Young Mr. Obama: Chicago and the Making of a Black President Book

Lost Hope: How Obama Okie-doked the Liberals.

This week should signal the final wake up call for liberals who supported Obama in 2008 as just a few days ago the Obama Administration positioned itself to prolong both the military operations in Iraq and the War in Afghanistan. And this week the Obama Administration seems to be in the process of cutting a deal to extend Bush's tax cuts to the rich while Republicans are touting a ban on earmarks and a cut in Defense spending.
Listening to liberal callers on talk radio programs this past week it was easy to pick up on their disenfranchisement. How had Obama ticked off the liberals to this degree?

Friday afternoon, less than 24 hours after watching a Frontline program called Obama's Deal, I picked up a book by Edward McClellend called Young Mr. Obama. These two mainstream media offerings were related to some degree. Obama's Deal documented the two year ordeal that President Obama went through to get his ObamaCare passed into law, while Young Mr. Obama detailed Barack's rise from a community organizer on Chicago's southside to becoming the only black U.S. Senator by 2004. The Frontline program and McClellend's book both go a long way in explaining the misgivings that liberals have over Obama's actions as President thus far, for the wheeling and dealing it took for Obama to become an U.S. Senator and the wheeling and dealing it took for him to pass the Health Care bill show that, like every other politician, Obama has no qualms about throwing out liberal principles in order to force his agenda.

As an Illinois state senator and as a U.S. senator Obama sold out liberal ideas for the advancement of his own career and agenda regularly, everything from allowing developers (similar to the one's he took contributions from) to demolish a historic nightclub in his district (on Forty-seventh street) known as Geri's Palm Tavern to voting to close the DCFS office on Chicago's Westside to appease fiscal conservatives. (Further example is given in McClelland's book as Obama was implicated in the porking out of a $29 million gun range to Sparta, Illinois in order to get its Senator to support him).

Similarly, when campaigning for POTUS Obama promised that if elected he would run corporate lobbyists out of Washington and he badgered the Bush Administration for letting the Health Insurance Industry write the Health and Drug bills'only to turn right around after getting elected and directly ushering in the Health Insurance lobbyists and the Drug Industry lobbyist into the white house to do basically the same thing all over again: i.e. to author his ObamaCare. And The liberals were thinking: WTF?!?

Obama's promises of false hope were especially damaging to Americans liberals because the thin membrane separating Liberals from anarchy or total apathy is that Liberals have a hope (there's that word) that the American political system has the potential to bring about change by ETHICALLY working within that system. Anarchists and apathetic Americans don't have that hope. So when you dash this hope, the Liberals are left with two alternatives. One, they can totally turn their back on the American political system (anarchy or apathy). Or two they can evolve into Progressives.

The dashed hopes began when Obama gained the white house and from Day One he showed that there wasn't going to be any CHANGE in the way politics were done in Washington. He wasn't throwing lobbyists out of the capital'he was inviting them in. He wasn't sticking it to fraudulent, wasteful and abusive corporate CEOs'he was bailing them out! And what happened to the total transparency (so that each individual could make an informed decision) that he promised? After two years of this Obama had proven to Liberals what they had HOPED wasn't true: that our political system breeds unethical maneuvering.

To Liberals, Obama's pattern of putting his agenda ahead of ethics was reminiscent of the Bush/Cheney administration. For Liberals, the question of "In the long run is ObamaCare best for the United States?" cannot be asked without looking at the facts around the cost in which it came to be'just as had been the case when a half dozen years earlier Liberals were asking the question "Was getting rid of Saddam Hussein (and taking over Iraq's oil) the best thing for the United States?" Ofcourse Saddam was a terrible man and he had to go, that is given'just as it is a given that our broken Health Care system pre-Obama Care was terrible and it had to go. BUT, in both cases Liberals have asked: "Was it worth the cost? Was the replacement any better? Did we sacrifice our moral ground to achieve it?"

Of course Obama didn't have to kill and maim thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens to get his ObamaCare passed. He didn't have to torture Iraqi citizens at Abu Ghraib or use white phosperous on innocent Iraqi citizens. He didn't have to destroy Iraq's infrastructure, schools, roads, markets, their government, etc to pass his ObamaCare. And he didn't have to put the lives of thousands of U.S. military folks at risk (although the rights of millions of Americans were trampled on by ObamaCare in its mandate for all citizens to be required to buy into the corrupt corporate health insurance industry by 2014). So obviously comparing Obama's march toward ObamaCare to Bush/Cheney's march to the war for oil in Iraq isn't exactly the same. But what is the same is the way Obama exerted his will to push his agenda compared to the way that Bush/Cheney set out to push their agenda. It was politics as usual'the exact thing that Obama promised us that he wasn't going to do. A promise, that more than anything else, inspired Liberals to get out and vote for Obama in 2008. And now it is the breaking of that promise that will cause Liberals NOT to vote for Obama in 2012. For they have lost Hope