WILLIAM HARWOOD
In an appalling act of purblindless reminiscent of Neville Chamberlain’s pandering to Adolf Hitler at Munich in 1938, Massachusetts voters chose to replace Senator Edward Kennedy with a Quisling committed to enabling the Republicanazi Party to repeal two thousand years of moral evolution and retain America’s unique status as the only nation in the Western world that sentences its chronically ill citizens to death if they cannot afford proper health care.
Absolutely nobody came out of the January 19, 2010 election with an intact reputation. The participant who contributed least to the debacle was the third-party candidate, a Libertarian named Joseph Kennedy whose one percent of the vote was insufficient to influence the result. Kennedy made no claim to be related to the senator whose seat he contested. But he probably counted on a lot of voters seeing the name “Joseph Kennedy” on the ballot and mistaking him for the former congressman of the same name who was Robert Kennedy’s son. And the number of votes he received suggests that a lot did—but not enough to affect the outcome.
A large share of the blame must be assigned to the Democratic nominee, Martha Coakley. In a state that had not elected a Republican senator for the past thirty years, Coakley assumed she could run her campaign on cruise control, and refused to recognize that her opponent was gaining momentum until it was too late. Given the magnitude of that misjudgment, the probability is that her career in politics is over, and for that she has no one to blame but herself.
But the primary culprit for the defeat that could turn Barack Obama into the longest-running lame duck president in American history is Barack Obama. His failure to campaign for Coakley until it was too late was merely the icing on the cake due to lack of leadership. From practically the day of his inauguration he set about alienating the voters who had elected him, by making no attempt to implement the changes they most wanted.
The one area in which he did try to bring about “change we can believe in” was the institution of universal health care. But his paranoid lust for what he called bipartisanship led him to metaphorically fellate the Senate’s most intransigent, power-drunk narcissists in the forlorn hope of winning their support, instead of throwing them under the bus and getting on with the job for which he was elected. Obama may have been the last person in the United States of America to open his eyes to the reality that the Republican Party was so deep in the pockets of the insurance companies, whose bribes purchased their elections, that there was not a snowflake’s chance in hell of their supporting any change to the status quo whatsoever. One can say this for Republicanazis: When they accept a bribe, they stay bribed. As a consequence, the House and Senate each wound up passing a bill that pandered to its own extremists, including godphuqt anti-abortionists (tautology) and a would-be Führer named Lieberman, to such a degree that it fell far short of anything that could honestly be described as “reform.” At this point, the probability of any healthcare bill being signed into law is not high—and Obama has no one to blame but himself.
But Obama’s capital default on his campaign promises was his refusal to repudiate the Bush administration’s treasonous violation of the First Amendment, and refusal to repudiate the Republicanazi dictum, “When the President does it, it’s not illegal.” Instead of abolishing Bush’s “faith based” misappropriation of taxpayers’ money for the propagation of religion, Obama expanded it—after securing the votes of America’s 100 million nontheists by expressly implying that they would henceforth be recognized as first-class citizens with all the rights granted to them by the First Amendment.
Obama lied to the 200 million Americans who support the separation of church and state. After winning their votes, he continued the Bush policy of turning the wall of separation into a picket fence. He lied to supporters of the Geneva Convention, by implying that the war crimes of the Bush Gestapo would be appropriately prosecuted. Instead he vetoed any attempt to bring to justice the perpetrators of acts that transformed America from the most trusted nation on earth into the most hated. Why? Is he planning, or even already perpetrating, crimes that could get himself prosecuted once he is out of office—if he does not establish the precedent that previous administrations are untouchable? Or is he just plain inept and, like the Robert Redford character in The Candidate, his response to his election is, “What do I do now?”