only change you’ll see are falling costs as our reforms take hold.”  There were at least 37 documented instances where the President or his top aides made similar promises, yet when the reality of the rollout in late 2013 exposed the gross deception, Obama then lied about the lie he had told.  On November 4, 2013 he said, “We said was, you can keep (your plan) if it hasn’t changed since the law passed.”     

Anyone who paid close attention to Obama’s past in 2008 could have seen all of this coming. Unfortunately, his own party had long embraced his ideological agenda, and the mainstream media smitten with his 2004 Democratic Convention speech and delirious with prospect of a "progressive" black man in the White House seem to have decided that his personal history and his political track record really did not matter.  Obama’s 2008 election was a con job – shame on him.  His 2012 reelection was a hatchet job – shame on us. He will be gone soon; his damage will remain with us for a very long time.

Hannah’s Obama – the Genius and the Crackpot

Society is always prone to accept a person offhand for what he pretends to be, so that a crackpot posing as a genius always has a certain chance to be believed. 

                          Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Hannah Arendt, a brilliant jewel of a political thinker, made this trenchant observation in her monumental work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, post WWII. She was speaking specifically of Hitler and the “magic spell” he had cast over his German listeners. The fascination with the Fuhrer, she adds, rested on “his pseudo-authoritative judgments about everything under the sun, and on the fact that his opinions – whether they dealt with the harmful effects of smoking or with Napoleon’s policies – could always be fitted into an all-encompassing ideology.” (305)  

So, it is hard to resist the suspicion that the occupant of the White House for the past seven years is just the sort of “crackpot posing as a genius” that Arendt was describing.  Consider: in 2008 a self-proclaimed “genius,” devoid of the relevant credentials and experience burst upon the political landscape promising to heal the planet, change the world, bring racial harmony and move the country beyond the frustrations and impediments of partisan politics. Well and good. Crackpots and their delusional promises abound, but sanity and common sense usually inoculate us against the nostrums of bloviating political charlatans, especially ones who promise things like “complete transformation.”

With the ascent of Obama in 2008 one could only contemplate with astonishment the rapture, the delirium, the intoxicated enthrallment with which hordes of serious, grownup people basked in the saccharin smog of vacuity that came out of his traveling carnival show.  College students, yes, but not only did the members of the fourth estate – professionally obliged to be skeptical – consume the snake oil, they stupidly joined the frenzied rituals of apotheosis. Evan Thomas of Newsweek with a straight-face proclaimed The One to be “a sort of God standing among us.”  Well … just what “sort of God” was he?   One that uttered proclamations such as “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for”, silly, bewildering humbuggery, a grandiose slogan of egotism and solipsism that one might expect from a collection of spoiled twerps running for 10^th grade student council. The dogged determination of the press corps to remain amnesiacs with regard to Obama’s past helped to put into office a man whose basic instincts, personal history and ideological fixtures were deeply inimical to America’s history and traditions.  He aspired not just to lead America, but as he said shortly before his first election, to “completely transform” it. That arrogant display of colossal egotism and condescension by itself should have finished him.

Shortly after his first inauguration before he even began being President came his Nobel Peace prize – gotten like the presidency for nothing related to any substantive achievement – and installation in the Pantheon of the Greats (FDR, Lincoln, JFK) by the adulating media. Years later, however, no one, including Evan Thomas, comments on the divinity or even the genius of the man who was proclaimed during his campaign as a “Lightworker.”  No comparisons now with FDR. He is sometimes likened to Jimmy Carter – Jimmy Carter, minus the humility. No president has ever produced such a vast disparity between the promises of the campaign and the fulfillment in office. His 2008 campaign was a masterpiece of illusion, deception and misdirection: his 2012 campaign was an unprecedented and depressing work of slander and character assassination. 

Our experience clearly shows that Obama from the beginning was pretending to be something of which he was the polar opposite. Transparency, moderation, civility, mutual respect, accountability, responsible stewarding of resources, racial healing, post-partisan politics – none of these have ever been remotely in evidence, which he is always eager to say is the fault of others. The Hope & Change act was a cynical cover for his deeply resentful and adversarial mentality and his intolerance and condescending disdain for any political opposition.

    

Since there was so little evidence of anything Obama had done or experience that he had that would justify his ambition, one must ponder the question: how was this pretender able to succeed? The answer captured in the title of Leonard Cohen’s song, “Everybody Knows” was bluntly and correctly asserted during the 2008 Democratic primary season by Geraldine Ferraro, who happened to be working for Hillary Clinton.  “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman of any color, he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.”  For her honesty and perspicacity she was promptly sacked. Indeed, the country was “caught up in the concept,” the concept being that Obama was no ordinary mortal candidate: he was in fact an opportunist extraordinaire posing as a miracle man. Thus he appeared at the right time and right place with a deal – white redemption, guilt no more.  “He can be President and we can finally be done with racism,” seemed to be the barely sublimated motif.  Obama was not selling his experience – he had none. He was not selling his ideological convictions – he hid them. He could not sell his integrity and character – they were compromised and questionable.  He was selling himself as a nice, well-intentioned, well-spoken, well-educated black man possessed of unique, transcendent qualities of personality who would be a President like no other. Doing that required a carefully honed message empty of content, wildly bold and grandiose, yet anodyne and non-threatening, and, it necessitated that he dissimulate his past association with the unseemly likes of  Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers, a past inconsistent with the wholesome, “we’re all in it together” change agent image that David Axelrod had helped him craft.  Plus, as Ms. Ferraro pointed out, he was, indeed, lucky. Young, sleek and fresh with the GQ looks and the crisp crease of his slacks that so impressed New York Times pundit, David Brooks, the cool and confident Obama stood beside the dumpy, “been-there-done-that” harridan in a pants suit, Hillary Clinton.  

Obama’s “deal” was a bait-and-switch.  No post-racial America in the horizon as some may have hoped with the election to the Presidency of a black man.  Racism is an unrelenting refrain of the Left, and the charge has been constantly used as a smear for anyone on the Right who finds fault with what the President does. A careful reading of Dreams from my Father reveals that  Obama, like his pastor-mentor, Jeremiah Wright is reflexively hostile on matters racial and can never be expected to relinquish his grievances.

Once in office throughout his presidency Obama appears everywhere – magazine and book covers, talk shows, interviews, speech after speech – delivering, as Arendt puts it, “his pseudo-authoritative judgments about everything under the sun,” all of it wrapped into a crude neo-Marxist ideology that finds exploitation and oppression and unfairness everywhere. The America he had sought to lead was in his mind a rigged system, burdened with iniquity, its “bitter clingers to their guns and religion” needing to relinquish their shotguns and bigotry. The remarks of his wife during the 2008 campaign captured the usually dissimulated rancor and bitterness of the Obamas: “[L]ife [in America] is not good: we're a divided country, we're a country that is just downright mean…”  In the White House for these long years, we have a President and First Lady long marinated in the juices of racial resentment, palling around with scurrilous race baiters and riot fomenters like Al Sharpton, meditating upon and nurturing the myriad grievances of identity politics, and insulting and vilifying anyone who happens to disagree. 

Rather than being humbled by the responsibilities of the office he had assumed, Obama’s arrogance and conviction of infallibility seemed to expand exponentially.  Again, Hannah Arendt: “The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error. The assumption of infallibility, moreover, is based not so much on superior intelligence as on the correct interpretation of the essentially reliable forces in history or nature, forces which neither defeat nor ruin can proved wrong because they are bound to assert themselves in the long run.” (348-49) 

Obama’s intellectual and moral conceit renders him incapable of acknowledging shortcomings or mistakes and of according any respect to those who differ with him.  He is the personal embodiment of progress, a force of rectification, The One who was destined to turn that “mean America” into a just America, and, not just America.  As his wife, high on the vapors of Obama worship in 2008 told a group of admirers, “Barack is going to change the world.” He  has surrounded himself with the sycophant celebrities of Hollywood, and to protect his thin skin and swollen ego his handlers usually put him in venues fully orchestrated where to the amusement of his adulators, he dispenses his sarcasms and insults his critics. He disdains the press conference where on occasion his wisdom is called into question.

For his much vaunted “superior intelligence” little evidence has ever been  produced.  His university grades, test scores and school records are all under lock. Though touted as a constitutional law scholar and professor he has produced not a single published page of scholarship, even as editor of the Harvard Law Review.  His only two publications are about his favorite subject, himself, and of these his authorship remains somewhat questionable. 

Obama’s infallibility rests, as Arendt suggests, not on his superior intelligence but on the mantle he adroitly donned as the great orator for “progressive politics.”  His national prominence came from a single speech. From the beginning, the foundation of Obama’s “genius” was to rest on his supposed inspirational, eloquent oratory.  But the more he talks, the less he says. When he is not mean spirited and petulant his talks are composed of boring and predictable cliches. At the end of year seven there is no inspiration or eloquence. Mocked for his teleprompter dependency, not even his admirers can find the remnants of oratorical brilliance. His genius, whatever it was supposed to be, is long gone.  When he leaves office and recedes into history, he will increasingly be come to viewed as the sort of "crackpot" so ably described by Hannah Arendt.