How can the most imaginatively progressive presidential candidate in recent history become recent history's least imaginative president?
Why have our ebullient expectations, which bore him aloft in the quest to redress the swaggering destruction of the Bush administration, been so regularly dashed over the course of his first, historic year in office?
The reason-defying semantic gymnastics employed by one and all to rationalize irresponsible actions and vindicate convoluted and corrupt policies have come to define the political landscape. And the raucous spectacle of woefully misinformed wingnuts (both elected and civilian) engaged in untethered heckling evokes less the democratic process at work and more garishly face-painted football fans hurling drunken invective in a stadium parking lot.
But President Obama, who retains the original personal and intellectual qualities which won him the office, governs not the country as we hope it is but the country as it actually is.
For the world, Mr. Beele, is a business. And our president, so smart, so charming, so able...is a businessman.
And the United States government is a business.
And the business of the United States is business.
Get the picture? You should: it's inches from your nose every moment of every day. America will never become what is promised in soaring oratory or compelling debate during a presidential campaign, when politicians bring their "A" game and go hand to hand and face to face with the American people. Because the actuality of governing has little to do with what is said to get elected.
It's not for lack of trying. If there were an efficacious way to close Guantanamo, fix Iraq and Afghanistan, fix the economy, fix the infrastructure, shut down the special interests and everything else we hoped and expected our president to do once he entered the Oval Office, then logic dictates he would have found it.
But he is not in control. He never was.
The world, Mr. Beele, is a business.
Because as long as the corporate interests control the message and, therefore, the messenger, the people don't stand a chance. Their outrage is displaced and dumbed down because they themselves have been systematically displaced and dumbed down.
Right or Left, Lib or Con, the tenure of President Obama is starting to smack of the cosmic letdown, something akin to the post-Thanksgiving afterburn. And it's not even his fault.
And no, it's not what the dyed-in-the-wool Obama-haters predicted about him being all rhetoric and no substance. Anything that smacks of subtlety or depth or intellect is beyond their neanderthal grasp. Rather, it speaks to the truth of what the United States has become and what role it really plays in global events.
With Bush, only those whose eyes were ripped away by a pharmaceutical-fueled chimp would be unable to see the crass con job, the blatant and ham-handed power grab which brought America to a new low. But with Obama, the tonic to all those years of sordid and lethal neo-con narcissism, the hurt is deeper, his inability to right those wrongs more painful than even when they were first inflicted.
And if, after his term of office is over, business remains business as usual and the dream of hope and change has acquired a commercial, pre-packaged taint, then will the people have the wherewithal to take action? As the constitution says, that's their business.