Take Back Barak

VanderLeun comments on the semi-sexual fantasies of the Obama-pervs.

My God, you can almost see the dew of desire glimmer on their tattoos and drip from their facial piercings as they think back on all the times their fevered fantasies of the New Jerusalem were titillated. They can still feel and hear that moist tele-prompted tongue rim the inside of their ears and then jab straight into the pleasure centers of their brains. I'm sure Jeff can remember the stirrings in his loins as clearly as DiDi can recall the thrills running up her legs again, and again, and again. As the Obamalations and strokings continued without let up all through those long months, it must have seemed to Jeff and Didi, as it did to Yeats, that:
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

Alas, it is clear -- at least for the moment -- that not only is there not going to be a Second Coming, there's not going to be a First. Instead Jeff and Didi have been hit with a huge case of Barakus Interruptus. They're all fired up with no place to let go.

Good writing. There's more...

Jeff and Didi and their cohort have "done it all" for the O-Man. He'd be nothing without them. Nothing! It doesn't seem to occur to them that all the time they thought they were using Obama as a way to get their soulless sensibilities into power, Obama was using them. Every step of the way. Just as Obama has always used people -- every step of the way until they become inconvenient and then... off to the magic land that lies under the bus.

With progressives Obama has always played his best game. He's the apotheosis of Shelby Steele's black bargainer. As Steele notes in The Obama Bargain,

"Though he likes to claim that his race was a liability to be overcome, he also surely knew that his race could give him just the edge he needed -- an edge that would never be available to a white, not even a white woman.

How to turn one's blackness to advantage?

The answer is that one "bargains." Bargaining is a mask that blacks can wear in the American mainstream, one that enables them to put whites at their ease. This mask diffuses the anxiety that goes along with being white in a multiracial society. Bargainers make the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America's history of racism, on the condition that they will not hold the bargainer's race against him. And whites love this bargain -- and feel affection for the bargainer -- because it gives them racial innocence in a society where whites live under constant threat of being stigmatized as racist. So the bargainer presents himself as an opportunity for whites to experience racial innocence.

This is how Mr. Obama has turned his blackness into his great political advantage, and also into a kind of personal charisma. Bargainers are conduits of white innocence, and they are as popular as the need for white innocence is strong. Mr. Obama's extraordinary dash to the forefront of American politics is less a measure of the man than of the hunger in white America for racial innocence

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Is the "O" Man too right or too left?

I fear Obama because I believe that his real "plan" is no plan at all. After all, that's the record he ran on, and that's what his campaign was about. Seinfeldian at all points, it was a campaign about nothing. It seems to me that, as he always has, Obama's just making it up as he goes along.