http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/11/30/the... /

Ten years ago in America, War Party fervor was on the rise, the media was in tow, and many a liberal was on board. Thus began the Bush-Cheney era, one of the darkest moments in American history. Those years seem like only yesterday, probably because on matters of substance – keeping the perpetual war machine going, undermining personal freedoms and the rule of law, encouraging environmental indifference while courting ecological disaster, and making the world safe for the corporate “persons” who own our duopoly party system — the Obama administration has been more or less continuous with George W. Bush’s.

What seems unreal was that brief interlude, begun just four winters ago as the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries loomed, and lasting into the summer of 2009, when liberal hearts and minds succumbed to the belief that Barack Obama would put an end to decades of Reaganite (neolibleral) depredations, and that we could then take up where the New Deal and Great Society left off. That Obamamaniacal moment now seems a lifetime away.

Obamamania was always an illusion in Freud’s sense, an expression of an unconscious wish. Freud also spoke of delusions, illusions held in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Before Election Day 2008, Obamamania was only an ordinary illusion to which liberals, trade unionists and, of course, persons of color were especially susceptible. By Inauguration Day, as the President-elect’s choices for top positions became known, Obamamania took on a more delusional aspect.

It was in this spirit that the liberal commentariat invoked pop historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s account of Lincoln’s war cabinet, a “team of rivals.” The idea was that the administration over which Obama would preside was not what it plainly was turning out to be; that Obama’s plan was to take advantage of the expertise of the Clintonites he picked to run foreign and domestic policy, while he, the wise and competent leader, would ride herd, assuring progressive outcomes. It soon became apparent that this argument was of mainly clinical interest; that the pundits promoting it were just making Obama appear Lincolnesque by artlessly interpreting reams of evidence to the contrary. No wonder, that we heard little more about Obama’s team of rivals once his presidency got underway.


snip