Nicholas Barrett

I’ve been wanting to write this since this blog started but i’ve held back.  Possibly from a mixture of misplaced hope and admiration.  I’m not an American but America matters and it mattered to me.  On the 4th of November 2008 I stayed up all night to watch history in the making.  Two years later I no longer believe Barack Obama to be a ray of hope but a brilliant con man, and the jokes on you.

There was one truth about Obama that most of us forgot, he’s a politician and in the mist of the hype of a black president we forgot that politician lie.  It wasn’t just his race, Obama sold his electorate a fair country unlike the previous administration who won the 2004 election by endlessly invoking the events of September 11th.

For years and years politician’s tempted us with a better world and consistently failed to deliver.  When a big enough proportion of the electorate became sufficiently disenchanted by this pattern the politician’s had to find a new trick.  Thanks to the cold war, that trick became fear.  Instead of bribing us for our vote with promises of greener grass they sold us protection from an enemy.  Why raise expectations when you can show films like this Bush ad or this Kerry ad?   

The 2004 presidential election wasn’t about who could help the American people, it only had to be about who could protect them from the super evil terrorists.  That’s why four years later the lives of average americans had not improved at all and Obama’s hopeful rhetoric was so popular.  There was nothing new about Obama, he was just an old fashioned snake oil politician.  

That was only half the con.  When Obama started making noises about climate change, heath care and finical reform it scared a few people.  It scared Oil companies, insurance companies, drug companies and the banks.  So they drowned the Obama campaign in money.  Golman Sachs alone donated $994,795.  That was the beauty of the deception, Obama said all the right thing to secure the votes of the electorate while simultaneously terrifying big business into funding his campaign. 

Two years later we have seen almost no “change”.  America is still addicted to oil and at the mercy of casino style banking.  Guantanamo Bay is still open and the “heath care reform” was a blowjob to the insurance companies.  I would feel slightly cheated but I guess we all just got carried away, he was black, we has funny and he was cool.  Most of all he was inspiring.  Barack O’Charmer might be the greatest confidence trickster of the 21st century.  I really hope that I’m wrong about this and not even close to being right, but at the moment that’s how it looks.