Obama is the best we're going to be able to do. Other forces are in control. [View All]

I'm not happy with how he has managed his presidency so far. While he may be intellectually smart in many ways, I think that he's also a naive and somewhat shallow thinker -- too easily buying into conventional narratives, too easily swayed by smooth-talking advisors and "experts", because he lacks any fundamental passionate ideological vision.

From the time that he disavowed Rev. Wright in order to improve his political prospects, it was clear to me that Obama was more focused on his own political future than in any sort of over-arching vision of social justice. The invitation to that prick Rick Warren to offer the invocation at his inauguration only cemented this impression.

So, yeah, for these and so many other reasons, I find myself rather unimpressed with Obama, to say the least. I've come to see the whole "hope and change" thing from his campaign as nothing more than a cynical -- yet highly effective -- ad campaign. The appeal to emotion, purposely bypassing critical thinking -- well, it worked, didn't it?

All those people in Grant Park, in tears, on the night of the election victory -- all those people so hungry for a savior, for someone who would put things right and bring them hope of a better future, a new direction.

Well, what those people hadn't reckoned with -- and what maybe Obama himself hadn't reckoned with -- was the inertia of the permanent shadow government of the entrenched powers of the MIC, the financial sector, the corporate powers who buy the legislation they want in order to maintain power.

And Obama, himself a naif and a marked outsider to the real power brokers in DC, was ill-equipped to make any concerted challenge to those who really control the levers of power. In his naivity and essential lack of a passionate ideology for challenging the status quo he found himself at their mercy and chose the path of appeasement in hopes that they could be reasoned with.

As maddening as this is, it is the best we can hope for out of our current political system. It's utterly ridiculous to hope for a hypothetical "more progressive" president. No such person would ever be allowed to attain that office.

The office of the President of the United States is nothing more than the head PR guy for the policies that are decided beyond his actual control. If, by some massive fluke, a true opponent of TPTB got elected, their presidency would be strangled in the crib -- witness the fate of President Carter. And even Carter allowed the massacre of East Timor to happen under his watch.

I think that Obama is a good-hearted man who genuinely wants to improve things, but he will always be hemmed in by the permanent shadow government and isn't really philosophically inclined to draw a line in the sand against the entrenched power blocs. It simply isn't in his nature to challenge conventional wisdom overmuch.

Anyway, I don't think it's worth much to rag on Obaman. He's as trapped as all of us are. I think our only way out of the trap is to stop worrying about judging Obama and start building a movement outside of electoral politics.

Yes, get out there and vote for Dems -- that's our holding action and it's important. But, beyond that, we really MUST work on a different level. Nothing is going to change from the top down, the real change must happen from the bottom up. And it has very little to do with who wins elections, and has everything to do with building pressure among the masses to reject the agendas of the entrenched powers who would disempower us.

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