Status Updates From The Obama Syndrome: Surrend...

"Once the novelty of the candidate and the high-octane campaign had worn off, a dull Republican rival had been safely dispatched, and the mixed-race president was safely and happily ensconced in the White House, the starlit night disappeared and a confused, misty gray half light enveloped the country once again. Stern reality interrupted the celebrations. The situation at home and abroad was bleak."

Faced with clear choices, he went for the worst, but pretended to have done otherwise, a pattern that, after his victory, he would soon establish in most other spheres.

It was automatically assumed that the new leader of the world’s only imperial state would heal the wounds of the past. Some of the victims of Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana, members of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, and people living in occupied Iraq and Palestine, as well as citizens of the European protectorate, injected themselves with hope. This time it might be different.

At its 1964 convention, to take but one instance, the Democratic Party refused to seat the pro–Civil Rights representatives from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, preferring instead to back the segregationists representing the lynch mobs.

The Obama Effect was enhanced by the fact that both Obama’s person and his ultramoderate views were anathema to the repellent anchors on Fox TV and the crazed bigots of radio talk shows. If they hated him, he must be fine.

The dismantling of controls, which had never been challenged during the Clinton years, proceeded apace. Each financial scandal was treated as an exception, its authors bad apples that had been removed. The real problem was that the entire barrel was rotten. But Obama, far from posing any threat to the neoliberals, boasted of his links to the rich, “savvy” Wall Street CEOs.