Obama to Run as Republican in 2012

 

I’ve written many times about Obama’s predilection for, not just corporatist policy, but flat out Republican policy, for example here and here.

 

For a long time my assessment of this person was that he was a corporatist by ideology and, even more important, a status quo elitist by personality. He prefers neoliberal corporatism, worshipping the “savvy businessmen”, but he’d worship the elites and want to be part of the cool crowd no matter what kind of system he came up in – Nazi Germany (if he were white), Stalin’s USSR, even the Founders’ original republic, whatever.

 

I also regarded him as politically incompetent. I discussed Obama as exemplary of the Peter Principle, how his career up until 2009 was just one long swindle where he never had any responsibility or accountability and his way was smoothed by powerful helpers, but once he became president and had nowhere to hide, and actually had to produce in the eyes of billions who aren’t part of his cult, he was suddenly unmasked as incompetent and clueless. I’ve also noted his basically mediocre mind. He may have more raw intellectual power than Bush, but he’s just as narrow-minded, just as mentally inert, just as shallow and vapid.

 

My main piece of evidence for his political incompetence was the fact that he couldn’t even get the spoils system right. That the winning party doles out jobs to its supporters is such an institution that even the schools weren’t embarrassed to teach about it when I was growing up.

 

Yet Obama left many Bush cadres in place, as well as appointed new Republicans to vacant positions. Even if people wanted to believe Robert Gates already represented some “post-partisan” paradigm (which is a load of crap), OCC head John Dugan was a pure Bush political appointee. Obama left him in place. Is it possible that there was no hard-working Democratic operative who would’ve wanted the OCC job? I find that hard to believe. That’s just the most prominent example, but there are innumerable others.

 

Similarly, Obama named Republicans like Ray LaHood and Jon Huntsman respectively Transportation Secretary and ambassador to China. He also staffed many lower positions with corporate cadres who are Republican by affiliation.

 

I’ve also seen figures showing that most of the districts which received the greatest stimulus disbursements were Republican-held districts! Now, I know Obama’s shtick was how he was going to lead us all to the post-partisan Promised Land, but nobody took that seriously during the campaign. That’s standard boilerplate, the kind of lie it’s OK to tell since nobody would ever believe it. So when starting with the stimulus “negotiation” (where he caved in before the fight even began) he really started acting not just in a non-partisan way but in a seemingly pro-Republican way, I chalked that up to a snivelling little kumbaya appeasement mentality. And when he persisted in this behavior I said “he’s an idiot.”

 

So for awhile I had the picture of a corporate ideologue who was also incompetent and wimpy. But sometimes, when I looked at examples of Democrats who are alleged to be Republicans at heart (e.g. the banksters’ favorite lackey in the House, Melissa Bean), I wondered if Obama might not also consciously consider himself a Republican. He’s certainly cynical enough and enough of a sociopath that he could have calculated how “In a perfect world I’d be a Republican, but in this world my best bet is to pose as a Democrat, since all the stupid liberals will swoon over my race and my bullshit pseudo-progressive rhetoric.”

 

So I was entertaining that idea, when I read this NYT magazine piece, which convinced me. If this piece is accurate, then Obama loathes the Democratic party. Not just the “progressive” wing, but the establishment, the fund-raising machine, the Congressional delegation, the whole works.

 

The piece tells us how Obama keeps attacking Congress as such while refusing the pleas of Pelosi and other to attack just the Republicans. How he wants to privatize Social Security and Medicare and reinstate the Bush tax cuts. How he attacked his own stimulus, his own policy, that’s how repulsive he found it to be associated with a Democratic piece of legislation. How much he hates fund-raising, and how proud his flunkies are of the fact that they flout Party requests on that score. (Also how he destroyed his own grassroots organization once he was elected and it was no longer convenient.)

 

Now, we who reject both kleptocratic parties don’t care about that, but isn’t a member of either party, let alone a party leader, supposed to be a partisan? But if anything, Obama’s an implicit Republican partisan. Not just on the policy, but even on the propaganda, everything he does is explicitly or implicitly not just pro-corporate but pro-Republican.

 

So all that’s why I’ve come to think he really is a closeted Republican. And given his real inclinations, and the possibility of a primary challenge in 2012 (for as moribund as the Dems are I have to think there will be some sort of revolt, however picayune), and how discombobulated the Republicans are likely to be (Romney? really? Petraeus?), I’m going to say that I think there’s a slight but non-zero chance that Obama will flip parties and run as a Republican. It wouldn’t be much crazier than lots of other scenarios I hear seriously discussed.

 

(Besides, that’s the kind of crazy prediction where there’s no penalty if you’re wrong, since wrong predictions are a dime a dozen, while if you’re right you may look like a genius. 🙂 )