I have never made it a secret that I never was very hot for Barack Obama, he was not my first choice for a Democratic nominee in 2008 and it was mostly the memory of the disaster of 2000 that led me to both support and vote for him in 2012. I, of course, voted for him both times and, as the estimable Charles Pierce reminds me, for the second time in one week, he immediately on winning election started to prove every reason that I didn't like him and would have preferred another president. I had him figured as a golden-boy of the ruling class and he did little to dispel that image of him. He was all high talk and disappointing action.
The Estimable one reminds us that in Barack Obama's never-ending quest to get Republicans to like him - he valued that far more than getting Democrats who supported him to be pleased with him - he wanted the idiot traditional-New Hampshire yankee princeling, Judd Gregg to be his Commerce Secretary, something which Gregg turned down only to have Obama console himself by appointing him to the, thankfully, pointless Simpson Bowles Commission. The only achievement of Simpson Bowles was to lead many of us to wonder just how far Obama would sell us out to the financially and politically elite.
The other reminder of how much I don't recall Obama with unmitigated fondness was when Lawrence O'Donnell had on Obama's prep->Ivy Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan on the other night. I can't remember much of what he said on O'Donnell's show because I can't see him without thinking it should be an unbeakable law for a Democratic President that no one should ever be Secretary of Education who had never set foot in a public school as a student and especially one of the endless string of prep=Ivy products who have not the first clue of how public education works and what its goals should be.
Judd Gregg is also the kind of guy Obama loves, one of his fellow prep-Ivy guys, in Gregg's case Phillips Exeter to Columbia to Boston University (a may as well be Ivy). I watched his political career and thought even then he seemed like he probably carried some quirks of inbreeding of the kind often seen in the elite old yankee families here, idiot sons of the elite are one of the more accurate stock figures of fiction. So much of it written by people who went to school with them.
I don't know the extent to which Joe Biden hankers after the approval and praise of Republican-fascists though I have never seen any reason to doubt that should Obama ever find himself as president again that he'd do exactly the same thing he did before. What has he done but party with the rich and famous since becoming an ex-president. I don't expect him to be doing Habitat for Humanity any time soon. I hope Biden doesn't appoint a single Republican with the idea that he will get the bi-partisan fairy dust given by the media spread on him. They'll think he's a chump and act accordingly. We should all force him to follow that law about the Secretary of Education, we should pressure him to open up appointments to those who went to public schools, the Ivy product has been screwing us long enough to try an alternative. I think he should appoint people who never had the chance to go to college to something. A lot of the people I've known who didn't get to do that learned a lot more than those who did.
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