Obamarama!

The grand guignol of American politics is always hard to watch, but it is equally difficulty to look away. Like everyone with a keyboard, I am powerless to record some observations.

We have two candidates in the fabled Center, the Center-Left Hillary Clinton and Center-Right John McCain, and one candidate on the Left, Barrack Obama. The only reason I am drawing a political map is to reveal the darkness in the moods of Conservatives and Libertarians like myself. Of course Libertarians, both large and small "L," are quite accustomed to despairing about politics, so we barely even have a runny nose anymore when the candidates are chosen. The Conservatives, on the other hand, have to be talked off of ledges all the time nowadays, for they squandered control of all of the branches of government. Like that Idaho guy with the shoes in the airport, they appeared to careen away from the checkered-table cloth hymns of small government, honesty and family values; the American's responsorial was "bad values are better than no values at all."

Now the Center has been the Political Promised Land for some years, especially since it has been formulated by analysts of the major news organizations as a kind of antidote to "partisanship." Supposedly centrist politicians might save us from ourselves, for armed with dangerous political philosophies, we might scowl or employ strong language. The intellectual yearning for left plus right divided by two is the grandchild of Pragmatism, that essentially American philosophy that proposes that we abandon our theories as such and just do "whatever seems right." The genesis of Pragmatism, as recapitulated in The Metaphysical Club by Louis Mendand (thanks Rush Simpson MD for turning me on to this book), was the Civil War. Many of the Blues and Grays stumbled home caked with the dirt and blood of the war and concluded that no conception of Liberty was worth the carnage.

But the Center is lukewarm by nature, so we have a tendency to spit it out. Is it true that Good plus Evil divided by Two is superior to Good? Sure, if you believe that Good and Evil are Relative, a Matter of Opinion, more or less Abstract. Like many Americans, however, I am deeply infused with philosophies of various sorts, primarily Libertarianism and Christianity in my case; I cannot average out the underpinnings of my identity.

But the problem of a lack of philosophical direction in a president, such as we pretty much have now, may not lie before us. Let us take the case of Hillary Clinton. She so incarnates the metaphor of the political chimera that it kind of revives Greek Tragedy. Her persona of Butch-Femme-Soccer Mom does not normally occur in nature; it certainly demonstrates the teratogenicity of American politics. Although she succeeds to some extent in being All Things to All People, she does not manage to be likeable. Her shrieking voice and the nagging feeling that she would filet you like a trout if you got between her and the Oval Office leave people feeling cold. In the end, she is a Richard Nixon: Brilliant, paranoid, unprincipled, and so unappealing personally that her effectiveness in the White House would be severely impaired.

Now John McCain, the other Centrist, is something of a paradox. He seems like the kind of guy who builds consensus with a fist and some f-bombs. Can you really do that? I lack the bitter hatred of him borne by the Conservatives; on the other hand I fear that he does not embrace a political philosophy because he does not understand any of them. Like Conservatives, however, I am wary of anyone who comes recommended by the New York Times. You better check inside that horse for Greeks! Now in my mind McCain is a war hero and he deserves to be president, but I worry that his volatility will bring further deterioration of our image with the rest of the world, if that is possible. And although he has a reputation for "reaching across the aisle" and all that, I believe that his personality will also impede his effectiveness as an executive.

So thank goodness we have another candidate: Barrack Obama. His name is utterly alien as presidential candidates go, but he has a vast reservoir of charm. McCain and Clinton have voices that sound like mechanical malfunctions of various sorts, one shrill and the other raspy; Obama's voice is deep, resonant, downright mellifluous. He sounds almost as good as that Allstate guy, and maybe because of all of the candidate's charisma, we feel like we would be in Good Hands with him, too. While Clinton and McCain appear to seethe under criticism, Obama keeps smiling, reassuring us, giving us the Audacity to Hope.

And unlike Clinton and McCain, who are unencumbered by political philosophy (you could graft skin from one to the other and it would surely take), Obama has principles. Unfortunately, they are Socialist.

I fear Barrack Obama with the same intensity that I like him. If his words are to be weighed and analyzed, if his past is the vector of his future, his presidency will take us away from Liberty and Prosperity faster than at any time since FDR. For Obama sees a Government Answer to all questions; the euphoric rainbow horizons he calls forth, like all phantasmal opium dreams, do not reckon on the realities of market economics and the yearning to be free. Instead of the leisurely loss of Freedom and Personal Responsibility we would have under one of the Centrists, we will rush headlong into a Chavez-ian social restructuring, thrust forward by Obama's tremendous persuasiveness and cagliostro. Like George Bush, he will not surprise us in the White House. He will use the Presidency to effect his strange vision, he will most certainly a Pleasure Dome Decree. Americans who abhor principles and doctrines will cleave to him and reminisce for generations about his promise of Freedom from Fear and Freedom from Want, but they will have contend with the concrete reality underneath the Camelot Arcade: Freedom from Freedom.

We Libertarians have a daily struggle with the probability that our Jeffersonian ideal is gone and cannot be resurrected. Although we we continue the fight, lion-hearted Americans have mostly gone extinct. We always ask what our country can do for us, not what we can do for our country; we do not want to know the truth about government spending; we are unwilling to trade security for liberty. If the march toward Socialist Utopia is irreversible, it would be well to have someone as eloquent as Obama to eulogize a people so invincible, it could only be defeated by itself.

Copyright (C) 2008 Robert Albanese Presentations