NewMediaJournal.us
www.NewMediaJournal.us     Return to Article     Kindle Compatible

Albert Kirkpatrick Adamson
The Kennedy Factor: Why Obama Should Be Worried
August 17, 2009
 

In recent days, the media has remarked extensively on the concern that President Obama’s life might be threatened by various hate groups and ostracized conservatives. It is true that assassinations have a strong historical precedent, and that a good cause attracts everyone, unfortunately even some whackos. (John Brown, for instance, comes to mind for Abolitionism.) Unfortunately, the situation isn’t as simple as the media wants to make it.

As his health care program grinds to a halt in the face of a minority opposition in congress and he is less and less able to deliver on all of the massive promises he made during the election, Obama is in increasing danger of violence from both sides of the fringe political spectrum. The simple fact is that as the years wear on, he may become more useful to the Radical Left as a dead symbol than as a living president.

American history has seen a couple of examples of an assassination resulting in what I label the “Kennedy Factor.” Abraham Lincoln became the first in 1865, but John F. Kennedy himself is the more dramatic example. Before his murder, in domestic policy, Kennedy was ineffective at best, and in fact could not even successfully manage a Democrat-controlled Congress. Many of his best known programs, like the Peace Corps, had to be accomplished by executive order.

Most Americans today, saturated with the Kennedy mythology as they are, would find it hard to believe that in a poll taken in the summer of 1963, just a few months before his assassination, Barry Goldwater was projected to beat JFK in the next presidential election. After the murder, then-President Lyndon Johnson skillfully used the resulting wave of sympathy and outright worship to send everything Kennedy wanted roaring through Congress. Lee Harvey Oswald had transformed Kennedy from a photogenic, foppish playboy to a god in mortal form virtually overnight. All criticism of JFK or his agenda became unthinkable. The “Great” Society exploded on the national stage, and by 1969 we had even walked on the moon, primarily because Kennedy had said so.

Barack Obama is poised to become another symbol, and unfortunately for him, the most useful symbol for the Far Left is a martyr. In the increasingly radicalized world of American politics, his assassination would serve the Left far better than it would the Right:

• First, his stalled programs for healthcare, global warming, administration of the war, etc., etc. etc., would fly through Congress, hardly touching any desks. No one would dare try to alter or oppose them, for to do so would be to side with the “racist bigots” who had killed “saint Obama” in the first place. A complete transformation of the country could be accomplished and the Constitution of the United States entirely subverted and destroyed on nothing more solid than the statement “This is what Obama would have wanted.”

• Second, if even basic evidence is left behind implicating someone on the political right, repression of the Left’s political opponents by any means necessary would instantly become justifiable. If the Radical Left were to find some van der Lubbe type character to commit the act, so much the worse for conservatives. The mere expression of concern about something one of the new handlers of the Obama legacy had proposed would be enough to warrant harassment, prison time, the denial of fundamental rights, or perhaps even violence. Anyone resisting these initiatives could be labeled a terrorist and confined.

But isn’t this idea completely impossible? It isn’t if one takes Radical Leftist ideology into account. Ever since Foucault, the Left has seen politics in starkly simplistic terms: Everything devolves to an issue of power, who has it, and who does not. Therefore, anything that helps you enforce your agenda is good, no matter how morally wrong it may seem to lesser folk. Bill Ayers and the Weathermen are a good case study, but even more recent, benign examples present themselves. Pelosi and other Democrats have no problem condemning the very same “debating” tactics and “community activism” at the town halls they themselves positively encouraged in the past because doing so now serves their purpose. So what if it makes them two-faced liars? Morality has nothing to do with it (or them).

If successful, another American revolution could be accomplished with another “shot heard round the world.”

Of course, I am not predicting anything, nor am I implying that if Obama is killed that it must have been at the hand of a Leftist. I am simply pointing out that the assassination question is inherently more complex than the mainstream media or Leftists would like us to think. It is very much in the best interests of conservatives to make certain that President Obama lives a long and healthy life. They have nothing practical to gain from someone harming him, but virtually everything to lose. The Radical Left is not in a similar position; based on the political philosophy of power, our president is only of value as long as he is useful to them. President Obama would be well advised to keep a close eye on both sides of the aisle.

Everyone on the conservative right has a moral, patriotic, and—yes—self-serving reason to protect the president. Even a survivable attack could be disastrous in terms of what the Left would use it to justify. If the worst happens—and it very well could—the murderer could come from anywhere along the political spectrum. Americans need to be prepared to deal with the consequences, and the Left’s inevitable attempt to exploit them.

About Albert Kirkpatrick Adamson
Albert Kirkpatrick Adamson is a former liberal speech writer who now earns his living shoveling manure. He has not noted any appreciable change.