Re: It’s not about Obama … or is it? – (the Obama thread)

Greetings, 

This post is on the Obama thread, the part of the story that is about Obama. 

Other posts will be about the non-Obama thread, looking at the actions of Geithner, Gates, and the other appointees.

rkm

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Hi Jeffrey,

I don’t think that what happens over the next year is likely to shake the loyalty of core Obama supporters. To the extent things don’t get better, that is likely to be blamed on Republican opposition, and on the attacks from the right wing.

One of the excuses people give for Obama is that he must be very careful in trying to change things, with all those entrenched interests in Washington. Here’s an example, from a correspondent:

Any person who’s elected to public office going to Washington DC is stepping into a mine field. I lived in those parts for years. To survive and change course significantly is very tricky. Most of us would fail miserably with the enormous help of our corrupt media owned by the war machine and a large part supporters of Israel.

I find it interesting that the same people don’t draw the obvious conclusion from their observation: the corrupt media would never have supported Obama, as it has so wholeheartedly, if he represented any kind of threat to the system. In general, I’ve been struck by the illogic, the degree of rationalization, and the emotional defensiveness, that Obama supporters have been expressing, whenever they’ve been challenged on Obama. The same correspondent rationalized Obama’s victory this way:

…”they” didn’t see him coming and when they did couldn’t believe he could actually win, as most discounted the youth and rural common sense voter along with internet organization. “They” didn’t let him win. Finally enough voters awoke from their ignorant slumber to realize the ship was taking on water and about to sink. To beat the vote rigging/cheating you have to win by quite a bit in the US.

This same story line seems to be widely shared by Obama supporters. It ignores the nature of the Democratic Party that put Obama forward, a party that is just as corrupt as the media, and which gave Bush everything he wanted from Congress. It ignores the fact that Bush was one of the most unpopular Presidents in history, and any Democrat could have been expected to win, particularly against a McCain-Palin ticket. It ignores the fact that if Obama were perceived only late in the campaign to be a threat, the media could have easily turned on him and made him look like a fool, or some skeleton could have been pulled out of his closet to discredit him. It ignores the fact that there is no real limit to how much vote rigging can be arranged, via Diebold and other mechanisms, if ‘they’ really wanted to do it. 

It takes a lot of compartmentalized thinking, and rationalization, to see Obama as an underdog who beat the system. And it takes even more rationalization to associate ‘change’ in any way with the Obama administration. All of Obama’s top appointees are Wall Street insiders, left-overs from Bush, or otherwise strictly Establishment. And he is giving all of them free reign, which is sensible from a management perspective, but absolutely nonsensical from a leadership perspective — if any kind of change is being envisioned. In nearly every area, we are seeing a continuation or expansion of Bush’s programs, and we are seeing the enriching of elites at the expense of ordinary people.

Now ‘these people’, who are doing the rationalizing, and responding defensively, are not stupid people, nor are they generally illogical — far from it. Included among them are many of my friends, people I continue to have full respect for. In trying to understand how they got into this illogical position, we need to briefly review the history of the Obama campaign. And in reviewing it, we need to remember that both political parties are controlled by the same elites who own the media, run Wall Street, and own the Federal Reserve.

To begin with there was Bush, who was clearly in bed with the elites, and who was not only hated and feared by progressives, but who went out of his way to antagonize and frighten that majority constituency at every opportunity. When Obama came long — with all of his charm, intelligence, and perceived integrity — promising to undo all the Bush evils — it is quite understandable that a rush of hope was experienced by progressives.

The Republican campaign, with its hateful rhetoric, was at least as important in promoting Obama as his own campaign was. The two campaigns were carefully coordinated, with Palin brought in to really scare the liberal majority. The corrupt media told people the election would be close, and Obama supporters were further drawn in, becoming Obama’s Army, fighting the good and desperate fight together. When he won, they celebrated their own victory as well, and they see the battle as continuing — as Republicans resist his programs and right-wingers attack him with ridiculous charges of being ‘communist’, and complain about the cost of his relatively modest stimulus program.

What this means, as I see it, is that the core Obama supporters are not impartial observers of the scene, rather they are engaged as ongoing participants in the good fight. Their hero continues to inspire them with his very appealing (even to me) rhetoric, and they want to rise to his defense whenever he is attacked. Their loyalty to Obama is a bit like the loyalty a soldier feels toward a respected commanding officer on the field of battle. When you are under attack, you don’t have much patience with critics of such a commander, more likely anger would be the response, as I have experienced repeatedly.

In this regard it is useful to consider Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, perhaps the most prominent of the anti-Obama media, the perceived arch enemy of Obama. Rupert Murdoch is anything but anti-establishment, and when Bush was in power Fox News was highly supportive with its blatant propaganda. Murdoch is very much in the circles that attend the Bilderberger meetings and other such elite gatherings. He’s not opposed to Wall Street elites, he’s part of their circle, in tune with their agendas. What he is doing with Fox News is not designed to undermine Obama, rather it’s designed to frighten the progressive majority, keep them engaged in the perceived good fight, and most important — prevent them from looking critically at what the Obama administration is actually doing.

rkm