After one year, even the New African asks Obama, "Where is the hope?"
January 30, 2010
Updated February 3, 2010
After one year in office, President Barack Obama has failed to deliver on any of his key campaign promises. Public opinion of the Obama White House has clearly changed. Obama has only succeeded in protecting the outrageous 9-11 deception, wasting billions of dollars in bailing out Maurice Greenberg's criminal enterprise A.I.G. and the corrupt investment banks he insured, and increasing the killing and suffering in the Middle East and Central Asia. To understand why Obama seems unable to deliver we need to know much more about his Senior Advisor David Axelrod -- the man who made Obama president.
After one year, even the New African asks Obama, "Where is the
hope?"
"What went wrong?" Pat Oliphant asks the "Great Obama."
"Now what?" Time magazine asks of the president who was elected
on promises of change but fails to deliver. He can't even close the
outrageous gulag of Guantanamo? What's wrong?
"Who is Barack Obama?" Bob Herbert of the New York Times asks, "Americans are still looking for the answer, and if they don’t get it soon — or if they don’t like the answer — the president’s current political problems will look like a walk in the park."
"Mr. Obama promised during the campaign that he would be a different kind of president, one who would preside over a more open, more high-minded administration that would be far more in touch with the economic needs of ordinary working Americans. But no sooner was he elected than he put together an economic team that would protect, above all, the interests of Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry, the health insurance companies, and so on," Herbert wrote in his editorial of January 25 entitled, "A Credibility Gap."
"Who is Barack Obama?" asks Bob Herbert of the New York Times.
"Americans want to know what he stands for, where his line in the sand is, what he’ll really fight for, and where he wants to lead this nation," Herbert concluded. "They want to know who their president really is."
THE AXELROD PRESIDENCY
It is safe to say that the U.S. government today is a far cry from what the framers of the Constitution intended. Congress has lost its control over our currency and completely abdicated its role as the only branch that can declare war. These powers now belong to the president, directly or indirectly. The executive branch has gained immense power at the expense of the legislative branch, our representatives in Congress. The result is that our presidents have much more power than envisioned by the Founding Fathers. The real power of the U.S. government is centralized in the person of the president, who has more power than a king or czar. To control the United States one need only control the president. The president is controlled by the people around him, his chief of staff and senior advisors. This is why it is essential to understand who advises the president because these are the people who shape the policies of the White House.
To understand the Obama presidency one needs to know the people who made Barack Obama president. Chief among the people behind the Obama presidency is David Axelrod, Obama's friend, senior advisor, and chief media and political strategist. If one were to look behind the televised images of Barack Obama, one would find David Axelrod writing the speeches and creating the image of the candidate and the president. While Barack Obama is the face of the current administration, the policies, words, and images are creations of David Axelrod. So overwhelming is his influence on the White House that it would be fair to call this the Axelrod Presidency.
David Axelrod is the man who explains the Obama administration to the world.
Axelrod is Obama's right-hand man and is always at his side.
Axelrod goes everywhere Obama goes...
Axelrod writes Obama's speeches...
and coaches him on how to present them, as he has since 1992.
Axelrod has been with Obama as his advisor and chief strategist every step of
the way, creating and shaping the candidate who became president after a short
career as a politician from Chicago.
Looking at the Obama White House from outside, one might get the impression
that David Axelrod is the real president and Obama is his spokesman.
WHO IS DAVID AXELROD?
The most peculiar thing about David Axelrod is that although he is clearly one of the most powerful men in the government of the United States, for most Americans he remains an unknown factor. The controlled media does nothing to help us understand who Axelrod is. How can that be? How is it that Axelrod represents the executive branch of the U.S. government on television and speaks to the media daily about the policies of the U.S. government and nobody cares to explain who this person is and how he became senior advisor to President Obama? Who is this senior political advisor to the president who said, quite incorrectly, in June 2009 that Iran had nuclear weapons - on national television? Who is Axelrod to say that Iran will face consequences for failing to submit to the extra-judicial dictates of the so-called "international community," as he did at the end of 2009?
David Axelrod is a Chicago-based media consultant, advertising man, and corporate lobbyist who makes his living by changing public opinion to support his clients, who are primarily political candidates and major corporations. Axelrod is really a paid lobbyist who uses television advertising to change public opinion on behalf of his clients. Because he has two kinds of clients – political candidates and large corporations - Axelrod started two media companies: AKP&D Message and Media for politicians, and ASK Public Strategies for corporations. While all partners at AKP&D (A is for Axelrod, with John Kupper, David Plouffe, and John Del Cecato) held senior positions on the Obama campaign, it wasn't the only campaign AKP&D worked on. AKP&D also provided services to the presidential campaigns of John Edwards and Hillary Clinton.
Creating a positive
image to affect public opinion through television ads is one of the basic
services Axelrod provides. To do this he writes most of their speeches.
Because he has so many politicians as clients, sometimes he re-uses the same
speech. When Obama the candidate used the same speech that Deval Patrick or
John Edwards had used earlier, it wasn't plagerism – it was simply Obama
reading a recycled Axelrod speech.