Recently I got incensed by a particularly stupid graphic being passed around by a Facebook friend, touting the many supposed achievements of the Obama administration and chastising Democrats for failing to support him hard enough. I’ll dissect that vicious and cliche bit of partisanship eventually; however, it got me thinking about something I’ve never addressed publicly before: my personal guilt and complicity in the election, and hence, the almost innumerable crimes and cruelties of President Barack Obama.
I really should have known better in 2008. I try to hold myself to a higher standard, when it comes to politics, than the general public or my friends and family; I did get a four year degree in the area after all, I should be a bit more knowledgeable. I wallow in this unpleasant politics stuff after all, while other people get on with their lives.
But I fell for Obama all the same, and to this day I don’t fully understand why.
I thought I was being smart, and cynical, and analyzing the situation properly. It didn’t take a lot of pondering to realize that John McCain is a nutjob, and belongs nowhere near the levers of power. Likewise it was painfully obvious that Obama was a charlatan, didn’t believe half of what he said, and was principally concerned with his own almost messianic image. The public was projecting their hopes and dreams onto him, as he’d asked them to do, and so Obama could be many things to many people. I thought I had seen through his ruse, considered myself wise and cynical for anticipating what his *real* agenda would be, what steps he’d take to assure himself a place in history.
Boy was I ever wrong.
In 2008 I looked at Obama and I saw a savvy man who would do many of the right things for the wrong reasons. He, I thought, would support worker rights via the Employee Free Choice Act, not because it was the right thing to do legally or ethically, but because unions are the backbone of the Democratic Party, especially its Get Out the Vote efforts. I believed he would pass health care reform with a public option, which would slowly but surely phase out private health insurance in this country. Again, not because he said he would, or because getting rid of the evil private insurers was the right thing to do, but because it was necessary to save the country from fiscal ruin.
On and on it went like that, in my head. Obama would do the minimum and the public would fawn over him for it, mistaking competence for greatness, and he’d get his place in history. Of course, none of it was true. Obama didn’t do the minimum, didn’t take the obvious steps on behalf of his country, his party, hell, in the case of his many failures on the environmental front, even his species. Instead Obama surrounded himself with a coterie of extremely well-heeled sycophants and twiddled his thumbs before implementing the worst imaginable policies.
Health care ‘reform’ that guarantees the public virtually nothing of value, certainly no real standard of care, but that *does* make them pay up to 20% of their paycheck to get it.
No action on union rights.
A massive increase in deportation as thanks to the Hispanic community for their support.
Constant kicks in the teeth for his diehard constituencies, particularly gays and women.
There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t loathe myself a bit for being complicit in all this. I thought I was so smart, I thought McCain was so scary, I went out of my way to cast a vote for this odious swindler and warmonger, a man so without shame he gave a speech defending war while accepting the Nobel Peace Prize.
I failed. It was a failure of judgment, a failure of ego. I didn’t heed the warning signs, which were there all along, of course. Obama’s flip-flop on FISA, his longtime grooming by powerful corporate interests, his shameless self-aggrandizement and obvious, desperate need for the right people to approve of him. It was all there. It wasn’t obvious how far he’d sink, or how fast, but I should’ve noticed the weights and chains holding him down like Marley’s ghost. Obama wasn’t a savvy schemer looking to play on the American people’s optimism to make himself great. He was just another dangerous, short-sighted and venal sociopath who wanted to sit in the White House to stoke his own ego, and who assumed history would love him regardless of what he actually did with power.
I had projected too, letting myself believe Obama to be what I.. not wanted, precisely, but suspected him to be. And I’m still kicking myself for it.
That’s probably part of the reason I got so angry about being chastised on Facebook for disloyalty to the great man. I don’t just hate Barack Obama for being evil, or for his overtly evil policies, his mass murder via remote control drones for example. I hate myself for helping him, even by the largely symbolic act of voting.
Barack Obama fooled me too. Next time, I hope, I will do better.
But I am sorry. Very, very sorry.
