I’ve held off on Barrack Obama for the most part up to this point; partly because I had trouble believing the democrats would actually make a black man with a muslim name their nominee (not that those things should be a barrier, but because there are plenty of racist democrats who are just plain not down to vote for a black man), and partly because Hillary Clinton’s extraordinarily petty and dishonest tactics – spreading rumors that he was a closet muslim, constantly bringing up his skin color as a negative and then accusing him of being a racist, and her attempts to paint him as an elitist (this from a woman who can afford to lend herself millions of dollars for her campaign and who’s talking about a man who’s mother had to rely on foodstamps when he was a kid).

Watching her and McCain grasping at straws and throwing everything they could think of at him, I almost felt like rooting for him. Almost, but not quite.

The fact is, Obama is a fraud. He may have started out working as a street-level community organizer in Chicago – and that’s one hell of a tough job, I know because I’ve done the same job here in Oakland – but whatever claim he might have had to be an advocate for poor and working class people is gone as of right now.

Why? Lots of reasons. Partly because of the typical shady politician business and his underworld friends (Rezko anyone?). Partly because he’s the kind of guy who will go on national television and refuse to disown his mentor for telling the truth about American imperialism and its toll on human lives and then turn around the next week and do exactly that when his refusal doesn’t poll well and when the minister restates those same facts. Partly because – for all of his nice rhetoric about ending the war in Iraq – he’s hardly the anti-imperialist dove some of his lefty supporters seem to think he is. Just take a look at his threats against Iran, his promises to send our military into Pakistan, and the distinct lack of cuts to America’s outrageously inflated military budget in any of his proposals. And his healthcare plan? the words “sick joke” don’t even begin to describe it. People like me who are self-employed or work shitty jobs and are barely scraping by aren’t without health coverage just because we’re shortsighted and don’t want to spend the money, we don’t have health coverage because the choice is either pay for insurance or pay for food and starvation sucks. I could keep listing, but mostly they all boil down to the fact that at the end of the day he’s just another corporate puppet. Yeah, I know. Big surprise there, huh? So for all of those reasons I’m not a Barak Obama fan.

Even beyond all of that, the icing on the cake was his announcement that he’s throwing away $84 million in free federal public financing money for the general election because he expects to be able to convince ordinary working class Americans to donate more then that amount to him. Think about that for a second and you’ll realize that it takes a conscious effort not to be stunned by the sheer audacity of such a move. Think about what you or I could do with $84 million. Think about all the community programs we could build, the directly accountable nationwide grassroots movement for real meaningful social change we could finance. Think about all of the truly brilliant and beautiful projects in your community that never get off the ground because there’s no money to fund them and people just can’t afford to give any more.

Think about what we could do with $84 million, and then realize that this bastard has just flushed that much money down the toilet because he expects us all to ignore that he could have had the money for free and dig deeper into our own pockets to donate that much – and more - to him instead of reinvesting it in our own lives, families, and communities. And for what? A nice speech? A few pretty words about how he’ll fight for the little guy once he’s in power? The same meaningless empty promises of reform that every other politician on the planet has made and then abandoned once elected? Excuse me if I don’t swoon. Shit, for $84 million dollars I might not be able to quite pull off a full-fledged revolution, but I could make one hell of a good start at putting the infrastructure in place to build one. Now THAT would be change you can believe in.

Fuck that, and fuck him too.

I won’t say I hope he loses every state because that would imply McCain winning every state and McCain is just as bad. If there was a way for them all to lose I’d hope for that, but since a total boycott of the general election seems unlikely, I’ll settle for just hating them both and writing in ‘none of the above’ on my ballot. And I definitely hope that he doesn’t raise anywhere near $84 million for the general election, is horribly embarrassed, and is forced to take public finds after all. I’m sure as hell not sending him a single penny and I hope none of you do either.

*Edit July 9* - I just saw this on today’s news: Obama’s turn to middle on surveillance. It might be more accurately titled “Obama’s turn towards the neo-fascist Right on illegal spying and violation of the constitution” In a nutshell, he decided that “security” is more important then liberty and the bill of rights and voted for a bill that provides immunity to the Telecom corporations for their role in the federal wiretapping scandal and actually makes that wiretapping legal.

As Benjamin Franklin once wrote “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” and people who are dumb enough to vote for a slimy bastard like this who’ll vote to allow the federal government and corporate America to spy on us without warrants and in violation of our fundamental rights to privacy (which are recognized by but do not originate with the Bill of Rights) deserve what they get.