Obama's Biggest Regret: Insufficient B.S.

A media goodbye which rivals even Ronald Reagan's funeral for overkill and hagiography is rapidly reaching its apogee. Or, if you cynically wish, its low point. Because this Sunday, Barack Obama will claim that it was mainly his own faulty propaganda which prevented regular folks from happily accepting their nasty, brutish fates under the plutocrat-serving neoliberal policies of the Duopoly.

In a tantalizing preview of a self-eulogy promoted as his last presidential appearance on network television, Obama tells 60 Minutes' Steve Kroft that if only his bullshit had flowed a little more slickly, the citizens of America would be satisfied and Donald Trump would never have been able to co-opt their grievances and pain.

Obama is also pitifully proud of the fact that he was able to keep his pants on during his entire eight-year tenure -- as though "major scandals" don't include such things as droning people to death at his whim, preaching austerity and urging people to "share the sacrifice" via his deficit reduction "Catfood" commission, deporting more Latinos and prosecuting more whistleblowers than all previous administrations combined, imprisoning refugee families, bombing seven different countries, force-feeding Gitmo hunger-strikers at a prison he'd promised to close, and siding with Wall Street bankers over people losing their jobs and their homes and dying ever younger in the process. 

Obama's inability to "get stuff done" is such a shock to him personally, given how his initiatives have largely been conservative and market-based. Look at Obamacare, for crying out loud, the biggest gift to the predatory health insurance cartel in history. He even secretly scuttled the public option to placate those nasty old Republicans and a passel of Blue Dog Democrats. And then they wouldn't even consider his last Supreme Court nominee, the most conservative law-and-order high court candidate ever suggested by a modern Democratic president.

Don't people get that Obama is a truly nice, smart guy who only aims to please rich and powerful people on behalf of all of us?  Why did people vote against their own interests, a/k/a  the interests of Obama's and Clinton's socially liberal donors? Why couldn't people envision their future ladders of opportunity and level playing fields 20 years from now as clearly as Obama could? 

Obama is the epitome of elite liberal victimhood. Nonetheless, he nobly offers to accept some of the blame for his party's implosion --  not by admitting his deliberate chronic failures to match his words and campaign promises with ensuing deeds, but by acknowledging his failure to bury the electorate in a large enough avalanche of sweet-smelling bullshit:

Steve Kroft: You couldn’t even get a (Supreme Court) hearing.

President Barack Obama: But we couldn’t even get a hearing. Trying to get the other side of the aisle to work with us on issues, in some cases, that they professed, originally, an interest in, and saying to them, “Hold on a second. You guys used to think this was a good idea. Now, just because I’m supporting it, you can’t change your mind.” But they did.And what that did, I think, made me appreciate. And I’ve said this before. But it’s worth repeating. Because this is on me. Part of the job description is also shaping public opinion. And we were very effective, and I was very effective, in shaping public opinion around my campaigns.

But there were big stretches, while governing, where even though we were doing the right thing, we weren’t able to mobilize public opinion firmly enough behind us to weaken the resolve of the Republicans to stop opposing us or to cooperate with us. And there were times during my presidency when I lost the P.R. battle.

Since CBS at this point cuts off the promo of the full interview, we'll have to wait until Sunday night to discover just what specific times in his presidency Obama is talking about. This is assuming, of course, that Steve Kroft presses him for details and Obama isn't allowed to veer off into more bathos about Michelle and the troops and the kids and the dogs and the dogs crapping in the Lincoln Bedroom and other sweet-smelling bullshit.

Judging from the pre-eulogy teaser, it is painfully obvious that Obama is either oblivious or cynical. Given his much-vaunted intelligence, I would guess the latter. He probably knows full well, in his heart of hearts, that if we had Medicare for All, Republicans would not even be daring to whisper about repealing it. That's because they wouldn't be able to co-opt resentment and use it as a divide-and-conquer weapon. The expensively and inadequately insured population would not be attacking the "undeserving" poor Medicaid recipients who are not required to pay costly premiums and deductibles. There'd be no 30 million people deliberately exiled from health care staying silent rather than harassing their congress critters on behalf of their fellow citizens deemed to be more privileged than they are.

"All against all" is how we roll in this neoliberal political system created by the movers and shakers of the two right wings of one duopoly. Divide-and-conquer is the real propaganda tool which political leaders utilize time and time again to keep the rich comfortable, and the poor and middle class either apathetic or pitted violently against one another in a constant battle for sheer survival.

The Democratic wing "lost" this time because resentment and pain can no longer be tempered by false hope. And probably next time the Republican wing will "lose" because that's the normal cyclical tendency; from frying pan to fire and back again to scorched frying pan.

 And maybe a miracle will happen, and the remaining ashes of any legitimacy they still possess will go the way of the funerary urn.

Notice how Obama himself frames his failure in "public relations" in terms of one elite faction at war with another elite faction. He and Steve Kroft are members of the same class, the media-political complex. They're having a private conversation that, through the magic of TV, we're allowed to witness. But we are not allowed to participate or contribute to it in any meaningful way. We're supposed to take it for granted that a bunch of experts and technocrats were "doing the right thing" and these busy bees with credentials had simply neglected to tell us proles about their total awesomeness. If only we'd known, we would have stormed Washington in support of... what, exactly?

It seems never to have occurred to Obama that the "folks" whom his propaganda campaign failed to reach were out in the streets in 2011 protesting Wall Street greed and wealth inequality, and that his police state and his Democratic governors summarily broke up the Occupy camps in one week-long orchestrated campaign of state-sanctioned violence.

Yes, Republicans are and always will be nihilistic sadists. And as long as basic insight and awareness and empathy continue to be deliberately scrapped from its own agenda, the Democratic Party will never recover. The utter lack of respect for the intelligence of American citizens displayed by Barack Obama in just the interview clip above is what is truly shocking and scandalous.

 When one-quarter of all American children are going to bed hungry, he wants us to think that all we need is a more comforting bedtime story.

Please don't let the door hit you on the way out, Obama. Good night, and good riddance.

****

On my own personal and self-serving behalf, meanwhile, I am proud to announce that today marks the sixth anniversary of Sardonicky. 

Here's a reprise of my very first post, entered on Jan. 13, 2011. (Remember the good old days when all good liberals were so shocked and appalled at Sarah Palin? Little did we guess about the fright-fest that was truly in store for us. "Caribou Barbie" has actually improved with age, though, because now she's bipartisanly warning us about Trump's crony capitalism and blaming Obama for the "Mexican Muslim" airport shooter.)

Out, Out Damned Spot! 

Blaming Sarah Palin for the Tucson Massacre is just as unfair as blaming Lady Macbeth for the mayhem at Inverness Castle.  All these two maligned ladies did was lay out the weapons: Sarah, her cross-hair graphics and Lady M, a few carelessly placed daggers.  Subtle hints do not a murderess make.

Along with their histrionics and lust for power, both women have a fixation with blood. Palin, subdued from her usual frenzied harangues, looked like a robot on tranquillizers  as she You-tubed herself into the queen of the martyrs and the victim of “blood libel” of the biased liberal lamestream punditocracy.  To give her credit, I doubt she knows the anti-Semitic origin of the phrase, but the blood part likely was what appealed to her.  And Lady Mac was  totally obsessed with blood, even to the point of sleepwalking and being unable to wash the imaginary stains from her hands. Sarah, of course, also had difficulty scrubbing her website clean of the infamous Cross-Hairs map.  It had already gone viral all over cyberspace. “Out, out damned cache!” could be heard echoing through the valley, according to Wasilla lore.
The Lady Sarah really doth protest too much, methinks, and all the sanguineous references in the world can’t mask the fact that this anti-mother/mama grizzly has ice water running through her veins and a stony heart totally lacking in the warmth of human kindness.

Obama's Bruised Ego Trip

Barack Obama actually seems to be jealous of Bernie Sanders. What cool, suave president wouldn't feel a bit miffed when his rock star status is suddenly usurped by a democratic socialist senator two decades his senior?  No matter that Obama's corporate party has now apparently successfully quashed the Sanders candidacy in order for the Clinton succession to proceed apace. Barack Obama is acting like a sore winner.

It started with a New York Times magazine puff piece of a vehicle through which Obama expresses his disappointment with all the ungrateful folks out there in America who are not sufficiently appreciative of the booming economy he has wrought. And that ingratitude, he says, is not the fault of any of his craptastic policies rewarding Wall Street and punishing Main Street. He magnanimously theorizes that the ingratitude is the result of his team's insufficient bragging in the wake of each and every one of their miraculous  accomplishments. He didn't toot his own horn loudly enough. Misplaced modesty was his enemy, even with the establishment of his own in-house marketing and propaganda shop.

Presidential Style: The Legacy Tour Collection

 
“We were moving so fast early on that we couldn’t take victory laps. We couldn’t explain everything we were doing. I mean, one day we’re saving the banks; the next day we’re saving the auto industry; the next day we’re trying to see whether we can have some impact on the housing market," he whined to Wall Street pitchman Andrew Ross Sorkin -- who made sure to tell us in the opening paragraphs that he got a coveted ride on Air Force One and several Oval Office invites in exchange for the favorable myth-making. Even more dramatically West-Wingish was the revelation that  the Secret Service was pissed off because  the blooming Obama-Sorkin bromance was interfering with the official schedule.

Jogging Our Memories: Tales of a Lonely Lapper

Obama -- described by Sorkin as "justifiably exasperated" by the vast public ignorance of his awesomeness -- brought down the deficit, fer cryin out loud! The unemployment rate went down with the creation of millions of new low-wage, part-time, temporary service sector jobs. He appointed the Cat Food Commission to make it appear that the rich would "share the sacrifice" with the poor. He gave us nationalized Romneycare, leading to some medical coverage for a small but ethically digestible number of  previously uninsured people.

The Times piece is only the opening salvo in the endless Obama Legacy Tour. The president has been actively lobbying friendly reporters to help him put himself back on center stage, from which he has been unceremoniously nudged stage-right by the presidential horse race. Still, it will be hard for the sloppy seconds to outdo Sorkin, whose journalistic prowess is so majestic that he actually broke through the Obama blood-brain barrier like a mind-reading shunt.

 Obama is animated by a sense that, looking at the world around him, the U.S. economy is in much better shape than the public appreciates, especially when measured against the depths of the financial crisis and the possibility — now rarely even considered — that things could have been much, much worse.

So pay no attention to your own senses. If an "animated" Obama senses from afar that your life is better than you think it is, then it naturally follows that you are naught but an inconsiderate inanimate object. Or, as Obama put it to Sorkin, we are "disoriented." And since we don't know our asses from a hole in the wall, it is perhaps understandable that we fail to sufficiently appreciate his "delicate balancing act."

Obama also took the obligatory jab at Bernie Sanders, whom he accused of speaking of the economy as though it were a mere "abstraction." Although the Sanders plan has only been to break up the largest banks, which own dangerously consolidated assets larger than the GDPs of most countries, Obama falsely accused him of wanting to destroy the entire economy.

“But there is no doubt that the financial system is substantially more stable,” he said. “It is true that we have not dismantled the financial system, and in that sense, Bernie Sanders’s critique is correct” — a reference to the Vermont senator and presidential aspirant who regularly calls to break up America’s biggest banks. “But one of the things that I’ve consistently tried to remind myself during the course of my presidency is that the economy is not an abstraction. It’s not something that you can just redesign and break up and put back together again without consequences.”

Then again, if you admit that our "economy" has been stealthily replaced by a plutonomy serving the interests only of the very wealthiest, Obama was probably right in acknowledging that Goldman Sachs and Citigroup and the rapacious global corporate and military plunder they enable are just about all that's propping Exceptional America up these days. There would be consequences of a breakup, which after a little initial upheaval, would probably result in a more equitable democratic system. 

Meanwhile, Obama is trying to win back some of the youth vote usurped by Sanders. The most secretive administration in history, led by a president who has been described by James Risen as "the greatest enemy to press freedom in a generation," suddenly reached out this week to a group of student journalists visiting the White House.

But rather than urging them to afflict the comfortable and demand accountability from government officials, he admonished them to tell their peers to simply vote for more politicians like him (and presumably, Hillary.)

Times White House correspondent Julie Hirschfeld Davis was dutifully awed by and envious of Obama's awesome engaging with mere student reporters, given that the professional press corps are so into "access" and given that they are so rarely given it.

So Davis stuck with the stenographic semantic playbook of the Legacy Tour:

But it was a student who asked about how to restore Americans’ faith in democracy who provoked the most animated (h/t Andrew Ross Sorkin) response from the president, a former community organizer who campaigned on “hope and change” and has recently lamented his inability to change politics for the better.

After a long discourse on what is broken in politics — gerrymandered districts, a flood of undisclosed campaign contributions and negative advertisements — Mr. Obama cited the low turnout numbers in American elections, especially by young people.

“You can’t just complain; you’ve got to vote,” Mr. Obama said. “Don’t let people tell you that what you do doesn’t matter. Don’t give away your power.

Obama ignored the huge, record turnouts at the polls by young Bernie Sanders supporters, both at his campaign rallies and at independent-friendly caucuses and primaries. So I assume that the president's subliminal message to his audience is to resist joining the Bernie Or Bust campaign, or heaven forfend, aid a resurgence of the Occupy movement which was the fuel for the Bernie phenomenon in the first place. Obama wouldn't want to have to call out the troops again so late in his career. It took forever to purge those pepper-spraying cop pics from the Internet.

Don't complain, don't agitate, don't speak out, don't investigate. Just use all your power sparingly: vote. Preferably for Hillary Clinton. And who knows? Maybe a few of you lucky budding journalists will even get the chance to be embedded in one of her inevitable wars.