Lately, as much as it will pain him to hear it, I haven't been paying too much attention to ol' Barack Obama. I think it'll be Clinton versus Romney in the general election.  That's what my gut's been saying all along.  But then it could just be IBS.  I've been meaning to see someone about it. 

In the meantime, I haven't watched a single debate, and I don't give a fat rat's ass who's prettier, who declares fealty to whose god, and whether or not they'd abort the anti-Christ.  I don't want to have dinner with any of them.  I wouldn't let them in the front door.  Hell, I wouldn't even let them in the back door.  

I find Obama particularly annoying, because I just don't see it.  I've been unimpressed from the beginning.  When I see him now I'm thinking Sanjaya from American Idol.  A little desperate and shrill, more off-key than on most times, but believing more than ever in his own myth.  I'm just waiting for him to come on-stage at one of these interminable debates with a ponyhawk.

I remember when the buzz started around him.  A guy I was dating whose cultural literacy/political IQ was somewhere in the 35-40 range forced me to watch a youtube clip of some speech of Obama's one morning while he was downstairs (the guy I was dating, not Obama) making coffee and talking to his cats, typically wasting perfectly good morning wood.

The speech went on and on. I earnestly waited for the moment when the inspiration would kick in.  I wanted to believe.  To hope again, because that's where I go for hope—you often find it under rocks with the silverfish and slugs.  More importantly at that moment I wanted to be able to agree with my guy, to seduce him with my enthusiasm for his candidate.  "Yeah!  He is so awesome! Let's fuck!"

I wasn't feeling it, though.  It could be that my meme resistance is dialed up too high.  I may be missing memes I should be catching.  Maybe that's why I'm not getting laid these days (but then I also have not had chlamydia recently, either, so maybe the glass really is half full like my doctor says—he's very happy I've gone celibate).

Anyway, what seemed clear to me as I watched Obama drone on is that my guy was more intrigued by the idea of Obama than the reality.  And I'm sticking with that theory, because he was also more intrigued by the idea of himself than the reality, the idea of a boyfriend than the reality, and (saddest of all, perhaps, given the rest) the idea of sex than the reality.

Obama has been riding that wave of intrigue for most of his campaign so far.  I mean, get real.  I'm at least average-informed.  I read a couple newspapers, listen to or watch an hour or so of news a day, and I subscribe to several of the nation's most venerable magazines, and I still don't know anything about anything.  I talk to people about Obama, they know less than I do.  And that was doubly true when he first popped onto the national scene as a presidential contender.

Obama went viral.  They got memed.  The itching and swelling will probably subside eventually.  I suggest calamine in the short-term.

What they knew about him was what they could see for themselves in broad outline:  handsome, articulate, young, clean-cut, well-dressed, light-skinned African-American (not necessarily in that order).  Some of them could tell you he was a junior senator from somewhere.  Oh, and he was the anti-Hillary, of course. 


The media egged us on.  They kept comparing him to JFK, who was his generation's handsome, articulate, young, African-American ... well, if you consider that the Irish were once commonly referred to as the "Negroes of Europe."

Point is, to this day it's the cult of personality more than the cult of policy at work with Obama. 

I was talking politics (which is not a habit, despite what it might seem) with a buddy of mine last week, and he was all like: "I haven't seen anything like this, felt anything like it, since the Kennedys." I told him I hadn't felt the way I feel about Hillary since Catherine The Great.  I mean, my friend is 33.  He was—what?—negative six when Bobby Kennedy was popped. Gimme a break. 

None of this is to say that the reality of Obama is a bad thing.  I mean, I don't see anything inherently wrong with being a handsome, articulate, young African-American junior senator from somewhere.  But I'm not going to give you my first-born for an accident of birth. 

It takes some time before reality can be effectively transformed to myth, like grapes fermenting to wine, but the Obama juggernaut wants to bottle their juice right up and start marketing it as 1960 Chateau Latour Pauillac.  The reality is just not anywhere near the stature of the idea.  And how could it be? 

Clinton has had an easier time, somehow.  She's the devil we know, or think we know, and there are volumes of lore attached to her.  Some see her as the Grendel of American politics, true, but there are advantages even in this.  When the majority thinks you're a monster, a little humanity goes a long, long way. 

And the more the press hounds and harps on her the more human she comes off.  Americans don't know who to hate more—it's an embarrassment of riches, really: their politicians or the press. 

I mean, you've got that evil little imp Katie Couric trying hard to hold back a squeak of glee as she tells Clinton Oprah will be campaigning for Obama, pressing her on what she'll do if she loses the nomination, and feigning surprise when she says "I won't." 

Pose the question to any candidate, and he'll give the same answer.  Obviously.  There's no serious contender for office who will say, "If I don't win..."  We all know this, so the question, the whole line of questioning, comes off as disingenuous at best, malicious at worst. 

And since everything in politics is relative, we come out of an interview like this thinking, Clinton may be an insincere, immodest, conniving cunt-bag, but Katie Couric sure is a little bitch.  Clinton can afford to get scratched and clawed.  All she has to come away with is a fistful of Couric's fur, and she's golden. 

But when your fan-base deifies you, as Obama's does, you can never let them see you bleed. 

It's been said (most famously by Pat Buchanan, but it's been bouncing off the walls of the media echo-chamber for awhile now), that Obama is not a street-fighter.  He appeals most to that segment of the left that feels the rightness of its moral and political program is self-evident, and that it merely needs a pitchman all Americans can unite behind.  To them, Barack Obama is a voice of reason and the antidote to partisanship.

But what if what this country needs is not to flee from principled partisanship, but to return to it? 

Still, the appeal of a politician who from sheer force of personality could usher in a new Age of Reason is appealing, so it didn't surprise me when I heard about Obama's "kingdom on earth" shtick in the news the other day.  "We're going to keep on praising together," he pandered to a congregation in Greenville, South Carolina, recently. "I am confident that we can create a Kingdom right here on Earth."

It's not that this type of rhetoric is unusual in American politics, it's just that it's desperate.  It's as desperate as Deval Patrick's laying on of hands before the elections last year was.  And as cynical.  And it plays up the problem of basing your public and political persona on the presumption of sincerity. 

Sincerity is fine as far as it goes, don't get me wrong, but there is simply no way to pander to everyone you need to pander to in national elections and come out of it with your integrity intact.  There is no way to win without a strategy, and denying you've got a strategy is not very sincere.  And a "sincerity strategy" is bound to come off as disingenuous in the end, too.

Sincerity in politics may not be an unreasonable thing to aim for, but it is certainly an unreasonable thing to expect anyone to achieve.

They call Clinton crafty, because she's sidestepped the issue of sincerity.  As has Mitt Romney, who, unlike John Kerry, has decided not only not to look stricken and offer convoluted justifications for his flip-flops, but to celebrate them as instances of personal evolution (at least he's not a creationist).  His approach, along with a massive infusion of his own cash into his campaign, seems to be working. 

Who knows.  It may be time for crafty. 

I guess it boils down to what you want from your politics.  And when people turn to it for things they should look to religion or sitcoms, household pets or personal relationships for, it's bound to end up a bloody mess.  It's going to end up a bloody mess, anyway, mind you.  The problem with Obama and his acolytes is that they either don't know it, or don't want you to know they do.  They come off looking like they want the glory without getting their hands dirty. 

Newsflash: even Christ himself had to get bloodied before really getting down to business.

But let me try another tack.  Personally, I think "the politics of hope" is like veggie sausage.  It's a fine, highly moral idea that defeats the whole purpose of sausage.  If you want vegetables eat vegetables.  If you want sausage, eat sausage.  There is no such thing, regardless of what anyone tells you, as vegetarian sausage.  It doesn't exist.  Even those who swear it does don't really believe it.

Think about it.  Vegetables don't bleed.