A common swindler and one of the great political liars of all time

I can't agree with Matt Taibbi because I have always been dubious of Barrack Obama's eight year effort to fundamentally transform America without his actually delivering any meaningful results and in some important ways forestalling actions which were strategically strengthen us for the future.  

From The Vanishing Legacy of Barack Obama by Matt Taibbi.  Bitterness always sharpens an essay.

A former president flying half the world’s celebrities to spend three days in a maskless ring-kissing romp at a $12 million Martha’s Vineyard mansion, at a moment when only a federal eviction ban prevented the outbreak of a national homelessness crisis, was already an all-time “Fuck the Optics” news event, and that was before the curveball. Because of what even the New York Times called “growing concerns” over how gross the mega-party looked, not least for the Joe Biden administration burdened with asking the nation for sober sacrifice while his ex-boss raised the roof with movie stars in tropical shirts, advisers prevailed upon the 44th president to reconsider the bacchanal. But characteristically, hilariously, Obama didn’t cancel his party, he merely uninvited those he considered less important, who happened to be almost entirely his most trusted former aides.

Interesting to see the acknowledgement of the greed and self-serving nature of the administration.

He extended middle fingers in all directions: to his Vineyard neighbors, the rest of America, Biden, the hanger-on ex-staffers who’d stacked years of hundred-hour work weeks to build his ballyhooed career, the not quite A-listers bounced at the last minute for being not famous enough (sorry, Larry David and Conan O’Brien!), and so on. It’d be hard not to laugh imagining Axelrod reading that even “Real Housewife of Atlanta” Kim Fields got on the party list over him, except that Obama giving the shove-off to his most devoted (if also scummy and greedy) aides is also such a perfect metaphor for the way he slammed the door in the faces of the millions of ordinary voters who once do desperately believed in him.

Obviously, getting rich and not giving a shit anymore is the birthright of every American. But this wasn’t supposed to be in the script for Obama, whose remarkable heel turn has been obscured by the Trump years, which incidentally were at least partly his fault. The history books and the still-starstruck press will let him skate on this, but they shouldn’t.

Obama was set up to be the greatest of American heroes, but proved to be a common swindler and one of the great political liars of all time — he fooled us all. Moreover, his remarkably vacuous post-presidency is proving true everything Trump said in 2016 about the grasping Washington politicians whose only motives are personal enrichment, and who’d do anything, even attend his wedding, for a buck. Trump’s point was that he, Trump, was already swinishly rich, while politicians have only one thing to sell to get the upper class status they crave: us. 

That sotto voce acknowledgement that Trump was, in part, right is remarkable. Taibbi does make a good point.  Bad as Obama was for the nation, he forestalled the continuance of the Clinton Dynasty in all its petty corruption and gold digging.  But at what a cost.  Well-packaged corruption merely usurped tacky and obvious corruption.

Previewing his current career as a uniquely gifted post-presidential profiteer, Obama in 2008 was a spectacular fundraiser, quietly setting the stage to become the ultimate defender of the status quo, even as he publicly ran against it.

He was so skilled at selling the appearance of a course change from payola and partisan gridlock that I recorded Democratic voters in his crowds comparing him in a complimentary way to Ronald Reagan, while another of his supporters told me with a straight face she couldn’t vote for Hillary because she represented the “old boys’ network” in Washington.

I saw that Obama was really just “a typical middle-of-the-road Democrat with a lot of money and a well-run cam­paign,” but by November of 2008 I’d convinced myself the mere fact of his campaign was a great historical triumph. He’d restored the public’s confidence just as our international reputation was disappearing down the sinkhole of the Iraq disaster. Moreover, at the exact moment the Katrina disaster had put the “two Americas” narrative on television, graphically demonstrating how little real progress we’d made since the sixties in desegregating the country, the sweeping nature of Obama’s victory provided hope that the country could finally conquer its racial demons. 

Taibbi reminds of the vast gulf between the aspirational fundamental transformation and the muckey routine corruption which fueled the 8 year administration.

The reality is much more grotesque. Obama sold out the instant he moved into the White House, before the likes of Mitch McConnell even had a chance to figure in the picture.

Example: as mentioned here before, Obama as a candidate had run an ad denouncing Louisiana’s Democratic congressman Billy Tauzin for taking a $2 million job at the the drug lobby firm PhRMA right after passing a monster prescription drug handout bill. “That’s an example of the same old game-playing in Washington,” Obama said, in an ad called, Billy. “I don’t want to learn how to play the game better. I want to put an end to the game-playing.”

Immediately after Obama took office — between February 4th and July 22nd of 2009, to be exact — “Billy” became a regular visitor to the White House, visiting an average of once every 15 days. Those meetings culminated in a deal struck between the Obama White House and PhRMA, in which the trade group would donate $150 million to lobby for the passage of Obamacare, and Obama in return would abandon two of his key campaign pledges (among other things): allowing Medicare to negotiate pharmaceutical prices in bulk, and allowing citizens to import cheaper drugs from Canada. Right out of the gate, Obama’s signature bill was built atop the exact slimeball game-playing, with the exact slimeball players, he pledged to avoid.

The rest of the article is a detailed account of the corrupt behavior on the part of Obama which drove Taibbi into a spiral of despair.  

Taibbi's is in the difficult position of being a utopian Classical Liberal whereas most conservatives are pragmatic Classical Liberals.  Neither have the time of day for either of the two threats to the unique American experiment - The threat of an emergent informal insider's Mandarin Class aristocracy self-serving one another at the expense of ordinary Americans and the threat of authoritarianism which we see manifested every day in Social Justice Theory, Critical Race Theory and so many Biden administration policies (such as trying to encourage vaccine passports, mandatory vaccines, suppressing free speech by coopting tech companies, etc.)

All Classical Liberals, left or right leaning, are against these alternate systems.  Taibbi mistook them for allies when they were the enemies of Age of Enlightenment universal humanism, tolerance, individualism, and empiricism.  He is now left with an ideological hangover.

But he is still a Classical Liberal and I am delighted that his and so many others's eyes are opening to what is happening.