What Happened To Obama? Maybe The Question Should Be What Happened To You?

I’m going to refrain from getting inside the president’s head or making too many comments with regards to this article.  It is well written and the last page in particular highlights some of the doctor’s perspectives.  I have actually thought about attempting to profile the president and wrote a long post doing just that.  But I ditched it. 

Let me just say that people seek positions of authority for many reasons.  We truly never understand anyone’s intent because people who seek authority almost never share their true self.  Instead we get a cleansed view meant for public consumption.  A cleansed view that is a result of the massive marketing and image consulting that goes into our broken political system.  Effectively, the intent of any politician is to game the American people.  That is most often how politicians get elected.  And the enabler for this dysfunction is the two party monopoly that hand picks politicians who will be subservient to party ideology.  Just like the Nazis.  That may sound severe but is the dynamic any different?  Because of the two party monopoly, we are then left with little truth to rely on in our decision making. 

I would like to make an observation about the doctor who wrote this article and for many of the disillusioned or disappointed citizens who supported the endless charade of what almost always turns out to be some degree of useless politicians.  Politicians are the result of tens to hundreds of millions of dollars of marketing and image-making through mass media.   Other than cheerleading about topics they almost certainly know nothing about, demagoguing to win votes, pandering to special interests and photo-ops kissing babies, what do you really know about Obama or any other politician? 

What happened to Obama as the good doctor asks?  Nothing happened to Obama.  He was the same unimpressive, detached rhetoratician (aka talker) before he got elected.  And the doctor’s article simply confirms this.   Contrarily, what happened to you?  You assigned your beliefs of what you expected this president and countless other politicians to be.  And your beliefs were created by an endless stream of propaganda that you believed if you are disillusioned or disappointed.  Of course, the same could be said of Bill Clinton, George Bush, Ronald Reagan or countless members of Congress over the decades or even centuries. 

Whenever society moves towards a post-political world, be that in coming decades or one hundred years from now or whenever it happens, we will finally elect people whose primary intent is to serve.  Because, with politics and all of its gimmicks gone from the public service arena,  there will little for elected servants to gain other than service to humanity and society.  And we will therefore be informed about the moral clarity of the people we are electing rather than trying to fight through the endless propaganda of politics.  And, as part of that post-political world, we’ll quit exalting public servants as saviors or figures larger than life.  (A severe defect of the human condition.)   And that means we’ll quit asking what happened to Obama. 

Public servants are completely imperfect people with all of the same foibles and shortcomings as everyone else.  And because there is so much power to be gained by being a politician, I would argue that the type of persona attracted to public office or to the CEO’s office are ultimately the exact opposite of people our society should be trusting to run our companies and our government. 

We’ll get there.  The process may not be pretty but both the economic and political system as they are structured today are on their last legs.