The Obama Disaster: Part II

Barack Obama's victory this week was hoped for, and celebrated, in Canada as a triumph of Canadian-style Americanism. Here in Toronto, for example, the writers group PEN Canada invited a wide range of people to a public-speaking event titled, "Democracy in the Year of Election" that amounted, at least in its advance notice, to an election-eve secular prayer meeting for an Obama victory. (It was explained in the invitation that it was a contest between an incumbent who wished to extend medical care to the disadvantaged and an opponent who wished to lower the taxes of the rich.)

Writers always hold themselves out as torch-bearers for truth, intellectual integrity and rigorous analysis of the complex. Likewise broadcasters: The election results, on Tuesday night and in days following, were presented on the CBC as an uplifting victory of a deserving winner and a crushing defeat of an evangelical, Zionist, misogynist, fat-cat reactionary.

This was an historic election, but not in ways that Americans or the Canadian left will celebrate. Mitt Romney was never a strong candidate, and any serious incumbent would have sent him to the proverbial dust-bin of history decisively, as Roosevelt did with Landon, Johnson did with Goldwater, Nixon with McGovern, Reagan with Mondale. If Romney had been a thoroughly credible challenger, he would have thrown Obama out of the White House like a dead mouse, as Roosevelt did to Hoover and Reagan did to Carter.

A shocking $3-billion was spent to keep a failed administration and mediocre congressional leaders (House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid) in place, operating a system that is very corrupt and is almost completely dysfunctional. Almost nothing worthwhile was said during the campaign about anything substantial. There is nothing in any of it to celebrate. An incumbent president was re-elected to a second term with fewer electoral votes than he had the first time — the first time this has happened.

The administration couldn't run on its record, and so resorted to a smear campaign against Romney with a fear-mongering leitmotif about "reproductive rights." None of the leading figures seemed able, right down to the nauseating treacle on election night, to stop the clap-trap about "the greatest power in human history's greatest days are ahead of it" long enough to notice what a basket case America has become.

The Obama Disaster: Part II

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