If you thought that was from a conservative website or a GOP-financed PAC, you'd be wrong. It is a line from a series of anti-Obama videos commissioned by the Huffington Post. They are meant to contrast candidate Obama with governing Obama, says Arianna Huffington. They are billed as 'satirical videos', but I'm hearing more sarcasm than anything else.
It's a good thing the bloggers' suit against Huffington Post was dismissed, so they now have millions of dollars available to spend on this sort of thing. Citizens United? Who needs it? You don't even have to be a PAC to do something like this - just create the content and hope every news outlet replays it ad nauseum, a la Swiftboat Veterans against John Kerry.
So, you can see how this video satirically draws a contrast between Candidate Obama and Governing Obama. Right?
Arianna spends lots of words justifying the move to make this series of 'satirical' videos,
We've all seen the two Obamas in action. There's Campaign Obama, who has a phenomenal ability to inspire and challenge a broken status quo. This is the Obama who said he was going to change the way Washington works and who promised to not "just read the polls and figure out how to keep myself in office." This Obama wasn't going to accept the conventional wisdom of what was possible; instead, he was going to reject the "worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics."
But then there's Governing Obama. This is the Obama who, instead of taking his case to the nation, let the parameters of what was considered possible (on infrastructure investment, on jobs, on foreclosures, on austerity vs. growth, on Afghanistan) be decided by... worn-out dogmas. This is the Obama who rightly insisted on the need for health care for all, but who engineered a new system that, overall, relies on and rewards the same players -- insurance companies, hospital conglomerates, drug manufacturers -- who created and profited from the mess he inherited.
As David Bromwich wrote after the 2010 midterms, "His eloquence finds its natural key not in explanations but in statements of purpose. Obama wants credit for the highest intentions even when conceding that he lacks the will to fulfill them."
So we have one Obama who in 2007 said, "I am running because of what Dr. King called 'the fierce urgency of now.' I am running because I do believe there's such a thing as being too late." And who in 2008 reinforced it with the assertion that "change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we've been waiting for. We are the change that we seek."
And then we have the other Obama, who seemed to be governing with the fierce urgency of... sometime later. Or much later. As he told 60 Minutes in December of last year: "I always believed that this was a long-term project. That reversing a culture here in Washington, dominated by special interests, it was gonna take more than a year. It was gonna take more than two years. It was gonna take more than one term. Probably takes more than one president."
As Huffpost
continues:
Sure, the first term hasn't gone exactly as planned for Obama supporters. Yes, he kept Guantanamo open, extended the Bush tax cuts, didn't get rid of too-big-to-fail banks, and nearly signed a debt ceiling "Grand Bargain" that would have cut Medicare and given even more away to the wealthy, but look on the upside -- you still get to hope...
With their lack of content and disrespectful tone (Hey, Obama??? REALLY??) these videos might as well be ready-made campaign commercials for the GOP. From the 'liberal' Huffington Post.
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