IX: Obama’s Triumph of the Will: The 2008 Primaries 311the United States as a whole from the terrible consequences of having the Democratic nomination
seized through a lightning campaign by a totally unknown political adventurer and con artist.
Senator Clinton was doubtless helped by the fact that New Hampshire voters had already been
exposed to the specific brand of demagogy which Obama was peddling. In New Hampshire, as
well as in Rhode Island, the main local television channels come from Boston, and therefore reflect
the internal politics of Massachusetts into these two nearby states. In 2006, Deval Patrick had been
elected as the first black governor of Massachusetts. Patrick’s campaign manager had been the
Chicago ward heeler David Axelrod, a member of the corrupt Daley machine who had specialized
in getting black candidates elected in situations where it was indispensable for them to obtain
significant numbers of white votes. Axelrod had attempted to solve this problem by recommending
that the black candidates he advised employee a vague and aspirational rhetoric of messianic
slogans and glittering utopian generalities, making the grubby details of another cynical exercise in
political hucksterism and corruption into a sublime idealistic quest. Axelrod had found that this
approach would deliver sizable support from affluent white voters and college youth which, when
supplemented by strong turnout from black inner-city voters, would often carry his candidates to
victory. But Patrick was failing as Governor of Massachusetts and voters there had been soured by
the Obama formula.
OBAMA: MANIPULATING AMERICAN VOTERS
AS ETHNOGRAPHIC MATERIAL
Even before Obama’s “Bittergate” remarks in San Francisco, the acerbic Spengler of Asia Times
had diagnosed Obama’s method of profiling and manipulating the American people: he was an
anthropologist, true to his mother’s method, doing field work, and reducing American voters to
ethnographic material in the process: ‘Obama profiles Americans the way anthropologists interact
with primitive peoples. He holds his own view in reserve and emphatically draws out the feelings of
others; that is how friends and colleagues describe his modus operandi since his days at the Harvard
Law Review, through his years as a community activist in Chicago, and in national politics.
Anthropologists, though, proceed from resentment against the devouring culture of America and
sympathy with the endangered cultures of the primitive world. Obama inverts the anthropological
model: he applies the tools of cultural manipulation out of resentment against America. The
probable next president of the United States is a mother’s revenge against the America she despised.
(Spengler, Asia Times, Feb. 26, 2008) The lesson was that if you do not have a full set economy,
including nuclear energy, you risk becoming ethnographic material in today’s world.
MESSIANIC AND UTOPIAN: THE IOWA TELEPROMPTER SPEECH
During and right after the Iowa caucuses, Obama began to attract attention as an orator. His
preference was to deliver a speech off a teleprompter before a huge crow in a stadium or sports
arena. The parallels to the Mussolini balcony speech or the later German Nuremberg party rallies
were overwhelming, but were seldom pointed out by the corrupt US corporate media. As Spengler
noted, ‘There is nothing mysterious about Obama’s methods. “A demagogue tries to sound as stupid
as his audience so that they will think they are as clever as he is,” wrote Karl Krauss. Americans are
the world’s biggest suckers, and laugh at this weakness in their popular culture. Listening to Obama
speak, Sinclair Lewis’ cynical tent-revivalist Elmer Gantry comes to mind, or, even better, Tyrone
Power’s portrayal of a carnival mentalist in the 1947 film noir Nightmare Alley. The latter is
available for instant viewing at Netflix, and highly recommended as an antidote to having felt
uplifted by an Obama speech. America has the great misfortune to have encountered Obama at the