Implode-o-Meter News - The President Who Wasn't There: Barack Obama's Legacy of Impotence

Obama assumed the presidency at a moment when much of the nation seemed ready to confront the unwelcome fact that the American project had derailed.... Corporate capitalism just wasn't delivering the goods anymore. Not for the bottom 80 percent, any way. The economy was in ruins, mired in what appeared to be a permanent recession. The manufacturing sector had been killed from the inside-out, with millions of well-paying jobs outsourced and nothing but dreary service-sector positions to take their place. Chronic long-term unemployment hovered at more than 10 percent, worse, much worse, in black America. Those who clung to their jobs had seen their wages stagnate, their home values shrivel and were suffocating under merciless mounds of debt. Meanwhile, capital moved in ever-tightening circles among a new odious breed of super-rich, making sweat-free billions from the facile movement of money.
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With his sunny disposition and Prospero-like aptitude for mystification, Obama should have been able to convert [the discontented] or, at least, to roll over them. Instead, they kicked his ass. How? ... Obama's most grievous political wounds were self-inflicted, starting even before his election when he rushed back to Washington to help rescue Bush's Wall Street bailout. This was perhaps the first real indication that the luminous campaign speeches about generational and systemic change masked the servile psyche of a man who was desperately yearning to be embraced by the nation's political and financial elites.

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The President Who Wasn't There: Barack Obama's Legacy of Impotence