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Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Guest Column: How to Succeed in Politics by Barack Obama

Let me be clear: the first thing you need in politics is an identity that can be aligned with a constituency. In my case, I decided that my best option was to sell myself as a professional black man. This is the reason why I began my political career in Illinois's 1st congressional district, which has the highest concentration of black voters in the country. Does it matter that I'm only half-white, was educated in various private schools, and was raised mainly by my white grandparents in a middle-class suburb? Of course not! All I had to do to prove I was one of them was change my name from Barry to Barack, go to a wacky black church, and give a couple speeches in Ebonics to black audiences. Quicker than you can wink, I was in the State Senate.

Make no mistake: to succeed in politics, you must be a chameleon. A chameleon with a best-selling memoir. Heck, I wrote two just to be on the safe side, and one of them was before I had even been elected to anything! Does it matter that they were chock full of platitudes and whitewashed personal history? Who cares? The important thing was to distract people from questions like: how did a self-admitted mediocre student like me get into Harvard and Chicago Law? Why were all my mentors far left loons and radicals? Let's face it- my background was less than ideal. My dad was a drunken, womanizing, 3rd-world bureaucrat and my mom was a flighty, irresponsible perma-student. See why I swept them under the rug?

There are those who say I spin like a well-oiled weather vane in the shifting winds of political favor. Well, obviously! How else does anyone get elected? 90% of politics is telling people what they want to hear and then doing whatever keeps you in power. For example, I harshly criticized Bush for racking up huge deficits and engaging in reckless wars. When I got in, I doubled down on all that crap and then gave speeches to distract from it. Politics is a game of emotions, appearances, and intentions. Facts, logic, and consistency count for little if anything. For example, I've made no secret of my past use of drugs to win the support of young people. At the same time, I ordered the DEA to crack down on medical marijuana clinics in states where it's legal. Do I have balls or what?

Above all else, you must learn how to capitalize on good news and distract from bad news. Remember how I basked in the glow of public approval when bin Laden was killed? It didn't matter that it was the result over a decade of work by hundreds of intelligence agents because I was the one in charge when it happened. On the flip side, Benghazi, IRS, NSA, Fast & Furious scandals? Hey! Look over there! A black teenager got killed in Florida! A bunch of kids got shot in Connecticut! Some guy made a anti-Islam movie!

Barack Obama is the current President of the US. If you don't like him, you're probably racist.




 

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