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Notes -
I suppose, because I'm older, I wasn't swept away by the whole idea of First Black President (no thrills up the leg for me!). It was certainly an historic achievement but setting that aside, I saw Obama as a typical politician (okay, maybe not so typical because he went into it late and had his law career in academia beforehand). Same way I felt about Trump later: neither of them would be the Greatest Thing Ever as their partisans wished, nor the Worst Thing Ever as their enemies prognosticated.
I thought Obama was ambitous for political success and had carefully crafted an image to appeal to the white liberals in the Democratic Party. The entire "hope and change" thing was masterfully done, because it was a mirror: you looked into it and saw what you wanted/hoped for/dreamed for looking back out at you, while someone standing beside you did the same and saw something completely different, but also appealing to them.
You wanted the End of Racism? LGBT rights? General niceness for nice people? It was all there if you wanted to see it, and the oratory and rhetoric promised much without promising anything directly.
Remember, the oceans were going to stop rising and the planet start healing. And if you believed that as anything other than soaring rhetoric to make everybody feel good - well, you got the guy and the reality and his phone and pen.
I don't think he was intentionally deceptive, he's just a politican and this is the kind of stuff you churn out to get the punters to vote for you. Nobody believes it and you don't expect anybody to believe it. I think he may believe in his own legend a little, but if you're not in part a narcissist, then why are you going into politics? 😀
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