310 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biographycontrast with the predictable reality that 2008 represented a watershed year of fundamental
reordering of American politics — it was a year of party realignment. Party realignment in
American history have come along every three to four decades, and have been characterized by the
majority and minority parties trading places, by the collapsible parties and the emergence of new
parties, or by other important and lasting shifts in the political landscape. 2008 was comparable to
the coming of Jacksonian Democracy in 1828, which inaugurated a time of disaster for the United
States, with a sickening slide into the greatest of all conceivable calamities, civil war. 2008 was
comparable to 1860, the year when the Lincoln Republican Party emerged out of the wreckage of
the Whigs, the Know-Nothings, and the Free Soil party, even as the Democratic Party split into two
parts thanks in large part to the treachery of Caleb Cushing, the king of the dough-faces; this cycle
allowed national unity to be preserved in a civil war and slavery to be eradicated, while setting the
stage for the United States to become the greatest industrial power that the world had ever seen.
2008 was in the same league with 1896, when the contest between William Jennings Bryan and
William McKinley gave the Republicans another cycle of dominance, but this time under the banner
of Wall Street Republicanism and the dominance of the House of Morgan, the emergence of an
invisible government controlled by financiers, the creation of the Federal Reserve, and the historical
vandalism of the US entry into World War I, all crowned by the beginnings of the Great Depression
under Herbert Hoover. 2008 might be similar to 1932, the most successful of all party realignments
in American history, which put an end to the dominance of the reactionary and pro-fascist
Republican financiers, and inaugurated the New Deal state of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the most
effective form of human organization ever seen in history, a force powerful enough to defeat
fascism, checkmate communism, open the secrets of the atom, and put humans on the moon. A
negative model for 2008 was 1968, the beginning of the Republican Southern strategy theorized by
Kevin Phillips, a retrogressive regime which consolidated itself after the horrors of Jimmy Carter
into the so-called Reagan coalition of white men, suburban voters, evangelical Christians, and the
Southern backlash against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. By 2006, the Reagan coalition had
demonstrably collapsed and this fact was announced in the current cycle by Ed Rollins, at that time
running the Huckabee campaign. 2008 was therefore destined to be a year of crisis and upheaval,
and the advice given by Mark Penn to Senator Clinton was the worst possible guidance she could
have received. Mark Penn recommended that Mrs. Clinton begin during the Democratic primaries
the phase of triangulation or moving towards the center which is normally reserved for the general
election campaign in September and October. Mark Penn’s premature triangulation was the key to
Mrs. Clinton’s defeat in Iowa. If Senator Clinton had had any competent polling, she would have
seen that her excessive moderation was setting her up for defeat, but there are hints that Penn was
skewing the internal polls of the campaign so that his bad advice would seen to be successful, and
would therefore continued to be followed. Mark Penn had worked with Zbigniew Brzezinski in the
Ukrainian Orange Revolution coup of 2004, and therefore was widely suspected of divided and
conflicting loyalties. When Obama won the Iowa caucus, there was grave danger that the
Democratic primaries would be over in less than a week, and that the process of politicization and
political education that the primaries implied would be a boarded and brought to a premature end.
This was the fervent wish of the Wall Street financiers who constitute the US ruling class, since
they much prefer the American people to be kept in an apolitical stupor of apathy and resignation.
OBAMA’S COUP SLOWED BY CLINTON AND EDWARDS
To Senator Clinton above all, and to some extent to Senator Edwards, goes the merit of having
foiled Obama’s plan for a cold coup d’état. By bouncing back from her disappointing third-place
finish in Iowa to win the New Hampshire primary, Clinton saved the Democratic Party and perhaps