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David Brooks of the New York Times has written an alternative biography of Mitt Romney that makes for witty reading (“He was sent to a private school, where he was saddened to find there are people in America who summer where they winter.”) But in the course of doing some internet research about this Romney fella, I found out he’s running against someone called Barack Obama. Obama’s biography makes for fascinating reading, too.
Barack Obama was born in 1961, the location marked by the appearance of a new star in the East. His mother lived on food stamps and his grandmother owned Hawaii. Between them, their son averaged out as middle-class.
From an early age, the young Obama displayed the abilities to listen to others, understand their problems and write a book about how they made him feel. At age 3, he had written his first memoir (Dreams from My High Chair) and by twelve had produced his own version of the English dictionary with the notable feature that every entry contained a reference to himself (“Godlike, adjective. ‘To be somewhat like Barack Obama’”). He excelled at every subject and could easily have become an astrophysicist or a baseball player. The schools never bothered to keep records of his grades because they embarrassed all the other kids. Obama spent most of his teenage years volunteering in the local hospital, where he helped the blind to see again. Although his academic life was challenging and friends were few, he found comfort in his middle American family that were just like you and me. Every Sunday they would gather at the local tiki bar for a simple meal of boiled Chihuahua.
Obama’s college years were challenging. A blow to the head from a jealous professor left him convinced that he was a member of the beat generation, which is why there are so many accounts of young women trying to, “You know, like, reach him?” It was while experimenting with cannabis that he made his first break with the grim Clinton orthodoxy of centrist liberalism: he inhaled. His horizons broadened, this born-again guru decided that it was time to walk away from the self-serving vanities of the legal profession and go into politics. He put on a blindfold, stuck a pin a map and found that God ("noun. 'synonym for Obama'") wanted him to start in Chicago.
Politically, Chicago is a nasty town and it’s hard to win outside of machine politics. So Obama didn’t bother to try. Promoted by his friends Jimmy “the fist” Vincente and Sam “you’ll vote the way Jimmy tells you to” Giovanni, he rose quickly in the ranks to become a state senator, where his courageous stand on abortion makes him one of the few prochoice Democrats prepared to say on record that “choice” doesn’t have to end after birth. His mix of principle, hard-headedness and a foxy wife got him noticed nationally by teenage liberals fresh out of Star Trek. Obama’s ability to make even the most complicated issues sound all about him impressed voters first at the 2004 Democratic National Convention (“As I stand here today, I can’t help but think about myself”) and then during the 2008 presidential primaries (“Imagine how great it would be if I won this election”). His inauguration was declared a new beginning and a national holiday – in Venezuela.
Within days of entering office, Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Since then, there have been military operations in Afghanistan and Libya, and drone strikes in at least 600 different countries. He has governed like a latter-day FDR, uniting the country behind a bold programme of government spending that has created at least 12 new jobs in the private sector – all of them in the Mississippi division of Chick-fil-A. Public sector spending has increased to roughly the size of the GNP of South Korea, most of which went to financing 32 years of sick leave for Mrs Ann Baumgard – an elementary school teacher in Bethesda, Maryland. Obama has nationalised healthcare, bottled water and anything that begins with the letter “T”. He is currently finishing his first term of a predicted five.
According to the New York Times, the only stiff opposition that Obama has faced has been from the National Braindead League, based in the small town of Backwater, Alabama. The NBL is almost certainly racist and would replace all tax with a form of barter based on chicken bones. They have helped nominate a man who is shorter, less cool and almost certainly less interested in himself than Barack Obama. Mitt Romney and the Braindead League don’t stand a chance.
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