Thursday: These liberals reject Obama

One of the commenters from the previous thread implied that if we didn’t like the Republican candidates, we must be Obama supporters.  This is an example of black-white thinking that used to be the sole provence of the right but has now spread to the left as well.  But I’m going to assume that the commenter was from the right side of the aisle.  So, let me clear up a few things for you.

Obama is not now nor ever has been a liberal.  Nope, not even close.  He’s not anywhere NEAR being a socialist or a communist.  If he belonged to either of these clubs, the membership committee would have stripped him of his special beanie and secret decoder rings by now.  He simply does not promote any kind of policies to help working people.  Period.

He *might* be edging over the dividing line towards fascism with his continual support for large business entities, the wealthy and the finance industry.  But in this political climate with the Republicans pegging the fascist meter up to 11, he looks just like a moderate country club Republican.  I guess that’s where I would put him- in the country club.  That’s where his peeps hang out, that’s where he feels most comfortable.  I don’t know how Glenn Beck and the rest of the right wing managed to convince people that Obama was a socialist or a liberal but it’s not my job to explain the difference to people who insist on being deliberately confused year after year, issue after issue.  You have to do your own research and figure it out for yourself.  Then you will realize that Obama hasn’t been promoting any liberal ideology or implementing any liberal policies.  The reason his policies haven’t worked is precisely because they *aren’t* liberal.  In a lesser Depression, liberal policies are what is called for and he absolutely rejected them early on in the crisis.  So, no, he’s not a liberal.

If the commenter had been paying attention to the news in the past couple of days, he would have learned that the Obama campaign officials in New Mexico took great delight in punching the hippies again with a memo castigating Paul Krugman as a “political rookie” and dissing leftist activists at FireDogLake as being Firebaggers.  Oh, the irony.  It wasn’t that long ago that Jane Hamsher was criticizing the holdouts here at The Confluence as being a “certain type of woman” because we refused to jump on the Obama bandwagon.  I was pretty steamed at Jane’s slavish loyalty to the party in 2008 even though she knew that Obama was not what he was advertised to be.  But now, she is one of us.  Yep, she and ThereIsNoSpoon have finally embraced our voting strategy: downticket Democrats or third party candidates with proven progressive or liberal records only and no soup for Obama and his gang of brutal and unscrupulous campaign operatives.  Rather than rejecting the Firebaggers, I’m glad to see they have finally come around to our position.  Now, we can get on with uniting the left against the destructive infection of the Democratic party by malicious, aggressive “smartest guys in the room” from the center right, wealthy gunslingers of the party.

The commenter, and other political pundits, may be under the impression that Obama is still personally attractive.  Well, his purported oratorical “gifts” never worked on me.  And after the way his campaign trampled 18,000,000 voters in the most blatantly unethical primary season I have ever witnessed, I have not found him to be personally likeable.  Some polls show that the public still finds Obama personally likeable but strongly disapproves of his job performance.  Let me suggest that these numbers are misleading.  I suspect his personally favorable ratings are also in the toilet because, let’s face it, the guy is just not that likeable.  He projects coldness, weakness and careless disconnect from the lives of the citizens he’s supposed to be leading.  Your urgent unemployment status does not constitute an emergency on the part of his re-election campaign.  (Yet)  But people aren’t going to tell pollsters that because they are don’t want to be told that they’re racists.  So, they hesitate when they answer that question, trying to come up with a reason to like him. Well, he’s not a *bad* guy.  I mean, he hasn’t ripped apart live puppies with his teeth on TV while screwing a goat so I guess that means he’s a good family man, and his kids are cute, I’ll give him that.  Yeah, he’s personally likeable {{rolling eyes}}.

One of the things that makes him personally unlikeable to me is the fact that so many of us are questioning our attitudes towards race and questioning our own judgement about his likeability through this filter.  I hate having a gun put to my head with the command to say something nice or have my character called into question.  So, no, I do not like Obama.  It has nothing to do with the color of his skin and everything to do with his personality and his character.

I also can’t stand to hear him speak.  His attempts at folksiness sound phony to me.  I hate the way he breaks concepts down into manageable puree when he likens the debate over the budget to his household budget debates with Michelle.  He must think we all have the mental capacity of children.  Why can’t he talk to voters like they’re adults?  His attempts to discuss policy just grate on my nerves.  I have been conditioned to look for the logical inconsistencies, misdirection and things left unsaid and his endless, labyrinthine, prepositional phrase-studded, run-on sentences lead to too many blind alleys.  The fact that I can’t understand the point he’s trying to make is not an indication of my inability to think but of his propensity to deliberately obscure with rhetorical shiny objects.  And this is not a recent phenomenon, oh former Obots, he’s always been this way.

But whatever.  He’s not a nice guy, he’s a lousy speaker, his job performance has been terrible (the vast majority of my well-educated friends are un or under employed for going on two years now) and he’s no liberal.  All of these things were clear and present dangers back in 2008 but they were ignored because he was new and exotic.  He’s not new and exotic anymore and his “historical moment” has passed as quickly as an orgasm.

The left is so over him.