Why America Elected Barack Obama

November 19, 2008

Many Americans are disingenuous in their extreme racial obsequiousness. They want to demonstrate, seemingly heedless of how they do so, that they are not racist. They feel that understandably opprobrious accusation hanging in the air, and consequently they are willing to vote for any black person who is at all amiable. They couldn’t be less concerned about his policies or about his associations.

Many Americans couldn’t care less about anything except Obama’s aura as the messiah, and they feel as though everything will be better in some mysterious way with Barack in the Oval Office.

Many Americans wish to please Europe, wish to show Europe that we are not a cowboy nation, after all, and that, above all, we read the classics. These Americans are embarrassed by Presidents Bush and Reagan, and have taken it for granted that socialism in some form or other is the ineluctable future of all government. They don’t give much credence to the argument that Marcel-Proust-reading-dreamers are wallowing in their own poetry.

Many Americans wish to escape reality. They don’t want to acknowledge the necessity of removing Saddam Hussein, for example, and the 35-year reign of horror in Iraq of the Baathists. These Americans want to think that if only Senator Obama is in the White House, all will be well, made whole through his endless programs. They prefer to excoriate America rather than the criminal regimes America engages in battle. (There are no atheists in foxholes, that’s true, but there were lots of new atheists in Saddam’s prisons.)

On the other hand, there are some few Americans dismayed by the election of this socialist who believes that his personal success is the criterion of America’s committment to justice. For us, the coming administration will resemble a combination of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton as they were president, and of Jerry Brown as he was the governor of California. We don’t understand why so many Americans believe that it’s a new day in America, when in actuality America has been self-indulgent in electing Obama.

T.D.

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