If you want some bizarre fun --

-- read Chris Wright's recent essay on Counterpunch, The Stupefying Mediocrity of Barack Obama. Here I will give this piece a go-over, pointing out its highly amusing word choices. It's not as if Wright is wrong, or as if his politics were suspect, or anything like that. It's that describing Barack Obama and his political party, the Democratic Party, requires a degree of verbal gymnastics that renders one prone to verbal belly-flops. Onward!

First, the title. Obama wasn't a "mediocre" President. He might be considered a "bad" President, by those conscious very few who feel stung by Obama's selling-out of the title of "first Black President." He was an excellent President if you think of the acuity with which he fulfilled his economic mission -- keeping the masses poor while making them feel loved. He did his job, and he did it well.

Obama also fulfilled his political mission -- to hand power over to the Republicans. In fact, we can now say that the Democratic Party is his party -- a party which serves no purpose which its members can identify because it offers nothing to the public. Its pitch is: just STFU and vote for the Democrat because the Republicans promote their evil more openly. Thus when Wright says:

This perception of his ("he is certain he will be vindicated") probably also explains his general reluctance to publicly criticize Trump. He simply doesn’t care enough to do so—he has nothing like a deep outrage against the continuous injustices of Trumpian politics—because his task has already been accomplished: he has written himself into the history books by being the U.S.’s first black president. That achievement is what matters, that and his eight years of (supposed) attempts to “heal the country’s divides.” Again, it’s too bad the country wasn’t ready for him, but that isn’t his fault.

he makes an excellent point while missing another one. When they do criticize Trump, elite Democrats criticize Trump for the same reason the slackers at your workplace periodically try hard to "look busy." They don't care enough about Trump either, but they still criticize him. Obama doesn't have to look busy -- he's retired.

And then you have Wright's pronouncement upon Obama's narcissism, which also makes one important point while leaving out another:

When your overriding value in life is self-glorification, what you tend to get is the moral cowardice and fecklessness of people like Obama, the Clintons, and, in truth, all centrist politicians. They’ll do whatever they have to do to rise to power, so they can realize their “destiny”—of being powerful. They’ll always try to please “both sides”—a binary notion that leaves out the genuine left, which is to say the interests of the large majority of people—because that is the safest and surest road to power.

Yes, of course, leaving out the public's interests is the safest and surest road to power.
But it isn't really "moral cowardice," because the principles that would guide morally effective government simply don't exist in actual government. No government has the courage to phase out the fossil fuel industry, the main prerequisite of effective climate change mitigation today. No government has the courage to phase out capitalism, which is today the main impediment to mass prosperity and to the continuation of the utopian dream begun with the Enlightenment and immortalized in Condorcet's Sketch. This is so because all governments under neoliberal rule are obliged to maintain the aggregate profit rate for an owning class (thus depressing wages) lest the forces of capital attempt to destroy them and the countries which they claim to govern. Rather, Obama's is the moral courage depicted in this New Yorker cartoon:

Which brings us to Wright's summation of Obama's legacy. Obama's legacy is of course Trump, and an America in which there are eight Democrat trifectas and twenty-six Republican trifectas even though the Republicans are, by membership count, a minority party. Here's the quote:

While the U.S. is certainly not Weimar Germany, and the risks of full-blown fascism are not as great now as they were then, one can see parallels. Just as the feckless, vacillating liberalism of Jimmy Carter ushered in the reactionary age of Reagan, so the vacillating liberalism of Obama prepared the way for the semi-fascism of Trump and the reinvigoration of white supremacy.

I'd like to know how Obama's idea of government counts in any way as "liberalism." Once again: catch one truth, miss another.

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Cassiodorus's picture

@dkmich he's actually quite a nice guy when you forget about the things he did, no?

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"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@Cassiodorus They can't stand to admit they were betrayed. Everything else follows.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

Citizen Of Earth's picture

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal @Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal
They can't bring themselves to admit they were conned by a World Class Conman. Or maybe some still can't see the con yet.

Within in the 1st month of O's first term, when he stuffed his cabinet full of Wall Street Insiders I knew we had been Duped.

And it really raises the question, when a real FDR-esque candidate comes along again (ever??), how will we be able to believe him/her. Candidate's words are useless.

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Donnie The #ShitHole Douchebag. Fake Friend to the Working Class. Real Asshole.

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@Citizen Of Earth The parallel is exact.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

gulfgal98's picture

@dkmich Obama's overt betrayal of his core constituency is what makes him so disgusting to me.

Obama was not a weak President. On the contrary, he was very strong on behalf of his real constituency, the rich and powerful. This is exactly why he fought harder to get the TPP passed than for any other issue. Basically, Obama was a pretty much a "hands off" President on any issue that might have benefited the majority of Americans. He used the Republican "opposition" in Congress as his public rational for not getting things done. It was just a fake rope a dope play on his part. He never wanted to accomplish any of those things that the American people so desperately needed done.

This one sentence (below) in the article stood out for me because of my previous research into neo-liberalism.

Obama may have paid lip-service to it in his rhetoric, but what he cared about more was a threadbare type of identity politics, cultural inclusivity, symbols and spectacles of the post-racial, post-nationalist millennium, of which he saw himself as the great exemplar.

I have highlighted the two words that leapt out at me in the above sentence. Neo-liberals like Obama are invested in globalism. They will do everything in their power to ensure that globalism reigns supreme, even at the expense of their own countries. This also explains why the only issue that Obama ever seriously invested his personal capital in was the TPP, for which he lobbied up until the very end of his term.

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Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy

@gulfgal98 what Obama really was. It finally sank in for me when he basically said anyone who did not believe in fast tracking it was racist. I had been totally on his side until that point, I fervently believed that it was only those horrible bigoted Repukes that were stopping him from "hope and change" until that moment. And it still pisses me off to no end it took me that long to see it, but he finally did me that favor by opening his big sell out mouth.

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Only a fool lets someone else tell him who his enemy is. Assata Shakur

Bollox Ref's picture

said this:

“I think Barack knew that he had God-given talents that were extraordinary. He knows exactly how smart he is. … He knows how perceptive he is. He knows what a good reader of people he is. And he knows that he has the ability — the extraordinary, uncanny ability — to take a thousand different perspectives, digest them and make sense out of them, and I think that he has never really been challenged intellectually. … So what I sensed in him was not just a restless spirit but somebody with such extraordinary talents that had to be really taxed in order for him to be happy. … He’s been bored to death his whole life. He’s just too talented to do what ordinary people do.”

Valerie Jarrett

Barf!

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Gëzuar!!
from a reasonably stable genius.

Cassiodorus's picture

@Bollox Ref Our problem is that we disagree with Obama's purpose -- to make a mess of any remaining government agenda that might benefit the world before handing power over to the Republicans.

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"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama

detroitmechworks's picture

@Bollox Ref Mel Brooks seems to have predicted the end result of this kind of attitude.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kt3745NRxpo]

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I do not pretend I know what I do not know.

@Bollox Ref

Only phrased in neo-lib-speak.

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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

Carter's "feckless liberalism" was not what ushered in Reagan. What ushered in Reagan was this:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/05/the-desert-one-deba...

And this, which of course is now being dubbed a "conspiracy theory." Obviously great patriots like Ronald Reagan and Henry Kissinger wouldn't make deals with nasty turban-wearing hostage takers in the Middle East just to win an election. And you know it's a conspiracy theory because a Congressional committee said so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Surprise_conspiracy_theory

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal @Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

It lasted too long, and it is what Bill Clinton deep-sixed when he created a new kind of Democrat. The sabotage deal with Iran was frosting on the cake.

If you target the rich or the poor for special benefits, sooner or later Joe six pack will resent it and demand it be eliminated or somebody else pay for it. Bernie's agenda is just like Social Security and Medicare. Everyone in and everyone benefits.

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"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@dkmich Not if Joe Sixpack is included in the deal, which obviously, if you're making a Great Society, he should be.

Bobby Kennedy traveling through WV could have been the beginning of something like that, which is probably why he was killed.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

Johnson's war on poverty didn't include Joe sixpack. Everything was means tested. The meme of the times was "the Republicans steal it and the Democrats give it all away". Even back then everyone hated both parties.

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"Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich."--Napoleon

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@dkmich the Great Society needed to be tweaked. The New Deal, initially, was good except that it was racist--in other words, good ideas, but they needed to be applied to Black people too. Then the Great Society was paying attention only to Black people, it seemed (with the exception of Medicare). Take the racism out of the New Deal and extend it, and you've got the right formula.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

Ronald Reagan, who is one of his heroes. I guess Reagan is liberal too.s

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

American liberalism? If I gave a shit about definitions of liberalism in this country, I'd be mad.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

Cassiodorus's picture

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal Weimar Germany came to an abrupt end because of some specific actions by some specific actors -- Franz von Papen persuaded the old and sick Paul von Hindenburg that appointing Hitler as Chancellor would "domesticate" him. And so on January 30, 1933, in the depths of the Great Depression, von Hindenburg gave in. Not sure how that works with "American liberalism."

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"The war on Gaza, backed by the West, is a demonstration that the West is willing to cross all lines. That it will discard any nuance of humanity. That it is willing to commit genocide" -- Moon of Alabama

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@Cassiodorus Isn't that weird?

Of course "liberalism" means whatever a person wants it to at the time. You have written extensively about this, if I'm remembering correctly.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

gulfgal98's picture

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal using the word liberal to describe my views. The same goes for left and progressive. These terms have been twisted in the public to define anyone who is a neo-liberal.

I now personally prefer humanist.

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Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy

Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal's picture

@gulfgal98 I still use 'left' but am willing to consider socialist or rationalist.

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"More for Gore or the son of a drug lord--None of the above, fuck it, cut the cord."
--Zack de la Rocha

"I tell you I'll have nothing to do with the place...The roof of that hall is made of bones."
-- Fiver

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal , the truth party, humanitarian, justice seeker, peacenik, earth first, social democrat, communal collaborator, better future and my new favorite... just us.

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Citizen Of Earth's picture

will be remembered for is that he was "The First Black President" -- Period.

2014 TYT segment quote - :18 - 1:10
https://youtu.be/nMuuaO-YLKE

I tend to agree. Although the librul teevee news outlets tend to aggrandize him with Fake Achievements.
Kinda sad for blacks, who have seen so much social injustice, that The First Black President was a Wall Street Whore just like all the White presidents before him.

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Donnie The #ShitHole Douchebag. Fake Friend to the Working Class. Real Asshole.

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