Well, the chickens have finally come to roost. Remember the scene in All the King's Men where Willie Stark shows up at some one-percenter Louisiana salon to be vetted by the local version of a permanent government? Six years into the dual administration of the man who would redeem both the sins of the previous nightmarish Bush administration and, as a bonus, four hundred years of racial injustice, the still youngish redeemer looks weary and focused on retirement to a good university post. Far from being the demagogue from Louisiana, Barack Obama, (even his name sends chills down the spine), was ever the contemplative--not Willie Stark but Marcus Aurelius took occupancy of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. One has to wonder what the aristocrats who vetted him are making of this by-election, a phenomenon in which the 40% of the electorate who can even rouse themselves to participate chose to have a collective tantrum. The real vote was cast by the 60% of voters who stayed home, thoroughly disillusioned and depressed by endless decades now on the slippery slope into an American version of fascism.
When the 2008 election was in progress and I wrote here that Obama was essentially a tool of the permanent government types given the assignment of restoring some semblance of wholesomeness to our political landscape, such words were greeted with hostility by Democratic Party true believers. Are they still so smitten with the man as they were in the heady days of the 2008 presidential election? And, as if the dissolution of our constitution via illegal wars, sanctioned torture, the end of habeus corpus, etc., was not enough, the whole economic system cracked at the seams on the eve of Obama's victory. If ever a popular new president had a mandate to go to FDR's playbook and really actuate the promised Change! But that was never to be because alongside Obama himself emerged a cabinet that had also been handpicked to lull the populace back to a kind of calm. Gates in Defense carried over from the Iraqi War Commission given his job in the previous administration; Paulsen stayed on along with a hand-picked crowd of economic shills for Wall Street with the assignment of saving the (their) system. All of this decided before Obama ever walked into the Oval Office.
Given Obama's real mandate, it should not have surprised anyone that from the Crash and ensuing Panic of 2008 (with the Dow down 50%) would emerge angry mobs, but the thinker in the White House allowed Tea Party proto-fascists to take that role rather than the vast majority of Americans who might have taken to the streets were it not for their mistaken impression that they had a man they could trust as their president. After fumbling on national health insurance, fumbling on the wars in the Muslim world, ignoring the needs of Black Americans, barely ever raising his voice against the attacks on the federal government, he will now spend the next two years--if he can find the energy--searching for a suitable legacy. It is hard to imagine what that might be given that, after six years in Washington, his real legacy is to have saddled this country with rule by a super-reactionary Republican political machine for the foreseeable future.