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I'm not sure if this is how things will turn out. I hadn't foreseen the rise of the healthcare mobs. Consider this a kind of dark fantasy of where things could go.
The history of the future is written in the past. It is my nature to be a cynic and doomsayer, to survey the forces alligned and predict the worst outcome possible. The forces which led to President Obama's defeat were already alligned against him before he was ever sworn in.
In electing a black man as president, America thought it had proven that race was no longer an issue in the same way as Britain thought that the election of Margeret Thatcher was a triumph over sexism. Perhaps America was no longer a racist country. Or perhaps electing a single black man, possessed of incredible charisma and eloquence allowed the salving of enough souls that the people could easily fall back into unreasonable expectations, demands that would not have been placed on any other president.
Or perhaps it was the Republicans all along. Obama entered office with an economic tsunami already bearing down on him. Caused in large part by thirty years of supply-side economics and unsustainable consumption, the tidal wave had built up too much force to be halted by the efforts of one man had he even been allowed to make such an effort. He was not. Convinced from the first that the election of Obama had been illegitimate, that his landslide victory had been a rejection of Bush's legacy for not being conservative enough, Congressional Republicans prevented President Obama from making any real impact on the meltdown of the economy. Sometimes joined by conservative Democrats, often filibustering in the way they had decried as unconstitutional a few years before, the Republicans succeeded in defeating or blocking the overwhelming majority of Obama's economic measures. Social legislation was passed on a few issues. The Freedom of Choice Act passed into law and the Republicans, determined to have one last hurrah on the battlefield of the culture wars, instantly used it as proof to their base that Obama was evil incarnate. To the remaining moderate voters, they simply lied and exagerated the Act's effects, turning it into a clarion call for infanticide. In vain, Democrats and independent organisations tried to knock down those lies but it is easier to tell an untruth than to debunk one and, repeated ad infinitum by the corporate media, enough moderate voters believed it.
In 2010, the Republicans ran on a platform that President Obama had enabled all manner of social ills, that he had done nothing to help the economy (neglecting, of course, that his power over the economy was limited and the right had prevented the majority of what he had tried to do). That he had not even removed all troops from Iraq (while the number was greatly reduced, Congressional Republicans had prevented the removal of the entirety of American troops). They assailed Obama as a do-nothing empty suit, a bright smile and soothing voice with nothing behind them. And the public, so endlessly guillable, so impatient, so desirous of believing the simple, especially when it was so endlessly repeated, believed them. The Republicans took Congress.
Resurgent on their success, the right viewed themselves as vindicated; that the country had experimented briefly with socialism but was now back home where it belonged. And, just as they had to Bill Clinton years before, they viewed this as license to undermine the president and his policies. Within six months of the Congress being sworn in, hostile investigations had been launched into Obama's finances, where his daughters went to school, his citzenship status, his use of campaign funds and, finally, into the Anti-American Associations with his former preacher, Rev Wright and former aquintance, William Ayers. Unable or unwilling to watch as a president whom she had grown to like and respect was put through another political lynching, Secretery of State Hillary Clinton resigned at this time.
Predictably, this show of compassion was interpreted as weakness by Congressional Republicans and, within a year of the new Congress being sworn in, articles of impeachment were drafted against President Obama for UnAmerican Sentiments. Whether this act was merciless political brinksmanship by the right or whether they believed their own caricature of Obama is now impossible to say but the sentiments of those who have spoken out since share a marked similarity with veterans of the Clinton wars: That, elected or not, Republicans viewed Obama as illegitimate and unfit to serve; that they were in some way incensed by his very existance and were determined to bring him down by any means necessary. Whether it was his ethnicity, his cosmopolitan life or his policies which so incesed them, we cannot know but the right was out to get President Obama any way it could.
The impeachment was defeated easily in the Senate but already, the damage to Obama's administration had been done. With much of his power curtailed by Congress, threatened with another impeachment if he tried to excercise any of the powers George W. Bush had appropriated to the presidency, unable to accomplish anything of major importance, President Obama turned his attention to regulation of the business world. Little of real importance was achieved but dozens of minor rules and regulations were rewritten, making life slightly easier for millions of people in a million tiny ways. Those same improvements cost the business world money though. True, the cost was little but, in a corporate culture which would slit it's mother's throat for the change in her purse, the knives came out for Obama and millions poured into Republican coffers.
By the time the 2012 general election campaign rolled around, Obama's administration had been effectively hogtied in red tape and the campaign against him was simple: The Republican ticket headed by Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin (due to the lost records of the war, it's now unknown who was leading and who was led) ran against the caricature of President Obama created by the press, by the endless investigations, by the ceaseless lies and smears. A ticket of "moving America back to God" for the base and "getting government working" for the independents, nevermind teh role they had played in preventing government from working. The Congressional Republicans had effectively created a millstone of a do-nothing presidency which they hung around Obama's neck and the public, whose forgiveness was miniscule but whose forgetfullness was bottomless, rewarded them with the presidency.
As President Obama went through the motions of tidying up his affairs, the Palin/Romney ticket chose it's cabinet. Jeb Bush, Charlie Crist, John Cornyn, Tom Coburn and Saxby Chambliss. Critics described it as "the most conservative administration ever seen". Palin would respond only "Oh, I don't think that's true". During the "lame duck" period of Obama's administration, the President-Elect gave no indication of the constitutional ammendments to come, no mention of the wars that would be initiated, the appointment of judges who would overturn Roe V Wade, who would first ban same-sex marriage and then outlaw homosexuality altogether. The second Civil War was, of course, impossible to foresee but even with that allowance, the campaign waged by the Republican party has been described as "a marathon of lies, obsfucation and avoidance".
President Obama's farewell address was described as a touching affair. Displaying the eloquence he was renowned for, the president openly wept as he described his hopes and fears for the nation, the future and his family. Fighting to make himself heard above the jeering of Republicans, his legendary composure slipped only once, as he spoke of his daughters and the future they had ahead of them. Unknown at that time was the United Nations envoy status that would be offered to him as soon as he left office, the global respect and adulation that would await him in his future. Like President Carter, Obama would be entered into history as a gift to the world from a United States too short-sighted to see what it had spurned.
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