His strategy borrowed heavily from the Bush Doctrine. What's the difference, really, as US troops now intervene worldwide and Guantanamo remains open for business?
There was a lot I didn't know. I didn't know the backgrounds of those that groomed him and funded him. His relationship with the centrist DLC was murky as were the details on the services he performed for a shadowy firm, Business International, said to have CIA links.
There were those who warned, but I guess, I didn't want to listen.
Why? I didn't want to reinforce my own skepticism and sense of despair. I feigned at being hopeful even as I took quite a few critical whacks at his positions in my blog. His deviations from a liberal agenda and his paens to the "free market" were considered necessary for his "electability."
I was also influenced by the euphoria for him overseas that had become infectious but has since soured.
To be honest, I was so disgusted with eight years of George Bush for all the right reasons that I wanted him gone full stop, as did millions of Americans.
Hillary didn't appeal to me, not because she's a woman but because of her slavish affinity for the Israel lobby and middle of the road Democrats. (Yes, Obama, did his mea-culpa to AIPAC too!)
I was denounced as a super sexist by a few for not buying into her centrist Clintonista crusade.
She had gone from a student advocate to part of a ruling family; he went from bottom-up activism to top-down elitism.
When she joined his "team," you knew they were always in the same league.
When the right bashed him for associating with radical Bill Ayers, who I knew, it made me suspect he might even be cooler than I thought, even as he raced to distance himself. His membership in Reverend Wright's church hinted at a deeper consciousness until he buckled in the media heat and threw the man that married him under the bus.
And yet, I wanted to believe because I needed to believe, needed to believe it was possible to change the American behemoth, to believe that, as he kept saying, "it could be different this time."
As the late writer David Foster Wallace put it, "In the day-to-day trenches of adult life...there is no such thing as not worshiping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship... else (what) you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things - if they are where you tap real meaning in life - then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough."
So, in a sense, I became a worshiper like so many, not of the man or the dance he was doing in an infected political environment, but because I convinced myself that I worshiped possibility, that there are times when the unexpected, even the unbelievable occurs. I had seen Mandela go from prison to the presidency of South Africa.
History happens.
After all, how does a progressive blast a candidate who has Bruce Springsteen and Pete Seeger singing the uncensored version of "This Land Is Your Land" at his inaugural?"
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