ABSTRACT
The Obama illusion was symptomatic, Chris Hedges concluded, of a longstanding national junk politics that personalizes and moralizes issues rather than clarifying them, emphasizing narrowly defined emotional response feelings over rational and honest confrontation with harsh, interrelated realities of socioeconomic disparity, corporate rule, and empire. The Obama administration will have to rebuild and significantly reshape the military. The real-world President Obama has advanced the twisted priorities of empire, war, inequality, and oppression even as Brand Obama has helped make the burdens imposed by the ruling class and its global empire seem more bearable to suffering masses at home and abroad. The Times editors felt that Obama's proper role would be to stop the deepening economic crisis from sparking a powerful new working class movement. To repeat the words of the Times' editorial, it was all about making the burdens yet to come more bearable.
