During his 1992 Republican Convention speech, George H.W. Bush, Sr. said that Americans should be “more like the Waltons and less like the Simpsons.”

But The Simpsons represent the United States effectively in that they are culturally influential yet also ridiculed for their reactionary stupidity by the rest of us – thanks to Bush Sr. and Jr. and their actions. George W. Bush Jr.’s approval ratings soon sank so low that they were second only to those of Harry Truman in the annals of American history. With the Republicans facing another election, without Bush, they were hoping that their next candidate – and their attack on voters from poor, Hispanic, African-American backgrounds – would be enough to hold on. It wasn’t – not least because one of those African-Americans was now the Democratic candidate in opposition to them. His name was Barack Obama.

The ‘progressive’ Obama seemingly came from nowhere to beat the second Clinton to run – Hillary – to break the elite’s promise of a Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton royal line by offering ‘Hope’ and ‘Change,’ adding ‘Yes, We Can.’ The subsequent wave of popular support he was able to ride to the White House as a black man meant that the lost votes in the flawed voting system weren’t even enough to stop him. But behind his carefully conceived marketing, what was he really about? Obama’s background was seemingly grassroots, but his first job after college was for the CIA front company Business Corporation International (which even sounds evil). The truth, it could be argued, lies there, with the rest of Obama’s inoffensive history built up around it to conceal it. But you don’t have to take my word for it: just look at all Obama did (or didn’t do) as soon as he was elected. We avoided a Bush/Clinton American monarchy, but again, how much is really different? The singer Morrissey obviously learned nothing from the Thatcher years; when he complained about the United States in his song America Is Not The World, noting, “The president is never black, female or gay,” he failed to realize that this doesn’t really matter.

The night of Obama’s election win, I was in Spain with my parents watching the 24-hour BBC coverage which seemed to focus on the African-Americans crying with elation and the President-to-be’s skin colour far more than the reasons why so many Americans mobilised to put him in power. This reducing of Obama’s success to something about a ‘victory’ for minorities (while most still lived in near-poverty) rather than his opposition to Bush/Clinton business-as-usual and promise of real hope and change was insulting. A person’s political colours, as we’ve seen with Thatcher, matter more than anything else – including their skin colour. Obama himself provided no benefit whatsoever to African-Americans themselves any more than, say, Thatcher benefited women. John Pilger put it perfectly: “This is the twenty-first century, and race, together with gender and even class, can be very seductive tools of propaganda, for what is so often overlooked, and what matters – I believe, above all – is the class one serves.”

Back in Britain, the working classes were still not being served well. Tony Blair was gone, finally succeeded by his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, who in accordance with their ‘deal,’ was supposed to have taken Blair’s place long before. One of Brown’s first acts as Prime Minister was to speak alongside George W. Bush, Jr., wear a suit and tie, remain on formal terms, and even have his podium moved away from Bush’s at Camp David, signaling a more statesmanlike approach while distancing Britain from the Bush administration, and announcing plans for withdrawals of troops from Iraq. However, by now the damage was done; the occupation of Iraq, the damage to the economy, the erosion of civil liberties and everything else Blair presided over were consequences that Brown – not Blair – would have to reap.

While universal health care was a hot topic in the United States – one of the few industrialised countries with no such plan – the economic crisis was again prompting people to look at other ways of doing things, and towards other countries themselves. Many Scandinavian nations, for example, were enjoying more progressive policies, and reaping the rewards as the ‘Happiest People on the Planet.’ Of course, some of these countries also have the highest suicide rates in the world, which, my dear friend Mel suggests, shows that the unhappy people are simply all dead – so the remaining content folk are the only ones left to be polled.

With reluctance to join the rest of Europe, the U.K. was no longer favored by a U.S. government led by a President seeking a more multilateral approach to international affairs than his predecessor. The U.K. was passé, and Gordon Brown was a ‘lame duck.’ With the Tories revitalised under blue-blood Eton boy David Cameron, and Rupert Murdoch seeking less ‘interventionist’ politicians, The Sun reverted back to its Tory loyalties as New Labour reached crisis point. As Peter Wilby stated on October 5th, 2009, “The Sun, particularly in the past 18 months, has been a Labour paper only in the sense that China’s current leaders are Marxist-Leninists.” He went on to point out that “Academics find, to quote one professor, ‘zero evidence’ of any paper influencing voting habits. But that just shows academics don’t get out much. Politicians take a different view.” Rupert Murdoch is a boost for the Tories as he hopes he will, in return, have government stop sticking their noses in big business – his, especially.

As the former U.S. Army General who led invasions of Panama and Iraq (the first time round) before being rewarded for his efforts by being made Secretary of State under George W. Bush, Jr., Colin Powell shocked the world when he betrayed the GOP and endorsed Barack Obama. But it’s no surprise, and something that says more about Obama’s fiber than Powell’s allegiances. Powell’s son Michael, after all, is the man who – as chief of the Federal Communications Committee – tried to trash thirty year old rules while loosening regulation on how much media could be controlled by a single corporation: as much as 45%. Can you imagine Murdoch’s News Corporation controlling almost half of all media consumed by Americans? A nightmare for the people, but a monopolist’s dream come true. And while much of the media calls Obama a ‘socialist,’ it fails to cover the actual substance of his time in office, or his true shortcomings – while his opponents on the far right enjoy the name-calling, and Obama’s own right-wing camp make the most of it, too, because it appeases the Left who actually believe he might be socialist. There’s no real constructive criticism of him as President, at all.

In his first few months in power, Obama failed to close Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay, and promptly appeased the military industrial complex that had so resented JFK, by making sure that – even if troops were exiting Iraq – more would be entering Afghanistan. The war went on, but the anti-war movement did not; rendered impotent by an illusion that, because Obama was in power, suddenly everything was OK. It was ‘Hope’ with false hopes, ‘Change’ without change. They were merely marketing words used by Obama’s campaign to get him into power. While he does represent a shift in the United States – a real desire for a different way of doing things – and he is surely not as bad as Bush, his hands are tied almost as firmly as the African-Americans enslaved and put to work by those rich white men all those years ago – a history even Obama’s own ancestry remains relatively free from when under scrutiny. He does not really represent African-Americans; he represents the system and its rigged, rigid structure of mass militarisation while preventing an advance of any alternative to capitalism. Hope™ and Change™ were – yep – just brand slogans. The American journalist Chris Hedges summed it up beautifully: “President Obama does one thing and Brand Obama gets you to believe another. This is the essence of successful advertising. You buy or do what the advertiser wants because of how they can make you feel.”

In George Orwell's frightening vision of the future, 1984, the book's totalitarian state stated "War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength." Interestingly enough, mere days after controversially sending more troops into Afghanistan, Barack Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize.