ABSTRACT
In his first inaugural address as the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama (2009a: 8) declared that he would ‘restore the vital trust between a people and their government’. This aim was given meaning by distancing his administration from the former, labelled ‘the cynics’, associated with the brute sovereign use of power and war making, despair and disillusion in the citizenry (Obama 2009a). In other words, cynicism was presented as the negation of Obama’s political and administrative ethics. Cynicism is the failure of sincerity in terms of the distrust and disillusion it creates. Scrutinizing Obama’s political rhetoric, cynicism is found to be coined as the opposite of all the values he stands for. Cynicism is put into play as the negation of all that Obama is fighting for by creating political visions and moral imaginations for the citizenry. Thus, Obama’s political rhetoric operates as a performative power, creating moral imaginations wherein cynicism becomes the constitutive condition of his administrative ethics. The focus in this chapter is this negative relationship between ethics and cynicism rather than the positive conceptions of transparency and open government, public interest and public trust formulated in Obama’s ‘Executive Order on Ethics Commitments by Executive Branch Personnel’, which was made public the day after the inaugural address.
