Changesobama

First, a little pop music history for you. Most of you are familiar with the work of David Bowie.  He has done some acting through the years, but he is of course best known for his music.  Aside from the music itself, there are some things that have distinguished his career, especially in his glory days. He has an unusual talent for self-promotion, and has been able to gather a large audience that will at least give a listen to whatever his latest musical phase might be.  Probably what most distinguishes him though has been his relentless pursuit of change in his musical styles and his image.  His records are always different than the ones before, sometimes very different. He also frequently revamps his appearance from year to year, to the point where it is a cliche by now to call him a "chameleon." Ideas about what has driven him in all this vary, but by following this strategy he has undeniably produced a large, diverse body of work, some of it very good.  

So there we have an example of one man's pursuit of "change."  Let's look at another.

The hero of this blog as a candidate somehow made his vacuous promises of  "hope and change" into a mantra for enough voters to sweep him to victory. Once in office he brought about a number of ill-advised changes, mainly in the form of massive spending and a bizarre foreign policy, to say nothing of healthcare "reform."  After two years of his administration, we now have continued high unemployment joined with various scary as hell economic threats looming on the horizon, including hyperinflation, the continued collapse of housing markets, and the coming bankruptcies of state and local governments.  The "hope" part of his presidential plank doesn't have much currency at this point, so apparently after the electoral rout by the Republicans in November, he and his advisors have decided to go with the "change" end of it for the time being.

For about the first month after the November elections Obama and his crowd were in a bit of a fog as to how to proceed, and they went from one misstep to another as they attempted to find an avenue of attack to reverse their electoral fortunes.  Somehow out of the aftermath of the murderous rampage in Tucson they've found a tactic on which they can all agree, which is to defame and marginalize anyone who disagrees with them as inflammatory or even inciting violence and murder.  In the last three weeks we've had a surge in employment among the speech police, to the point where I won't be surprised to see pending legislation somewhere banning martial imagery in political speech.

Obama's pose in all this has been "The Healer," quite a stretch for someone who only months ago was telling Latinos to "punish their enemies," and has advised his followers to "get in their faces" and "they bring a knife, we bring a gun."  Lately he's made a few noises about his strange new respect for Ronald Reagan, only to make a State of the Union speech that details his further plans for more, more, more and better expansions of the federal government and spending programs, including squandering untold amounts of money to blanket the country with high-speed railways, something so implausible it wouldn't even give a hobo a hard-on.

The White House has announced it will begin fundraising for the 2012 re-election bid in March or April, but to my eye this President has never stopped campaigning since he was elected.  I'd say that if he wants to bring about change, he could actually act like a serious President for once by putting the future of the country ahead of fulfilling his infantile, bankrupt leftist vision. If he did that, he might someday be able to retire with a record at least half as good as Ziggy Stardust or Heroes.