Being Kingfish and Obama's Second Term
‘Who built the highway to Baton Rouge? Who put up the hospital and built your schools? Who looks after shit-kickers like you? The Kingfish do'
America might well have spurned Barack Obama in the 2012 election. Times are tough and when I visited the USA late last year I have never seen or felt such bitterness in the heart of the stuff of fables, the US middle class. I described it then as a depression of the middle classes. Could any Australian Prime Minster survive a middle class depression in which the value of family homes declined to zero? Of course Obama does not deserve the blame for the crisis, and deserves some credit for turning things around. But he has also made some serious mistakes. His worst error concerns his half on, half off stimulatory economic policy and his tendency to run with the free market foxes and hunt with the expansionary hounds. A recipe for a potential world economic disaster.
For the unconverted, unrusted on Obama supporters, Mit Romney overcame some serious gaffes, and by the end of the campaign presented himself as a serious candidate with strong business and decisive management credentials. Romney nearly got there, and he pushed Obama to overcome. what I think was a kind of ‘Kingfish’ political complacency – that comes easily in the White House.
It sounds like a cliche but the US did well from this close contest. It brought the Kingfish down to earth and bodes well for a better second term in office.
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