My neighbor Swamp Rabbit and I were discussing Barack Obama. We miss his charm, eloquence, intelligence and so on, but we can’t forget how badly he seemed to misjudge the changing mood of the country in 2004 when he declared that “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America.”

A lofty pronouncement that proved to be dead wrong. There are two Americas now, just like there were in the 1850s. Which is why Obama recently endorsed a Democratic plan to redraw congressional districts in California, a move meant to counter Republican redistricting in Texas. He has decided to help Democrats fight back after belatedly realizing that Trump and his henchmen are trying to eliminate democracy in America.

Swamp Rabbit said Obama would have been come closer to the mark in 2004 if he’d quoted from the speech Arthur Jensen gave to Howard Beale in Network (1976):

There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.

“Don’t be such a cynic,” I said. “Obama was already gearing up to run for president in 2008, so he had to say something grand. He had to preach unity.”

Swamp Rabbit groaned. “Yeah, but look what happened after he got elected, after the economy under George W. Bush blew up. He used taxpayer money to bail out the Wall Street crooks while ten million peeps were losing their houses. Without knowing, he helped the MAGA disease get started.”

I said that’s not fair, the 2008 financial crisis wasn’t Obama’s fault and he later did some good things, including the Affordable Care Act that Republicans are dismantling.

But Swamp Rabbit was adamant. “He got dazzled by Summers and Geithner and them other advisers who were friends of the crooks. He blew the Democrats’ last chance to win over the peeps who are too nasty and ignorant to care about protecting their own rights.”

He added, “Trump is a low-life Arthur Jensen. He don’t care about America. His whole life he spent being a greedy fraud. He don’t answer to nobody except billionaires, and even the billionaires know better than to cross him now that he owns the gov’mint.”

I told him to get over it, the Democrats have to focus on winning back the Senate and House in the midterms. Obama was naive or worse, but it’s good that he finally seems to understand how close the would-be dictator is to crossing the goal line.

My swampy friend laughed. “Where you been, Odd Man? He’s already standing in the end zone.”

Footnote: “The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.” — Edward R. Murrow.