Anyone remember Lynn Forester de Rothschild? Think reeeeeaaaaalllllly hard back to the closing days of the 2008 election; and you may recall an upper class white woman with strong ties to the investment class making a big regretful noise that, contrary to decades of loyalty to her Democratic Party, she could not in good conscience vote for that radical lefty Obama and so must endorse the proven centrist John McCain.
Right. You forgot. So for some reason The Daily Beast has given her bandwidth to remind us, this time in the form of an I Told You So. Yes, that is literally the headline. “I Told You So.” Um, okay, I’ll bite — you told us what?
Suddenly now everyone is worried he is trying to transform America. He had said so all along. His is an effort to make a bigger, more intrusive and more costly government. His hope is, and has always been, to turn the country into a nation that looks more like a European social democracy. He ignores that the roots of our strength have always been small government and a dynamic private sector, fostered by both Democrats and Republicans. His cynical use of centrist language as a tool to get elected does not change the fact of his true objectives for America. It is telling that under Obama’s presidency, according to Sunday’s CNN Poll, 37 percent of Democrats, 63 percent of independents and 70 percent of Republicans see the federal government as a threat to the rights of Americans.
The stuff I emphasized above is the “what planet are you on?” stuff. If Obama’s true objectives are to turn the U.S. into a stable social democracy based on successful European models, I would be the first in line to blow him.
But before I get out my knee pads, I have to say, he’s really going about it all wrong. Cuz first thing out the gate he bails out Lady de Rothschild’s investor cronies with no strings attached, ensuring uncannily enormous profits, until public outrage prompts him to try to get the moolah back; and even so, nothing significant has changed, no significant regulatory regime has been implemented, leaving plenty of opportunity for another Ginormous Financial Meltdown.
And as for health care reform…. Wouldn’t a dedicated social democrat push a lot harder for single payer or a robust public option? Cuz I seem to recall he caved pretty quickly on that issue almost a year ago. Does someone seeking to transform America into a Lefty Paradise sell out his green technology agenda to the “Clean Coal” (sic) and nuclear energy industries? And, hey, how about those wars?
But whatever. Best to stick with a Radical Extremist straw man conjured out of the paranoid stereotypes of Black Power that haunt the white ruling class imagination. Surely the craven little weasel currently animating McCain’s corpse would have been a better bipartisan player had he won the Presidency, reaching across the aisle to throttle the Pelosi-Reid Hydra with all the force of his vindictive, angry, tortured soul.
Here’s the thing: It is really important for certain sectors of the ruling class to believe, or to have the rest of us believe that Obama is not the corporate centrist that he actually is. Because then any move he makes that is both practical AND progressive — that is, that holds the investment and financial class accountable for the horrible mess they’ve made and that might make them more socially responsible (ha, ha, ha) — infringes on their entitled sense of unchecked social and economic power. De Rothschild is not a very effective voice in this chorus, but their overall aim is to intimidate the altogether Wall Street friendly president from spoiling their party. They need to keep painting him as a Loony Leftoid. If only he were such.
