Obama a Weakling?

On this blog I wrestled with the idea that Obama was a manufactured creation, pulled out of nowhere by the real political masters of U.S.-America to convince jaded, angry, disillusioned USian voters that electoral politics in their country was still meaningful.

I'd decided that nobody is that smart. No group of people in the USA is that powerful. I decided that Obama is just what he appears to be at first glance. A charismatic African-American politician who has learned how to play the game (which for him includes soaring, but vague, rhetoric and a devotion to the status-quo of an outsider wanting to get in) who has found himself in the right place at the right time.

But I've been confounded by the mindless absurdity and excess of his latest behaviour. Most notably his stated desire to go around Congress and to justify "preventative [or prolonged] detention" through an Executive Order, and thereby assert an expansion of presidential power that even bush II couldn't have dreamt of. This desire to create a dangerously powerful, practically lawless emperor out of the office of president seems especially bizarre given the rag-tag, relatively tiny threat of terrorism.

Obama is not so stupid that he shivers in fear at night, worried that he might find himself surrendering to Osama bin-Laden in the Oval Office one day. He's smart enough to know about the excessiveness of his claims to power for the USian political-legal system. Why should he pursue this? He must know that the majority of the US-American population is opposed to this. He must know that the "serious" political-media class in the United States are the same tiny, unrepresentative nitwits who yammered stupidly about flag-pin lapels during the election. Why would he pursue this (among other) absurdities?

I asked this of my partner "ephemeral" and she speculated that he's a weak man, beholden to others and indifferent to how stupid or unpopular their desires are with the voting public. And that actually seems the most plausible thesis. Their is a corporate elite in the USA that desires bailouts for the private sector, continued health for the private insurance industry, oppressive laws against protest and terrifying powers of suppression ("first they came for the Muslims") and on and on, and they've picked Obama to continue to shove this down the throat of the US-American electorate. "Brand Obama" is just that, and he's done a good job of fooling millions of people into believing that politics matters and that they have a (potential, at least) friend in the Democratic Party. They picked Obama out as an attractive package to sell a very toxic product and allowed him to win the presidency. In return, Obama is beholden to them, and he's more a fanatical game-player than an idealist, so he's willing to do these nauseating things to please the power-brokers even if it obviously antagonizes the people he played (the voters) to get the actual votes that won him the presidency.

Can he wake up? It doesn't matter. Electoral politics in the USA are completely bankrupt and useless anyway. The only good Obama is capable of doing is exposing this truth so that even more USian voters learn to abandon their vain hopes and think of some other way to redeem their country.