Given the infantile needs of the electorate it's possible Obama's opposing the gas tax could be viewed as authentic in a 'politics not as usual' kind of way and therefore earn him credits with the whole 'oh, god we need a change' type of voter. And if his campaign calculated the politics of it in just such a way? Guess I'd have to praise him for that - but where would that leave me? Seems much of my dislike of the guy stems from belief that he wouldn't calculate it in such a way, that he'd view such a thing as beneath him. If underneath the anodyne gibberish that lards his speeches there lurked a cunning manipulator I'm not sure what I'd make of that.
To me he's a posturing liberal whose chief ambition seems to be not power per se but rather the trappings - he wants to be thought well of and wants to be seen doing good things - but if power is the lure and if he's willing to play a certain liberal type in order to acquire it, well, hard to know what that means. There's so little to go on with this guy, it's quite startling actually - still, I tend to think the reasonable arrogance of his style is borne out of a weakness that certain fetishistic liberals, and he himself, mistake for a strength. He's prospered from this - whether he deliberately manipulated the game, I don't know - but he's prospered and now he's perched on the edge of some awfully damn serious responsibility - hard not to see that the dots just don't connect here: something's missing. Wonder what happens when he figures out that he can't fake his way through being president of the United States the way he faked his way through being president of the Harvard Law Review.
Something definitely does not add up here, a vital piece of the puzzle waits to be revealed. My guess remains that when it finally shows up a lot of people are going to be rather unpleasantly surprised by what they see.
