I'm at a point now when I'm responding to Obama's speeches similarly to the way I
responded to Bush's. Obama's might be more interesting to listen to, more eloquent and complex, but ultimately his speeches, like Bush's, are just propaganda.  They are window dressing for a policy driven by a logic that has little or no connection to the logic or rationale argued in the speech. Obama's and Bush's speeches are fundamentally empty; they are designed to distract and deceive. I have no reason to  believe a word of any of it.  Or more precisely, I don't believe that what they say in such speeches has any correlation with the rationale for the policies he seeks to defend. When the premises upon which such speeches are based are proved wrong, new arguments with different premises will be offered rather than to admit the policy was wrong to begin with.

As such, these speeches, no matter how superficially interesting, don't warrant serious scrutiny. Obama's differ in style from Bush's insofar as they are designed to seduce a different electoral constituency. Bush appealed to the jingoist, bully right; Obama appeals to intellectuals who think of themselves as realists, and to Niebuhrian ironists. But the underlying policy is fundamentally the same in either case because directed by the same interests.That policy is pursued no matter who presents a justification for it.

I'm open to be proved wrong here, but the evidence is pretty strong to support this view. Perhaps he will prove otherwise–I hope so for all our sakes.

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BTW, I came across this quote from July 2008 by Mark Steel, which I used for a "quote of the day" back then:

. . .most of America will be run by the same people no
matter who wins the election — the oil companies, WalMart, Murdoch
etc. And Obama has set out not to disrupt their rule but to manage it.
But the hope he's unleashed may not be so easily controlled, because
change does not happen from the top down, it happens from the bottom up.

Or,
as articulated by the topical American program "The Daily Show," "A
disease is spreading across parts of the nation called
'Baracknophobia', meaning 'fear of hope.' But the disease is so
contagious it's even spread to Barack Obama, who is becoming afraid of
himself.  Read more.

Obama: "Yikes, those people might actually believe there's substance in my speeches?! Now that's frightening."

Would, though, that words really mattered, that they could inspire a bottom-up groundswell awakening, even if it was unintended. But he really has little to fear along those lines.

***

UPDATE:  This headline Sunday morning struck me as apropos of our subject: "WMD not point of Iraq war, Tony Blair says".  He goes on to say "I would still have thought it right to remove [Saddam Hussein]. I mean, obviously you would have had to use and deploy different arguments about the nature of the threat."  Substitute the word "contrive" for "deploy", and he articulates what both he and Obama are particularly good at. The WMD argument or the bringing-democracy-to-Iraq argument have nothing to do with the real reasons for the invasion. Their goal is simply to make what is in the Owners' interests appear as though it is in the public interest, and in doing so to de-legitimate opposition to the extremist fringe.

We'll probably discover at some point that Obama's real model for the presidency is not FDR or Reagan, but Tony Blair, a decent, intelligent, eloquent, but fundamentally weak man, who is influenced more than he influences, and is led more than he leads.  I think, though, that this kind of "leadable" president is the only kind that's possible now. The system will not allow oppositional strength.  The only leaders who look strong are those who align with the will of the Owners.