Popping The Obama Bubble

Popping The Obama Bubble

Now that the Kennedy’s have formally anointed Obama with the legend of Camelot we have to wonder if he deserves it, or, if "it" is really anything at all. Firstly, JKF gained mythic proportions only by being assassinated. Before that, he became President by the tiniest of margins; in fact, on the day of his assassination he was in Dallas, not as a legend, but as a struggling politician shoring up his sagging political fortunes there in anticipation of his next difficult election.

Since Kennedy’s death we have learned that his personal life, and the national security implication of it, was horrendous; in fact infinitely more horrendous than the personal life of Bill Clinton, who was, let’s not forget, impeached for comparitively benign behavior! Kennedy was so bad that the press, even the opposition press, could not report it because it was deemed too injurious to the well recognized foundational values of American social life that were, apparently, held in contempt by Kennedy. One of the Kennedy tricks, for example, was to hold women under water during extramarital sex so that their panic would heighten his orgasmic pleasure. Nowadays, liberals are so apoplectic about water boarding when for Kennedy it was no big deal, even in the White House?

In the end though our President is the symbol of America, the embodiment of our highest dreams and aspirations, and a reflection of our best selves, or so we like to think. When Kennedy was killed a part of America, then, was killed with him and so to this day we are inclined to keep him as a legend or at least a member of the family. We do this despite a short, marginal Presidency during which very little was accomplished, except perhaps for the precipitation of the Cuban missile crisis which nearly ended the world in nuclear war becuase Kennedy had uttered a few wimpy Obamasque statements in Austria that did not impress Khrushchev, in the slightest. If maintaining the legend means overlooking the amazing hypocrisy of his personal life and his other political short comings, we do it to protect him, and ourselves.
Additionally, and as importantly, Kennedy and his wife were Hollywood pretty. We know what awe that inexplicably inspires in many Americans. The rare combination of Washington power and Hollywood glamour proved too much for America to resist, at least when clouded over by the wake of an assassination. Will the Obama family really excite us this way in the end? It seems unlikely. We should all be thankful that the embarrassing, anti-democratic, and Hannah Montana quality of his political campaign can’t possibly last. It is no wonder Europeans hold us in contempt for our extreme and odd celebrity worshipping, especially when freedom and individual liberty are supposedly such a part of our character.

When America aspired to great personal values, Kennedy’s values had to be kept secret. Today, we have given up on personal values. There are no secrets to be kept. We pass out condoms in the schools knowing that we are too weak or too human to even have standards. Our new standard is: Que Sera Sera. We no longer melioristicially create our culture, we merely respond to contingent genetic variables. The downside: a 50% divorce rate, 1.3 million abortions a year, 2.4 million in prison, Hip-Hop culture, failing schools, and 30% of kids in poverty does not disparage or even discourage us at all. We celebrate and embrace the new tragic realism of our lives on The Oprah Winfrey show every day. Hence, in stark contrast to JFK, we know in real time all the sad details of the great stain maker (Bill Clinton), and of Obama’s youthful indiscretions. So how can Teddy and Caroline pass on the legend of Camelot when Camelot existed only fraudulently, and in the wake of an assassination?
It was contemptuous of them to try to pass on the legend, but contempt for people and love of gov’t is what Democrats naturally do. It is their stock in trade. Obama inherited a dubious legend, and hopefully, if only out of the boredom that can come with a long campaign, it will slowly become apparent that Obama is no JFK; primarily because the JFK we imagine now never did exist.

Another problem for Obama is that he is anti defense while Kennedy had the good sense to run to the political right of Eisenhower and Nixon in a successful effort to trick America into believing that Democrats are not cowardly, anti-American surrender monkeys. Hillary had the good sense, and amorality, to attempt this trick too through all her pre-Presidential years in the Senate and in the early months of her Presidential campaign, but has since been forced to give it up because the Democratic base just won’t stand for defending the America they hate so much. Obama though has stood true, secretly, to his anti-Kennedy principles by offering no foreign policy ideas whatsoever despite 9/11, a urgently deteriorating situation in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, and a precarious but momentarily stable situation in Iraq? The hypocrisy is nearly perfect given that their "Bush derangement syndrome" was caused by the war on terror about which they are now perfectly silent?
If Kennedy is legendary at all it is as tax cutter, who Republicans site incessantly, while Obama has definite plans to raise taxes in every significant category. How could he pay for all the new programs if not by taxing for all the new programs? All he has to do is make the dumber people feel that gov’t programs are free, and make the dumb people feel that they’ll pay less than their neighbors for the programs. If you drill down through his web site long enough you can discover all this, but of course you’ll never hear it on the campaign trail through all the tribalistic "Fired Up, Yes We Can" poetic chanting.

Another problem for Obama is detailed by the renowned black author, Shelby Steele, who claims Obama can’t win because he is a phony black man. He has, according to Steele, the reassuring looks and non confrontational altitudes of a house slave - i.e., someone who is content to live among white people and not create guilt or discomfort with any lingering anger he may have about a few centuries of slavery and racism. Eventually, Steele claims, Americans will see this as phony and demand to know what a future President Obama really thinks and feels before they place the levers of Presidential power in his hands.

After Carl Bernstein wrote his recent, comprehensive biography on Hillary he was asked what her biggest liability would be. He said, "her inauthenticity", and all the world agreed with what was obvious. But now that worry has all but disappeared given that Obama has given new meaning to any conceivable understanding of the word with what has to be the most utterly vacuous, vaporware campaign in modern democratic history; a campaign that has now deteriorated into a personality cult as much as anything else.
Hillary, the perfectly inauthentic and legendary triangulater has now challenged Obama to 5 debates, or at least what passes for debates in modern politics, but Obama has declined because he says. "it is time I could be spending getting to know the people." To Obama, a one second touch across a rope line offered to a few thousand adoring supplicants is far more important than telling millions in a debate what he would do as President. Maybe he figures that after a full two years in the Senate everyone ought to already know what he stands for?

But, he is a Harvard trained lawyer. Lawyers are trained to live in a moral vacuum and to be fully prepared to take any side of any issue, if the money is right, aren’t they? So then, perhaps Obama’s campaign ought to be one of the lawyerly best ever in that sense? Indeed, it does appear to be breaking new ground in terms of shamelessness, exploitation, and contempt for the masses whom he wishes to deceive and disarm with a fleeting touch across a rope line, and then rule from his condescending socialist pulpit. Obama has the "Audacity of Hope"(the title of his award winning book) but not the audacity to trust his postulants with the truth about what he will do as President?
Obama presents like earnest kid running for class President, albeit with a mellifluous voice and Ted Sorensen writing his poetic lines. In point of fact, Kennedy did and Obama does rely on Sorensen who wrote the now famous line, "ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country". The line was absurd when Kennedy, a Democrat, used it, but utterly ridiculous for Obama who has huge plans to, in effect, buy millions and million of votes by fraudulently promising to have his socialist gov’t do everything on earth for people who will then be increasingly dependent on gov’t for their sustenance, and not looking to do things for their country. It is Republicans who use government to guarantee the freedom from gov’t with which people can do things for themselves and their neighbors and, only secondarily, their country.

Even more sad and tragic is that the more upscale a Democrat is the more likely he is to be attracted to Obama’s charismatic "Fired Up, Yes We can" nonsense about hope and change. If there is something positive in smart people demanding nothing from a candidate, who can imagine what it is? And even worse, independents like Colin Powell, for example, who claim to be above it all, free of petty party loyalty and ideology, and therefore free to pick the best man with the best program, are also herding to Obama? If Hitler, Stalin, Jefferson, and Christ had ideologies and party affiliations that reflected those ideologies, what can it mean to be free of party and ideology anyway, if not to be free of consciousness? This is what the mighty Obama encourages!
Republicans too though are moved by charismatic figures. Just look at the way they adore Ronald Reagan. He is quite clearly the standard bearer of the party and almost worshiped within the inner circle of true believers. It should not be a mystery that people like Bob Dole or Gerald Ford who lacked Reaganesque principles and passion are not easily worshipped for standing in the middle; seemingly too feeble to pick a side. You never know with such people if they are real Americans who believe in the American democratic middle or if they would always be in a cowardly but safe middle no matter what the extremes were. After all, the middle is easy and almost deceptively sensible in 21st Century America, but it seemed easy and sensible too, for many anyway, in 1930’s Germany when Nazi and Communist parameters defined the political landscape.

So then, how does a real American think about the intellectually blinding charisma of Reagan? Firstly, he must realize that Reagan and Obama are exact opposites. Reagan operated in the tradition of the West that started, roughly, with the Magna Carta Libertatum and ended with the US Constitution. Any charisma and power was to be used in that tradition to free people from the power of Kings or other charismatic despots. Reagan sought power to destroy it for future generations so that they might live in freedom. Obama is the exact anti-American, anti-Western opposite. He seeks power for leverage with which to continuously expand a gov’t which he and his heirs will regally and charismatically control.

Underneath the charisma is, in fact, the most liberal Senator in America according to the "National Journal." This mostly explains why his campaign in America must be the emptiest in American history. It is simply too disingenuous to promote a charismatic, ever expanding gov’t in a free country, even, for the time being anyway, when many have already been subverted by our left wing Democratic Pied Pipers. We can only pray Obama will be exposed over the course of a long campaign; that Democrats and Independents won’t see him as another Teutonic Knight, Napoleon or Hitler who they want to sheepishly follow into the promised land of another Russian winter.

Tragically, that was human history - before America!

Ted Baiamonte
Intellectual Republican