Street indicts Obama here in his own version of the Mull-er Report. There "Barry" was, throughout 2008, campaigning as the Hope and Change candidate, his confident, buoyant steps, lifting all votes, and filling our sails with luff and inspiration. When he said, "We are the change we've been waiting for," some of us lefties looked at each wondering what that meant, and passed around the helium bong, funning and stuffing like it was 1969, love and pipe bombs in the air. By the time we got to Denver, already mile high, we were sure that not only would be getting our first Black president, but a whole new hip way of regarding the master-slave dialectic. Like Hegel once said, and said again, we need each other. Hug?
Street reminds us that Obama wrapped himself in iconography: Ali, MLK, Mandela. He writes,
Obama relished the imagery of a fierce fighter: the charismatic Ali's decimation of Liston, who was emblematic of the ghettoized Black population that had long made Obama uncomfortable.
Turns out that Obama's signature strut was more the rope-a-dope Ali of later years than the Clay who made Liston pay in 1965; Street makes a convincing argument that Obama was no street-fighting man. Ever.
As far as Obama's drawing inspiration from MLK goes, Street laughs at the idea: MLK, he reminds us, was a "democratic socialist"; his 1963 "I Have A Dream" speech was the culmination of a march on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. It came three months after an August march in Birmingham against segregation that saw more than 1000 Blacks brutally arrested, including one woman taken down by five cracker cops, one of whom had her neck pinned to the ground by an officer's knee. Sound familiar?
Obama, Street argues, is a Corporatist (not a Democrat or a liberal), and did next to nothing to promote jobs for Blacks, and bears a legacy that saw him intensely prosecute whistleblowers and reporters (including a 7-year go at Pulitzer Prize winner James Risen), and extend the Surveillance State. MLK was a Nobel-winning man of peace, Obama used his undeserved Nobel Peace Prize speech to promote casus belli. You know, like Nam, the Noble Cause, that had Mao in stitches.
And though Obama was wont to do Nelson Mandela's little stage shuffle, and said he was Woke by Madiba -- driven to politics by Mandela's courageous leadership in ending South Africa's fascist Apart-Hate system -- he didn't go to visit South Africa as president until 2013, five years in. He made a show of visiting Robben Island and the cell in which Mandela called home for 18 of his 27 years, in prison. But, the 94 year old Mandela was hospitalized and too ill for visitors. Obama promised to close Gitmo; it's still open. In his strategy to fight Terrorism, Obama switched from such problematic detention to droning to death suspected illegal enemy combatants where they lived, which, ironically, reminds one of the film, District 9. Although, as a bonus irony, Obama is responsible for the immigrant children's "cages" on the Mexican border -- ask Snopes.
Even later, Obama might have drawn a parallel between his own life and, say, South African Trevor Noah and the childhood he describes in his memoir Born a Crime -- a reference to being the love product of a Black man and a white woman. Their union was illegal. And one could argue that the birther conspiracy that emerged later was driven by the same kind of Apart-Hate (Jim Crow) anti-miscegenation white angst that Trump championed and rose to power out of. Street writes,
Obama's failure to punch back in a meaningful, forceful, and timely fashion has been all-the-more disturbing given Obama's deep complicity in Trump's ascendancy.
It's true, Obama retired and seemingly entered a second childhood, what-me-worry? smiles all over the MSM, as if to say, see, No Apocalypse.
At first, Street's speed bag work on Obama's legacy seems excessive. Politics in America has been moving farther to the Right for at least 60 years, and there's rarely been a time when we weren't either engaged in full scale war or covertly intervening in the governments of other nations. Technically, we're still at war on the Korean peninsula. A warrior nation is a conservative nation. And over that period of time more and more citizens will have served the military, bringing its regimental thinking to political decisions. Defense and national security take precedence, much of the national budget is drained that way, what's left is further siphoned by corporate welfare; we the people get to sop up the soup sauces remaining. The question is: Who will stop this MIC madness before we descend into climate change hell?
The real question Street seems to be asking is: How did we end up with Trump?
Like many millions of us, we just can't get past the reality of his presidency. There's something missing; something we're not being told. Street curses. "The deadly clown." "The demented oligarch." "The self-described Chosen One." "The indecent beast Trump." "The beastly Donald." We could hold a contest. But what's truly "sad" is that such name-calling is what Trump excels at, and engaging in it, as we feel we must, lowers our collective IQs. You can almost see how Hitler did it with his malleable Good Germans, limp fish salutes all around. How did Trump come to be? For Street, the answer is Obama, Obama, Obama, "the cringeworthy Obama."
There was newly elected Obama one minute, bright and bouncy, lifting us all up with that gleaming smile (he even looks a bit like Mandela, some of us noted, passing the bong), and then -- pop! -- something snapped, and we found ourselves free-fallin', criminals on Wall Street busted our colorful laughing gas balloons, and, even before he was inaugurated, Obama had an emergency: banks had made a grave mistake handing out balloon filled loans to Black Americans, so that they could feel they were movin' on up, at a thousand feet a minute, to the Eastside, finally getting a piece of that pie in the sky. More racism. They were gamed; they might as well have joined a pyramid scheme. Anger from Obama? What would Ali, MLK or Mandela have done? Barry, breaking bad, said, Let's Make a Deal.
Street describes Obama as a wolf-of-Wall-Street in sheep's clothing (and probably synthetic at that). It's astonishing:
The nation's financial elite had driven the nation and world's economy into an epic meltdown...The banking titans came into the meeting full of dread, expecting that the new president would be angry at their monumental negligence and criminality, ready to initiate massive financial reform... Rather than stand up for those who had been harmed most by the crisis-workers, minorities, and the poor-Obama sided unequivocally with those who had caused the meltdown.
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