It must be getting on to a month since Obama took office (or, as Keith Olbermann would say for February 22 2009, “it is 2115 days since the previous President declared mission accomplished in Iraq”) and the Obama honeymoon is still in full swing. This despite the fact that the economy is still tanking and all you read in the papers are dire forecasts of job lay-offs and company liquidation. Still the love affair shows no sign of diminishing. Watching the Daily Show and you have Jon Stewart discussing the daily doings under the rule of Emperor Obama and then there is a silly, silly moment where, after he mentions the President, a voice from on-high can be heard moaning “Obaammmaaa” in a more than suggestive manner.
But I have to say that not everything is hunky-dory in Obama-Land. There are a few signs emerging that it is business-as-usual in the US of A. The most recent portent was the publication of the racist cartoon in the New York Post that linked the story of the chimp that savaged a woman and the battle of the President to get the stimulus package passed. The caption to the cartoon reads: "They'll have to find someone else to write the next stimulus bill”. For all the misguided trumpeting that the election of Obama meant that race as an issue was dead in the US, here was tangible concrete proof of the racist undercurrents that percolate through society. Granted that the New York Post is not a broadsheet with any sort of pretensions to the type of seriousness that we might attribute to the New York Times. But to represent the President as a monkey is just so clearly a representation steeped in the racist past of the lynch mobs, Jim Crow laws and the claims that African-Americans were an inferior race. Although the NY Post apologized it was a clear indication that the election of Obama was a momentous event, but that there are ingrained, historical attitudes that will be hard to shift (adding the fact that the NY Post is presided over by the former Australian, Rupert Murdoch).
The second portent that things haven’t changed all that much was the manner in which the Republicans rebuffed Obama’s overtures for a consensual approach on the stimulus package. For all the hope and hype of bi-partisanship, it is clear that the dinosaurs from the Republican Party are reverting to the usual petty nit-picking politics – as if it were business as usual. So they lined up to block the stimulus package and declare that the government should be delivering tax cuts and that they could not, in clear conscience, saddle future generations with such debt. Leaving aside the fact that it all happened under the watch of their very own Dubya you have to wonder if they will ever learn? There was even the ludicrous comment from Republican (of course) Congresswoman Michelle Bachman who declared that she didn’t think that the stimulus package would work because “we are running out of rich people in this country”.
As if to emphasise the radical, iconoclastic nature of Obama as politician there is a constant procession of petty, provincial politicians with the snouts in the trough. Or, alternatively, you have the Republican governors declaring (presumably on ideological grounds) that they would not accept funds from the Federal stimulus package. No thought given to the fact that unemployment rates are rising by the month and the home foreclosures continue apace and the people that would be affected by such grand-standing would be their own constituents. If it sounds like I am offering up Obama for beatification or some other such recognition of a status of divinity it is only that his radiance is increased in comparison with the tawdry, sad pack of incompetents who (supposedly) represent the people in the Congress. It brings me to the inescapable conclusion that we do it better in Australia! Granted the Queen is an anomaly and the Governor-General did stuff up things in 1975. But it did deliver us the martyrdom of Gough and something for the Labor Parties true believers to cling on to. What I am talking about is the limited power given to the elected President and the power that resides in the Congress. My understanding of the history of the framing of the US Constitution is limited (with a lot of it drawn, I concede, from watching the HBO television series on the life of John Adams, the second President) but I have to say that I find it passing strange that the President who has been elected in a landslide has to battle against the Congress, and basically horse trade, to make sure that he gets his measures through. Even his own party (take a bow Harry Reid) for a fleeting moment, gave some indication that they would scrutinize Obama’s measures. So the President is elected to govern and then has to go around trying to placate the regional pork-barreling aspirations of every tin-pot senator and representative! What is even stranger is that the President can lose control of the two Houses (Senate and Reps) and continue to govern, as a lame duck President, for the remainder of his or her term. It is also strange that the opposition party leader, having lost the election, fades back into the crowd and they don’t have a key spokesperson to go toe to toe with the President. Constantly the petty machinations of politicians bring into stark relief the yawning gulf that separates them from the vision of Obama. I dread to think what will happen to the US if the forces of mediocrity frustrate any real change because the Republicans are trotting out more of the same. And that obviously hasn’t worked.
So there is little cause to celebrate the higher motives of most US politicians, but I have to confess that it is not all boring and bland. Once you move beyond the ridiculous notion that politics should be about serving the people (with the exception of you-know-who), you can glean at least some passing enjoyment from watching politics as a form of blood sport or extreme reality show. There has been, for example, the riveting spectacle in recent months of the impeachment proceedings against Rob Blagojevich, the Governor of Illinois, who was wire-tapped by the FBI touting the vacated seat of Obama to the highest bidder. Infamously Blago (as the media here have dubbed him) is heard declaring to his advisers, when it became clear that the President elect was not going to play ball, that he didn’t want to give this “motherf—-er [the President-elect] his senator. F—- him. For nothing? F—- him.”
(For more of Blago’s deluded, colourful rantings check out the politico site at: http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=1D549536-18FE-70B2-A8DEA34624EA721A
What was even more entertaining was the string of media appearances made by Blago, where he declared that the Illinois Congress was denying him the right to give his side of the story. Leaving aside the falsity of that statement it was hugely entertaining to watch the besieged Governor quoting Rudyard Kipling ("If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you."). This in turn lent itself immediately to parodies along the lines of:
If you can keep your job while all about you
Are fielding bribes and blaming it on you,
If you can duck the Feds while all men doubt you,
And bleep-ing show the charges are untrue,
If you can fight and not be tired by fighting,
Or, being wiretapped, profess surprise,
Or argue that there will be no indicting
Because it’s all a bleep-ing pack of lies....
Then, to trump it, Blagojevich went to old western movies to explain how he was being denied a right to be heard. He declared:
I like old movies and I like old cowboy movies. I want to explain how these rules work in a more understandable way. There was an old saying in the old west. There was a cowboy who was charged with stealing a horse in town. And some of the other cowboys, especially the guy whose horse was stolen, were very unhappy with that guy. One of the cowboys said, let‘s hang him. The other cowboys, hold on, before we hang him, let‘s first give him a fair trial. Then we‘ll hang him.
Under these rules, I‘m not even getting a fair trial. They are just hanging me. Under that fact pattern I just gave you, if the cowboy who charge was stealing a horse was charged with doing that in town, but, in fact, on the date and time that he apparently stole the horse in town, he was on the ranch with six other cowboys, herding cattle and roping steers, and then he expects that when his day comes to go to court, he can bring those six cowboys to say it wasn‘t him, because he was on the ranch herding cattle; even if he could bring those cowboys in to say that, under these rules, under 8-B, it wouldn‘t matter. The complaint that charged him with stealing the horse would convict him.
This is the man that was in charge of governing a State. He is undoubtedly barking looney mad, or perhaps an indication of what it takes to be a successful politician in Chicago. A further possibility does spring to mind from the conspiracy theorist in me (and we all love a good conspiracy, admit it). I couldn’t help but make a connection between Blagojevich’s rantings and the disturbing postscript to the film “Milk”. The killer of Harvey Milk was defended on the basis that he had an overload of sugar in his diet from fast food and so he was not technically sane. It was dubbed the “twinkies defence” and it worked! He got convicted for two counts of manslaughter (having also gunned down the mayor of San Francisco) but only served five years. Given that Blago will be indicated on Federal criminal charges I would suggest that these media performances aren’t going to hurt his defence. In any event Blago made for entertaining viewing. He even had the larger than life hairstyle to go with the larger-than-life political ego (matching even Donald Trump – the hair I mean, but possibly the ego too). The fact that Blagojevich comes from the same Chicago that delivered us Obama doe makes me a tad nervous, however, that the new Emperor might have feet of clay, that there might be some political scuttlebutt or past misdeeds lurking in the background. Then again if the right-wing extremists of the world like Russ Limbaugh haven’t managed to find anything then I can sleep comfortable in the belief that they can’t lay a glove on him…yet.
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