VII: The Hope Pope and his Trilateral Money Machine 279a Texas Southern Baptist church. “Can I get an amen here?” Obama said to the cheering crowd as
he compelled them to turn the TV off at home and make sure their kids hit the books. But these
risks did not resurface later at a rally in Fort Worth, where the audience was decidedly more racially
mixed and in a higher income bracket. Gone was the preacher-like cadence. He talked about health
care and education, but only made a passing reference to individual responsibility. Political
analysts say Obama is using a dual approach to win Tuesday’s primaries in Texas and Ohio and the
Democratic nomination beyond that — a race-neutral, rousing stump speech for most audiences and
a sermon like dialogue reserved for lower-income black audiences. “I called it a two-track
strategy,” said University of Maryland political science professor Ron Walters, who has written
extensively about blacks. “This requires two different kinds of politics and Barack Obama has been
able to synthesize both of them.” (Susan Ferrecchio, Washington Examiner, March 3, 2008)
THE MEDIA SWOON FOR BARKY, THE HOPE POPE
One of the things that Obama’s money machine could be used to mobilize was of course the
fawning adulation of those press whores who populated the controlled corporate media of this
unhappy nation. Here is a sample from the middle phase of the 2008 primaries. Notice how the
author tries to establish the unique world historical importance of Obama, and then goes on to
compare him to John F. Kennedy, before deciding to throw in Lincoln as well. We can only guess
how many of these hack writers were getting paid by the word for such moronic hyperbole:
The tides of history are rising higher and faster these days. Read them right and ride them, or be
crushed. And then along comes Barack Obama, with the kinds of gifts that appear in politics but
once every few generations. There is a sense of dignity, even majesty, about him, and
underneath that ease lies a resolute discipline. It’s not just that he is eloquent — with that ability
to speak both to you and to speak for you — it’s that he has a quality of thinking and
intellectual and emotional honesty that is extraordinary. I first learned of Barack Obama from a
man who was at the highest level of George W. Bush’s political organization through two
presidential campaigns. He described the first-term senator from Illinois as “a walking hope
machine.” All this was made clearer by the contrast with Hillary Clinton, a capable and
personable senator who has run the kind of campaign that reminds us of what makes us so
discouraged about our politics. Her campaign certainly proved her experience didn’t count for
much: She was a bad manager and a bad strategist who naturally and easily engaged in the
politics of distraction, trivialization and personal attack. The similarities between John Kennedy
and Barack Obama come to mind easily: the youth, the magnetism, the natural grace, the
eloquence, the wit, the intelligence, the hope of a new generation. But it might be more to the
point to view Obama as Lincolnesque in his own origins, his sobriety and what history now
demands. (Jann S. Wenner, “A New Hope,” Rolling Stone, March 20, 2008)^127
The hysteria of this encomium was in inverse proportion to Obama’s substantive record. After
spending 2005 and 2006 pretending to be a senator, but in reality planning his presidential
campaign, the Illinois Messiah dropped out of his legislative functions completely, missing virtually
every vote. According to one press account, Obama had missed “the most votes of any Democratic
presidential hopeful in the Senate over the last two months, including a vote on an Iran resolution he
has blasted Sen. Hillary Clinton for supporting.” The Illinois Democrat had missed nearly 80
percent of all votes after September 2007. This was a great advantage, since no one could really
know what he stood for, if anything.