Mr. Morford 2014

In Obama the Light-Worker: Thoughts From 2008, I passed along the reflections of a Mark Morford, SF Gate and Huffington Post columnist, on then-candidate Obama as “rare kind of attuned being who has the ability to lead us not merely to new foreign policies or health care plans or whatnot, but who can actually help usher in a new way of being on the planet.”

One of the commenters wondered what Morford thinks now, so I checked. I didn’t find any more amusing “Light-Worker” stuff, because Morford seems to have had his dreams dashed. Here, in an article from a couple of weeks ago, after ranting about a rich guy complaining about Obama, he himself complains:

It’s curious, no? The unmitigated hate for Obama comes from the right, but the real disappointment comes from the left. It’s we liberals who seem to have the most legitimate gripes with a man we all thought would be far more radical and revolutionary. From the NSA to drone warfare to a shocking lack of transparency, a shameless kowtowing to Wall Street, a lack of serious education reform and barely a blip about the environment (until very recently) — Obama has been a far more mixed bag for the left than anyone wants to admit.

And here, in an article from last December, he makes the same point, only more strongly:

Oh, the missed opportunities, the failings, the ugly choices that make you despise politics all over again, and realize it’s all just an insidious shell game, and you’re not even rich enough to be the pea.

Radical overhaul of Wall Street corruption and runaway greed when Obama had the chance? Didn’t happen, won’t happen. Cartoonish CEOs still gorging on salary bloat, many making as much as 1,000 times the pay rate of their average employee? No end in sight. We now live in a country where wealth inequality is so violently lopsided as to be laughable, if it weren’t so disgusting. The kicker? The ratios are probably a lot worse than you think.

Despite all the good Obama has done, from housing reform, defending gay rights, killing DADT/DOMA and enacting college loan reform, et al, the dominant system is more brutally rigged for the over-class than ever, and Obama is more enmeshed in that framework than even the most moderate Democrats imagined. He has also repeatedly upheld the Patriot Act, increased military spending, increased domestic oil production, championed drone warfare, and done almost nothing to curtail the NSA or America’s rabid gun fetishism. Benghazi? Iran? Guantanamo? What else you got?

. . . [S]tep back far enough and it’s more of a frothy sea of inbred powerbrokers than ever, and Obama, despite all hopes to the contrary, stands right at the helm of the ship.

But, of course, since Obama is still the man who brought a new way of being to the planet, or at least the great (read: only) hope for the utopian left, much or most or maybe all of this is the Republicans’ fault.

Not that he necessarily wants to be there. This is easily the most acidic, obstructionist GOP in a generation, a mean-spirited, leprous party full of barely veiled racists and Tea Party wing-nuts willing to sacrifice any core value, constituent, legal precedent, national monument or social service just to undermine Obama and block him from enacting even the most basic functions and services. This appears to be the one over-arcing rule: The smart black guy can never win. No. Matter. What.

It’s true, isn’t it? America has never seen a minority party so openly hateful of a sitting president, one who is at once far more intelligent and articulate than them, but somehow, infuriatingly, far less willing/able to use that intelligence to beat them back like a pack of gun-toting monkeys. Strange.

Well, we can think of a majority party that was so openly hateful of a sitting president, though he was easier for them to work with than the contemptuous Obama is for the Republicans. He could work with his political opponents, as Bill Clinton did after the Democrats lost control of the House, but then he and Morford wouldn’t have anyone to blame.