After the Obamagic Wears Off
By Joe Hodgkin and Ron Serko
Until everything fell apart, my heart lay with John Edwards
The soft hair, the soothing accent, the proletarian pandering…all too perfect! But Edwards soon abandoned me. I fell sobbing into the warm embrace of the junior senator from Illinois, whose soar-ing rhetoric felt like a coded message to a solidly leftist base.
Such honey-sweet words! “We need fundamental change!” “If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won’t act, we will.”
Anyways, millions of college students couldn’t be wrong. We weren’t wrong in the 60’s!
And by the election, I had invested my hopes in the romanticized Fox News version of our man.
“I think when you spread the wealth around it’s good for everybody.” Obama would finally address the large-scale socio-economic root causes of racial disparity…right?
“Make them go to bed at a reasonable time, keep them off the streets, give them some breakfast, come on!”
Obama’s victory, of course, felt like a deeply moving personal victory for all of us
But in the months that followed, the magic wore off and I noticed that the president-elect possessed one trait that I hadn’t noticed before… centrism. Obama’s appointments were dis-appointments: Tom Vilsack…Hillary Clinton…fine. But Rick Warren?!
But by now it was too late. My feelings for Barack Obama ran deep…deeper than could be rationalized.
I wish I knew how to quit you.