Barack Obama, a Democratic former US Senator from Chicago and law school professor, declared that he would run for president in 2012, contacting potential supporters by all sorts of electronic gadgetry to let them know that he’s furious at the direction the country has taken during the nearly eleven years of Bush-ama rule. He said his campaign theme would be “The Paucity of Hope–How Bush-ama Stole the Dream”. Admitting that the theme reeked of negativism, he nonetheless argued that it was impossible to be anything but negative watching the steadily-downward trajectory of the American dream since Bush-ama took over in 2000.
The candidate explained that he would move to immediately end the now three international conflicts in which Bush-ama has embroiled the US military. He claimed he would never have committed American forces to battle in Libya without prior Congressional authorization as did the incumbent, and his presumed opponent in the race, President Bush-ama. He vowed he would not just “stand-down” operations in Iraq to a troop level second only to Afghanistan’s, pledging to actually bring all the soldiers home, and to leave “Mesopotamia to Mesopotamians”. He observed that in Afghanistan, where the US military has been deployed now for nearly a decade, our aim to “bomb them into the stone ages” was misplaced and superfluous because most of Afghanistan had never made it out of the stone ages before we arrived, and that the longer we remain in the area, the more likely it will be that American idiots burning Qurans can imperil the lives of American troops and Afghani civilians, not to mention UN “peacekeepers” idly standing by. He vowed all American troops would leave Afghanistan within the year of his election.
Obama pledged that his foreign policy would be focused on one simple objective: To protect and defend the United States Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic, just as the presidential oath of office provides, nothing more and nothing less. Accordingly, he vowed that the US military would no longer be used as a personal police force to ensure the safety of international transactions initiated by global investment banks, which he said enabled the exploitation of both American and foreign workers by allowing the location of factories in oppressive regimes employing quasi-slave labor without regard to safety or environmental degradation. Asked whether the US military should serve as a laboratory for the experiments of social progressives, such as the impact gay marriage might have on force readiness, Obama remarked that the US military would reflect all of America, as he would reinstitute the draft of all able-bodied men and women, while simultaneously reducing active forces to a skeletal minimum in order to keep the mostly reserve forces trained and ready to accomplish the mission of protecting and defending the US Constitution.
Obama vowed that not only would the US military no longer serve as the investment banker’s police force, the US Federal Reserve Bank would no longer act as their risk indemnifier. He proposed a constitutional amendment that would prevent the Federal Reserve from purchasing private securities to prevent any further “rescues” on the backs of taxpayers without their input. He further proposed that the Federal Reserve’s mandate be expressly limited to protecting the value of the currency, eliminating its dual mandate to maintain maximum employment, noting that the value of money and the level of employment are only tangentially related, if at all.
Obama promised that he would close the Guantanamo Bay prison within a year of election, reviving a promise made by the incumbent Bush-ama. He said it was against every value that Americans hold dear for this country to detain people indefinitely without charge and without trial. For some few of them that were American citizens, he promised to seek damages for the violation of their constitutional right against suspension of the writ of habeus corpus, noting that people questioned even Honest Abe Lincoln about his having suspended the writ during the Civil War, even when Abe’s suspension of the writ was well within the exception of “rebellion” provided by the US Constitution. He wasn’t sure what he’d do about the rest that weren’t US citizens, since apparently no country is willing to take them.
He excoriated the current Bush-ama administration for having moved, on the same day as his announcement for the 2012 presidential election, a trial of “innocent until proven guilty” terrorist masterminds out of New York city’s civilian courts for trial by military tribunal. He promised if elected he would bring the “accused back to the criminal justice capital of the world”. He offered that if the trial was still in progress upon release of Guantanamo Bay’s prisoners, they might enjoy attending to get a better display of American values than they got as detainees in Guantanamo, where it was often hot and they sometimes didn’t have air conditioning, like most of the rest of the island’s population.
In a radical departure from the incumbent Bush-ama, Obama declared that he would support reform of the American entitlement system, particularly its health-care entitlement known as Medicare, observing that failing to do so would imperil America’s future in ways military adventurism could only hint at. Though a Democrat, he signed on to Republican Congressman Paul Ryan’s plan for reforming entitlements and balancing the budget by 2015, with some “reservations around the margins”. He proclaimed that there can be no freedom where there is oppressive taxation, and that the federal government’s gargantuan and growing consumption of American wealth represented an indefensible burden today and for future generations, noting that two initiatives undertaken during the Bush-ama administration, the prescription drug benefit and health insurance entitlement and reform, were markers along the way to a bankrupt national fisc, each representing impairment of the ideal that freedom requires individual responsibility. He remarked that no country has ever traveled the road to prosperity by borrowing to pay for social entitlements, and that even his predecessor Democratic President, Bill Clinton, had managed to balance the budget and institute welfare reform, without leaving people dying in the streets for lack of government compassion.
Obama’s election would represent a radical departure from the politics of the Bush-ama era. When asked whether it would be possible for someone with such progressive views to be elected, Obama explained that it was time someone had the audacity, not of hope, but of truth; that America was tired of electing empty suits for leaders, and that the revival of the American dream of pursuing life, liberty and happiness according to the tenets of ones’ own character required a reordering of society in the direction of individual freedom and its attendant responsibilities.