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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 3/11/13

What Is Obama's Political End-Game? Did He Enter Politics as a Democrat Only Because Republicans Are Bigots?

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Eric Zuesse

People who assume that Barack Obama entered politics as a Democrat on account of his being progressive in his convictions assume something that could be false. There is an alternative explanation for that, and it is far likelier to be true. In fact, his record in the White House, thus far, suggests that he entered politics as a Democrat for this alternative reason.

 

On 26 October 2012, Peter Finocchiaro at huffingtonpost headlined "Lawrence Wilkerson, Former Colin Powell Aide, Blasts Sununu, GOP, as 'Full of Racists'," and he linked to video of that evening's MSNBC "The Ed Show," in which the Republican White, Col. Wilkerson, expressed outrage at Romney campaign spokesman John Sununu's saying that the Republican Black Colin Powell was endorsing Barack Obama because Obama was black. "Let me just be candid: My party is full of racists," said Wilkerson.

 

It is hard to say precisely when Obama entered politics, or if he had in mind at that time the aspiration to become America's President thereby, but whenever he did first think about the Presidency as his future career-objective, how smart would it have been for him to do it then as a "Republican," given Richard Nixon's infamous anti-Black "Southern Strategy," and the impossibility at that time for any Black -- no matter how politically gifted -- to be able to win from the nation's Republican voters (including the Southern states) the Republican Party's nomination to become the U.S. President?

 

A Republican black man entering politics at that time wouldn't have stood any chance at the White House, because he wouldn't have stood any reasonable chance to win his own party's Presidential nomination.

 

This article will document that Obama is sufficiently conservative, as shown by his actions (though not by his liberal public rhetoric) while he has been in the White House, so that an intelligent question can be raised as to whether he entered politics as a "Democrat" basically because this was the only way that a black man, when he entered politics, could at all reasonably have aspired to become the U.S. President. One must put oneself in the mind of Barack Obama, at that time, and then construct a reasonable history, from then to now.

 

This article will even seek to document that Obama is actually completing a plan that was started in 1978 when the University of Chicago's Republican economist Milton Friedman first said that government expenses should not be fully funded from taxes, and that gradually building up the federal debt would be the only practical way to force the public to accept the ultimate "necessity" to slash "entitlement spending." Friedman's aim there was to encourage creating an enormous enough federal debt so as to produce what the public would come to believe to be the inevitability of slashing what Friedman considered to be inappropriate and unnecessary programs of the federal government, such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, which he wanted to eliminate, or else privatize. (He was, of course, a passionate libertarian: he favored eliminating many functions of government.) What will be shown here is that since Barack Obama first entered the White House, Obama has been brilliantly maneuvering himself into a position where he can claim that Republicans in Congress are forcing him to slash, though not to privatize (which he doesn't want to do), those programs. This is actually what he has been aiming to do, and been planning to do, all along, and he is now in the very closing months of finally achieving this long-held Republican goal, I shall attempt here to show.

 

Since it will be argued here that Obama is basically a believer in Republican economics, the concept of "Republican economics" will first need to be explained here, in order to enable one to understand how Obama has planned, and is now executing the closing phase of, this long objective, of a form of, actually, a massive Republican policy-victory. (People who refuse to consider even the possibility that Obama is aiming to load the costs of bailing out Wall Street onto the economic backs of coming generations of the broad American public might as well read no further here, because that's precisely what this article will document.)  

 

The basic difference between Democratic economics and Republican economics is the difference between Keynesianism and the economic theory that preceded it (and that Republican economists still cling to). So: Keynesianism must first be explained here:

 

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of  They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010,  and of  CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that (more...)
 
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