The Obamacon

Sam Smith

Barack Obama's State of the Union address offers further proof that he is one of the greatest political con artists of modern times. I came to realize this early in his campaign, but being surrounded by liberal friends who thought otherwise, I thought it best not to put it so bluntly.

But now many of these friends are adding pathetic parentheses to their expressions of Obamaphilia, so it may be time to speak more plainly.

As a con man, Obama even beats Bill Clinton, who always looked and talked a bit like a used car dealer and who wasn't all that good at maintaining his own cover. That liberals should be twice deceived brings to mind Samuel Johnson's thought on second marriages: the triumph of hope over experience.

Like Clinton, Obama was carefully vetted before he was licensed to leap into the nation's heart. They were approved social anomalies - Clinton the purported liberal southern white and Obama the first black.

Both had to be cleared by the Democratic Leadership Council. And both could have been easily derailed if the CIA - with which Clinton was involved as an Oxford student and Obama as an employee of a seldom mentioned front corporation - had found any deep flaws (like a serious bias towards progressive politics).

At least Obama didn't have to be checked out by Pamela Harriman, who had gone to the great private salon up yonder by the time he came along. When Clinton was running, conservative Democrats held nearly 100 strategy meetings at the home of party fund-raiser Harriman. The meetings were successfully aimed at ending years of populist insurrection within the party. Democratic donors paid $1000 to take part in the sessions and by the time it was all over, Mrs. Harriman had raised about $12 million for her kind of Democrats, of whom Clinton was seen as the best.

And there was another way in which Obama differed from Clinton. He was black, or least half so.

When he won, his victory was hailed by liberals and the media as the sign of a "post-racial society."

Hardly any noticed that with his election, the Senate once again had no blacks in it. Obama, it turned out, was a kind of all purpose black - the only elected black in the Senate, only the third since the civil rights movement, and now the first to be elected president.

But why Obama? And why was his lead opponent a woman seeking to become the first such as President?

Throughout most of human history, the first of any form of elected power get there because of their accomplishments and a strong, positive history with a rising and loyal constituency. But neither Obama or Hillary Clinton had actually done anything. They were not leaders of their ethnic or gender cause. They had no achievements with which to inspire others. They had simply cleverly worked their way to the top, blessed by the review and approval of America's establishment. They had broken the glass ceiling, but had failed to bring any rope to help others follow behind them.

They were in a sense, the establishment's idea of how a social revolution could occur without changing anything. And how right it was.

Which is how we came to be stuck with Obama, the Bernie Madoff of liberal politics.