The 12-Step Guide for the Recovering Obama Voter

Craig S. Karpel

• Publisher: Broadside e-books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780062131058
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Global Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

"My name is Craig K., and I'm an Obamaholic." So begins the mock confession of a former community organizer who woke up one morning with a massive political hangover. Today, many Americans find themselves in the same uncomfortable position. Just as President Obama's uplifting words and bold promises once inspired exaggerated hopes, failed policy after failed policy have left us a nation of recovering Obamaholics. In this can't-put-it-down diatribe, award-winning journalist Craig S. Karpel alleges satirically—but proves with alarming facts—that voting for Obama was the result of a debilitating political addiction. Karpel guides us through a 12-step program for attaining "voting sobriety, " and like any 12-step process, recovery begins with an admission that we have hit bottom and need to make amends. Thus we must admit to each other, and ourselves, that the Obama presidency isn't Obama's fault—it's ours. Rather than returning him to office, we the voters should be impeached for having elected him in the first place. Follow Karpel's 12 Step Guide for the Recovering Obama Voter, and get on the path to recovery—before November!

 

STEP 1: We need to acknowledge that we became hooked on a political cult that, blurring the distinction between government and religion, presented a politician as a messianic figure.

As we recovering Obama voters begin to “work the steps” of Democratic detox and Republican rehab, we can see that American politics has become more like religion—non-negotiable belief in unprovable propositions—and religion has become more like politics: whatever you believe is true.

Idea for a viral video: An Obama impersonator, shifting his gaze from the left teleprompter to the right teleprompter while making pedantic hand gestures, intones, “I’m not a messiah, but I play one on TV.”

The national headquarters of mainstream Protestant and non–Orthodox Jewish denominations promote an undefined and undefinable notion they call social justice—a sanctimonious term for Democratic Party talking points.

Simultaneously, the turning away of Nativity scenes because there’s no room for miracles on courthouse lawns leaves a void that vacuums bogus spirituality into our civic space.

America’s “progressives” have long spewed venom at “the religious right,” warning that the latter want to turn the country into a theocracy. But in reality it’s “progressives” who want a theocracy—presided over by an elected god.

At a time when the word religious is used by “progressives” as the R-bomb, the most corrosive adjective that can be applied, the most repulsive characteristic that can be ascribed, turnabout is fair play.

“Progressives” rail (without realizing the irony: in tones of fire, brimstone, hell-fire and damnation) against “the religious right,” oblivious to the reality that, with their dogmas (“political correctness”), catechisms (ThinkProgress.org), inquisitions (“litmus tests”), excommunications (Joe Lieberman: please do not pick up the white courtesy phone), witch hunts (whatever happened to former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, who narrowly escaped being burned at the stake?), and terrifying visions of apocalyptic end-times (Manhattan flooded with seawater as a result of our vicious, wicked, selfish use of incandescent light bulbs), they have come to constitute a religious left.

The religious left’s prophet was the far-seeing Al Gore, ever wandering from one five-star hotel to another, his humble mantle—mantle collection, actually—stitched together on self-effacing Savile Row, subsisting somehow on speaking fees of $175,000 per jeremiad, the extent of his renunciation of the pleasures of the flesh ascertainable from his continually expanding girth, warning evildoers (that would be you and me) that this earthly realm will soon be engulfed by “the-fire-next-time,” updated to “global warming,” re-updated to “climate change,” formerly known as weather.

And the religious left’s philosopher-king is Barack Obama, the sacred oil on whose brow may need to be freshened up a bit now that it has become clear to those who anointed him that the “good jobs to the jobless” he promised in his Minnesota primary victory speech—given, aptly enough, in a city named after St. Paul—have yet to materialize, that “the rise of the oceans” he said would begin to slow has proceeded apace, and that our planet, which he said would begin to heal, is still in agony. Promising salvation instead of the most that can ever be obtained from the political process—slight incremental improvement—he was bound to disappoint.

“Progressives” snarkily describe their sectarian creed as reality-based, a term they coined to counter Bush 43’s use of the term “faith-based” to characterize federal partnerships with local religious groups to deliver social services.

But as we recover from our addiction to the cult of Obama, we discover that it’s liberalism that’s truly faith-based. Not only is there no evidence that the liberal model works, but the financial disaster that is Western Europe is proof that it doesn’t.

As we learn that liberalism is not a rational political philosophy but rather a religion that attributes providential potency to government rather than to what Alcoholics Anonymous calls “a Power greater than ourselves . . . God as we understood Him,” we can see that it was only natural that, at the end of liberalism’s day, we would find ourselves voting not for a chief executive but for a savior.

Obama’s sudden emergence, seemingly out of nowhere, as the 2004 Democratic convention keynote speaker was a political manifestation of the religious concept of creation ex nihilo, “out of nothing,” preparing us to become not his supporters, but his devotees.

The words of Obama’s campaign slogan, stolen from the collection plate of religion: “Change we can believe in.”

The iconic Shepard Fairey poster, coloring Obama red, white, and blue—the sort of idealized graphic, abstracting a mortal face into a pseudo-transcendent symbol, that has been a feature of every mindless “cult of personality” from Lenin to Che.

Arenas transubstantiated into profane megachurches thronged with secular congregations chanting in response to the candidate’s litany of soaringly rhetorical questions a faith-healing mantra: “Yes we can!”

Regarding which I would note this: If it involves responsive reading, it’s a religion.

Instead of stump speeches, sermons on the mount of the candidate’s towering ego.

The impassioned testimony: “We spend about 50 percent more than France does on health care, and yet they’ve got universal health care, doctor will come to your house at three o’clock in the morning and prescribe you [sic] for what you need, and you get it for free!”

In other words: Paradise is of this world, and resembles France.

And even a sort of resurrection: Chicago’s dead voting.

E-mails forwarded and reforwarded have asked, “Where are his former girlfriends?” So we have absolute proof that Obama is a religious phenomenon: There are people who don’t believe he exists.

We can see now that the endgame of those who vociferate most vehemently for separation of church and state is to transform the state into a church.

A primitive idolatrous pagan church in which, as the ancient Egyptian fertility god Osiris was superstitiously believed to have the power to make grain grow, the president of the United States is superstitiously believed to have the power to make initial unemployment claims shrink.

Religion is about seeking truth. Politics is about seeking lies that poll well, because in today’s fractured society, there’s no way to assemble majorities except by telling different people different things.

We recovering Obama voters need to make “a searching and fearless moral inventory” of our spiritual selves, as called for in the fourth step of Alcoholics Anonymous.

Have we determined, listed, examined, and prioritized our values?

Are we acting upon those values wholeheartedly?

Are we at peace with ourselves and others, at home in the universe?

Unless the answers are yes, there will be a hollow place within us, an emptiness that can be invaded by toxic thoughts and feelings from the public realm—anger, envy, suspicion, hatred, politicizing our inner being.

A saying used in AA: “There is no chemical solution to a spiritual problem.”

There is no political solution to a spiritual problem.

The distinction between politics and religion is that politics is supposed to be about practicality versus impracticality, while religion is supposed to be about good versus evil.

When, as was the case with Obama’s addictive election strategy, the line between politics and religion is intentionally blurred, with politics transformed into something out of the Dead Sea Scrolls—a cosmic conflict between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness—we find ourselves in an uncivil war in which one’s opponents aren’t just wrong but are bad, and we are in big trouble.

In retrospect, the backdrop for Obama’s 2008 nomination-acceptance address was disturbingly apt: two Greek temples connected by the West Wing.

STEP 2: We need to acknowledge that instead of valuing only character, we became addicted to charisma.

The Obama phenomenon was the inevitable outcome of our craving for charismatic presidents, the unavoidable result of infusion of our politics with a false religiosity.

American voters’ addiction to presidential charisma had its origin in the 1960 campaign, during which the pundits of the era couldn’t quite define it but made it clear that, whatever it was, John Kennedy had it and Richard Nixon didn’t.

Charisma: noun, a quality that, though indescribable, is so marvelous that it can be referred to only in ancient Greek.

The word, which meant a divine “gift of grace,” was first applied to the political sphere by the German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920):

Charisma is a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities.

Before each recent presidential election, talking heads have done much rubbing of their talking chins over the question of which candidates have and do not have gravitas—an air of seriousness so profound that it can be referred to only in Latin, ascribed by the commentariat to Democratic candidates they want to win and Republican candidates they want to lose.

We went off the stuff cold turkey when Bill Clinton left the White House, larger than life even as his mistreatment of Monica Lewinsky and his disbarment for perjury revealed how little he was.

By 2008 we were desperate for a strong fix of it, Bush 43’s charisma mission not having been accomplished, as he incessantly offended sophisticates by acknowledging a supreme being rather than pretending to be one.

We experienced what is known in the psychology of addiction as an urge peak: an irresistible desire to re-expose oneself to something to which one has become addicted.

And to our relief, we were presented with Obama, his detachment passing for loftiness, his chin in the air passing for elevation.

In 2011 the paperback of The Good Fight, a memoir by Harry Reid (D-NV), was issued. In an epilogue headed “The Obama Era,” the Senate majority leader wrote that during Obama’s first year as a senator, Reid was bowled over by a speech he gave when he was an Illinois legislator about the Bush administration’s conduct of the Iraq War:

“That speech was phenomenal, Barack,” I told him. And I will never forget his response. Without the barest hint of braggadocio or conceit, and with what I would describe as deep humility, he said quietly: “I have a gift, Harry.”

Obama was informing the smaller-than-life Reid that he possessed, in plain Greek, charisma.

Speaking of Greek, when Obama was asked in 2009 by a reporter in Strasbourg, France, whether he believed in American exceptionalism, he answered, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptio...