by Dr. Miklos K. Radvanyi
History is the never-ending quest of men for the attainment of determinative powers. In a democracy, however, the powers of elected officials are limited; presidents, congressmen, local office holders are only temporary representatives of the sovereign people. The main challenge of democracies, therefore, is the tension between the all too human temptation of politicians to think that they are masters of the present as well as the future and the peoples’ desire to guard and maintain their sovereignty.
In 2008, the fallacious infatuation of a minority of American intellectuals with the notion that political and economic freedoms are reactionary obstructions of their anti-democratic and anti-capitalist sentiments of progress, appeared to gain credence by the severe recession that shook the United States and the rest of the world. The resulting existential trauma on the individual as well as on the national consciousness gave rise to the demand of a hypocritical “fair” and “just” world in which personal responsibility, competence, fidelity to the rule of law and adherence to Judeo-Christian morality have been pronounced mere relative criteria for judging the true integrity of an individual to himself, his family and society. To accomplish this objective, a coalition of media personalities and political operatives sublimated their intellectual contempt for the American way of life into a philosophy of a utopist “hope” coupled with an equally misguided call for a “fundamental transformation” of society, in which they as the “vanguard” would control the political, economic, social and cultural levers of power.
Awareness of the essential hollowness and unattractive elitism of their philosophy, however, caused these hate-filled and envious destructionists to search for a person who could embody “hope” and “change” and thus could persuade enough voters that they failed through no fault of their own. Specifically, they needed somebody who could be sold to the voters simultaneously as a victim of a dishonest, exploitative society and a man with some intellectual pedigree. Hence, the legend of Barack Hussein Obama was born, invented by a thoroughly biased, unscrupulous segment of the media that turned American politics into an all-encompassing lie.
The son of an intellectually and emotionally confused nymphomaniac Kenyan father and an equally self-absorbed white American mother, the young Barack Obama has possessed an unbalanced personality. Corresponding to his unconventional origin and his abandonment by both of his parents, he has been in a state of permanent revolt against everybody and everything he has come into contact with. In short, he has been the quintessentially inadaptable, born rebel. Moreover, his rebellion has had brought him in permanent conflict with everyone – his father, his mother, his maternal grandparents, his friends, and his supporters – and above all with himself. Finally, to compound this human paradox, he has become the prototype of a person without roots – a wanderer in constant search for a true identity. Since he could identify fully neither with the whites nor with the blacks, his only refuge has been a compelling desire to return to the utopian past of his blood ancestry in Africa.
On the other hand, he has come to admire people in America with firm family foundations, material riches and influence. Lacking an illustrious pedigree, Barack Obama has longed for acceptance from the rich and the famous. Thus the rebel has fallen in love with the upper classes and their lifestyle. Yet, these sentiments have not prevented him from viciously castigating them from time to time for their alleged dearth of sympathy for the so-called less fortunate. Hence, this living human paradox, for the sake of proving to others that he too can conform, has decided to emulate those whom he hated. Wholly absorbed by such primitive and contradictory torrents of emotions, he has become a fraudulent character with the natural ability to mislead and disappoint everybody.
As a state and later as a US Senator, he displayed an astonishing degree of infirmity of purpose. Whenever he was confronted with making a decision that had the potential of carrying long-term consequences, Senator Obama famously either voted “present”, or drifted with the events until the need for making a decision became obsolete. On rare occasions, when he finally made up his mind, he stuck by his decisions, regardless of their benefits or harms to individuals, society, or the country. His positions on foreign policy, national security, the economy, health care, and education were unfailingly destructive, because they all lacked foundation in facts and sound judgment. His decision-making was always the result of irrational reasoning, because it was never rooted in reality, but always guided by his subjective and hate-filled ideology.
A case in point is his narrative of his epiphany, or rather reconfirmation of his tormented character, at the gravesite of his paternal grandfather and father in Kisumu, Kenya. In his book “Dreams From My Father”, labeled as “ A Story of Race and Inheritance”, he absolves his father of any personal responsibility for his wasted life of unfulfilled dreams and fantasies. With equal penchant for the irrational, he ingeniously stated that his father was a victim of circumstances beyond his control and concluded: “I saw that my life in America – the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I’d felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I’d witnessed in Chicago – all of it was connected with this small plot of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of name or the color of my skin. The pain I felt was my father’s pain. My questions were my brothers’ questions. Their struggle, my birthright.” For Barack Obama, like for his father, the world of his fantasies has been more real than the actual world with its facts, contradictions and individual responsibilities.
Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008 was tailored to his schizophrenic personality. One half of his election strategy was designed to capture the sufferings of every minority and the lower middle classes. This part of his strategy asserted that the recession was caused by the inherent deficiencies of the political and the economic systems and accused President George W. Bush, members of Congress, Wall Street “fat cats” of violating their own laws in order to destroy the voiceless victims of their greed. The other half consisted of shameful promises, unrealistic predictions and outright lies. While the enthusiastic media acted as his orchestra and his audience, members of disparate groups hoped for the promised miracles, Barack Obama and the Democrats managed to obtain a large majority, but with no lasting political advantage to himself or to his party.
By 2010, the sickness of the Obama phenomenon became all too apparent. On the one hand, his public persona has been based on an unending personal and professional lies and distortions. On the other hand, his domestic and foreign policies have quickly demolished the carefully crafted legend of the self-made politician of personal magnetism, inherent goodness and superior intellect. Domestically, his mentality of moral superiority of the allegedly victimized minorities, predictably have engendered base hatred by his most ardent admirers against the majority of Americans. Having legitimized hatred as a political imperative and thus laid the foundation for a class-based division of society, he proceeded to destroy the political, economic, financial, religious, and cultural pillars of the constitutional order. With his battle cry “to hell with the hostage-taker Congress, the reactionary judiciary, the racist states, and the immature people,” he has expressed his contempt unequivocally for the constitution that he swore to uphold and protect.
In foreign policy, even before he was elected, he declared himself in Berlin “a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world.” In this vein, he promised the dawn of a new era in international relations, in which the United States will confess for being the sole perpetrator of all the ills in the world and deliver itself to the mercy of the world community with generous disregard to the shortcomings of other governments. Similarly, the war on terror was declared by him a mere pretext to “building new walls” among nations and people for the sole purpose of thwarting the universal happiness of mankind. As President, his first act was to return the bust of Churchill from the White House to England with the statesmanlike justification that his paternal grandfather suffered injustice by the British when Churchill happened to be the secretary responsible for the colonies.
Subsequently, he traveled to Cairo and Ankara where he assured his audiences that he, as a Muslim born human being, understands their pain and will assuredly bring about a just solution to their many problems. In Iraq and in Afghanistan he tethered between demonstrating resolve and pacifying his political base. In Europe he enjoyed the initial adulation of the anti-American crowds without offering any ideas of a more effective and cohesive partnership. Vis-à-vis Russia, he promised a “reset” without even having the faintest understanding of the mentality of its ruling elite and the complex nature of its multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society. In Central and South America he made a fool out of himself by embracing lunatic dictators while showing the cold shoulder to democratically elected governments. In defiance of his stated objective of making the United States “energy independent” he picked a fight with Canada over the construction of a mutually beneficial pipeline. In this manner, condemned to hover between the realities of the world and his fantasies, he forced himself and the United States into a terrible international vacuum.
Today, about four months before the presidential elections, the choice is between Barack Obama’s vision of a large bureaucratic welfare state and the policies of his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, of less government and more individual freedom. Ultimately, the issue to be decided is how the United States and the rest of the world can progress. The fact is that history has always been on the side of freedom. Nations where politicians have labored under the misguided belief that they possess all the right solutions and anybody who disagrees with their policies is evil have been relegated, as a rule, to stagnation and certain decline. Although Barack Obama is a gifted demagogue and a person of considerable populist acumen, as a politician he has proven that he has been blinded by his emotions of hatred and his passion for senseless destruction. For these reasons, he has been and will remain a liability for America’s future and a danger to the well being of the world. Therefore, the challenge to the voters in November is to overcome the false notion that they are powerless victims, exercise their sovereignty, and entrust the government to persons who will honor the limits of their powers.