The Denial of History

Perhaps the worst thing about Obama is that he acts as if the divide in this country is a new phenomenon he can blame on his parent's generation alone.

He's made comments to this effect in The New York Pravda and elsewhere.

In his second book, “The Audacity of Hope,” Mr. Obama is critical of the style and the politics of the 60s, when the psyches of most of his potential rivals for the White House were formed. He writes that the politics of that era were highly personal, burrowing into every interaction between youth and authority and among peers. The battles moved to Washington in the 1990s and endure today, he says.

“In the back and forth between Clinton and Gingrich, and in the elections of 2000 and 2004,” he writes, “I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the baby boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage.”

Mr. Obama says he recognizes that the flashpoints of the 60s — war, racism, inequality, the relations between the sexes — still animate American politics and society and remain largely unresolved. And he acknowledges, as a child of a white Kansan mother and black Kenyan father, that his own prominence and prospects would have been impossible without the struggles of those who marched in Selma and Washington. But he argues that America faces new challenges that require a new political paradigm.

Aside from the issue of asking, "What's the fraking matter with Kansas?", let me reiterate that those that forget history are doomed to repeat it.

The cultural divide in this country goes as far back as Patriots and Tories. The issue of exploitation and manipulation go to the very embryonic conception of this country: most of the first immigrants were brought here as indentured servants, and when that didn't work out so well, slavery became the economic base of the most habitable part of the country.

The Guilded Age was a product of the same robber barons, who basically wanted all the perks of the Old South without having to bother with the overhead of really holding slaves.

Even Roosevelt's own family had some fault in this. His realization that he had to see beyond the traditions of his own class came from the understanding that their class warfare was destroying the base of their prosperity: the American worker.

Obama's tendency to ignore the reality of the long-term corporatism of the Bush crime family makes him a most unsuitable Presidential candidate, and ensures the Rovian promotion of Clinton/ Obama DINOcratic ticket in 2008.

[Thanks to Lambert for the tip.]