Barack Obama began his run for the presidency in a burst of racial justice, anti-war sentiment and high-flown rhetoric about hope and change. He was brought to earth by a twenty year association with a racist minister, hidden alliances with Chicago machine politicians and unrepentant bourgeois radicals, not to mention a lot of missteps on that war and weird pronouncements about capital gains taxes — only to find himself backing into the presidency because the bottom fell out of the US (and global) economy at the very moment he looked to be losing the election. What amazing luck!
Or is it?
The good news for Barack Obama is that (at this moment) he seems to be winning the Presidency. The bad news is that he will have to do the job.
Good-bye fixing this and fixing that (health care, infrastructure, education, whatever) that he has been talking about in vague quasi-idealistc terms throughout his campaign. The economic crisis, which stems in part from the naive/corrupt (duality deliberate) events surrounding Fannie and Freddie and sub-prime lending, may have only just begun. We may yet be in the 1920s, not the 1930s, in our national reptition compulsion of past mistakes. Barack Obama may yet prove to be a (trendy) Herbert Hoover, no matter who Joe Biden said was in office when the market crashed. Hold on to your seat belts, batten down the hatches. We’re in for a wild ride.
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