adventures in disaster

trying to explain

I don't like Obama. I have tried over and over to explain not only to others but to myself why this is but I am failing. I hate to say "it's a gut thing" because that's kind of bullshit but it is something.
Something that is putting me off. I guess most people can understand a little of this. It's like when you go to a party at a friends and they introduce you to someone they obviously really like and they really want you to like them too but in the very moment you make eye contact, feel their hand in yours you get a weird itchy "oh no thank you" feeling that makes you let go ,step back and smile with your teeth.
You have no evidence other than the friend you trust and respect likes this person. Positive information that should make this introduction easy, comfortable. But it's not. Worse this new person is oblivious to your reaction. One part of you thinks "thank goodness" because you don't want to embarrass your friend, your self or this new person but on reflection their non reaction makes you even more uncomfortable.
I don't know Obama and his election to the Presidency wont have that much impact on my day to day Canadian life. Right?
I don't feel that. I feel like there is a missing agenda here. An agenda that is going to be reaching farther than the US borders.
I have a little information about the guy. He is rich, always has been despite his professions of a hard scrabble raising, unless we have begun to consider solidly middle class as hard? His mother raised him but he wrote a book praising the father that abandoned him, refused to support him financially. The father he says gave him nothing is the star of his book.
This leaves me puzzled.What of the mother who did all the real work?
He made a point to attend a church filled with life, a church exploding with opinions and arguments but he only attended..he wasn't a participant.
I think his pastor is not a man that should be vilified, he is a man of passionate conviction. Obama turned his back on him quickly and brutally. A man he called a mentor.
Obama's wife kind of freaks me out too. She is stiff, formal and defensive. Defensive even when her husband is praised. She seems angered to have been put into the public eye. She diffidently sidesteps questions as if the answers are really none of our business and we should know this. She leaves everyone feeling slightly embarrassed as if we have violated some obvious social custom by acknowledging her.
Maybe we have but isn't that politics? Shouldn't we have some insight into this woman that married this man? Doesn't their union define him in many ways?

Obama speaks mostly about change and about how we all must leave behind our partisanship and come to the table united. But nowhere in his political life has he ever done this. He has never taken the risks that others have in joining with an opposite to build legislation. He has never created an atmosphere of creative co-operation.
If he has never tried this then how can he, as President, encourage, cajole this from the congress or the senate?
He wants a different kind of government but he forgets that the government that stands right now is the government he must work with. He seems short sighted, naive. He has built no relationships that will help him. He has been an outsider the entire time he has been in government and though this seems really cool it's actually stupid.
Government is a behemoth , Godzilla, cloverfield if we have to. If you aren't interested in being involved with it it will happily continue chewing up the scenery without you. To control, even tame this creature you have to know it. Know it like you know yourself. It's failures, it's successes, it's evil plots. All the gossip, backbiting bullshit that exists in every major place of employment.
If you don't the power grabbers will be free to undermine every action you try to take.
Obama seems strangely proud of being oblivious to this or he is lying his ass of. He is a lawyer, Harvard educated. No stranger to madly competitive, backstabbing bastards of business.
So he is lying. Or is he?
I hate this shit.
I want the truth about who you are, even if it's your forced laugh, your inappropriately weird giggle, the God awful half cackle of McCain. I want to see you react, really react, even if you do slip right back into that speech you have repeated for six months now.
But Obama doesn't react.
How can someone who has spent half his life in a church of huge reactions not show anything?
It's all just little things. The way his lips tighten when a hard question is asked. When his tone goes from bland to insulted but his face doesn't change. His tone is petulant but his message is unchanged. It's incongruous .
I know when Hilary is pissed, McCain never let's you forget he is pissed but Obama acts as if it's all just a little too low brow for him.
Maybe I am wrong. Maybe he is just a guy who values his privacy and guards his emotions and reactions. But I don't think so. I think he is a guy who has studied for this position obsessively . I think he has been practicing in front of a mirror for many, many years. He wrote his script meticulously, then he memorized it word for word for word. He stared into the mirror and demanded order from his expressions. He is a demonstration of complete control and it is just a touch freaky.
I would feel better about him if once, just once he lost his shit and went after some asshole reporter and verbally kicked some ass. Revealing in that moment that a real guy is living under that script.
Maybe I would really like that guy.
Bu this guy? Who talks about climate crisis in terms of change your lightbulbs? Who has no economic plan other than raise those taxes on the rich right now? Who has no experience as a diplomat? No foreign affairs experience at all.
Every choice the US makes is a global choice. The world will feel it and Obama seems oblivious.

The Iraq war is just a blip in a global scale. What is happening all over Africa makes Iraq a complete success right now. But Obama ignores Africa and we will all pay for that.
To continue George Bush's ignorance and revulsion for getting involved in genocides? Is that the guy the US needs for the future?

I am confused with some Americans adoration over a man who has accomplished almost nothing politically other than getting elected to the senate. Just because he can speak well in public? This is what excites Americans now? A guy who can speak in full sentences, sentences filled with all the key words that grab at the heartstrings. A master of emotional manipulation is the guy you want to run the biggest bureaucracy in the free world?

Is that how low your expectations have fallen?

posted by adventures in disaster @ 10:37 PM