Catherine,
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There are several points to respond to here. Always be suspicious of any political bloggers from America's right wing lunatic "birther" contingent-- i.e., those who talk endlessly about Obama not having been born Hawaii. These right wing lunatic fringe groups are typically comprised of proto-fascist white racists-- often from the former slave-holding states of the American Confederacy-- and they have been perpetually egged on by the right wing mass media in America-- especially Rupert Murdoch's highly partisan Fox News television station, and the Rush Limbaugh radio affiliates. I have personally known people like this-- even some clergy and laypeople in the ROCOR-- who are absolute, anti-African American racists, enraged that the American people elected an African American to the highest public office.
In American history, there have been a handful of truly idiotic, unlettered, incompetent men elected to the high office of the U.S. Presidency by the popular vote. Two of the absolute worst Presidents in U.S. history were Warren G. Harding and George W. Bush-- both essentially public relations mouthpieces for wealthy, unprincipled business groups. The Bush administration was run, de facto, by the infamous American "chickenhawks" Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, and a group of unprincipled political propagandist like Karl Rove, Andy Card, and Karen Hughes. The emerging historical record shows that all of Bush's major foreign and domestic policy initiatives-- including the disastrous Iraq War-- were initiated by an internal group of political advisors [i]extraneous[/i] to the Bush cabinet. U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, for example, first learned about Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld's planned invasion of Iraq in December 2002 from Saudi Prince Bandahar! Powell, who had been out-of-the-loop on the Wolfowitzian invasion plans, tried to dissuade Bush from the fateful pre-emptive invasion of Iraq, all to no avail. The best historical documentation of this chapter of American history is Bob Woodward's book[i][u] Plan of Attack[/u][/i]-- part of his trilogy about Bush's Iraq War.
As for Obama, the American right wing media has completely distorted the reality of the man and his political agenda-- depicting him as some sort of Satanic, Marxist reincarnation of Malcolm X. The truth about Obama is that he is a highly educated professor of U.S. Constitutional law, highly intelligent, and quite committed to working within the marked limitations of America's corporately-controlled media and Congress to achieve several much-needed reforms. His Keynesian economic recovery initiative of early 2009 has been largely credited by most economists with averting a 1930s calibre economic Depression and worldwide economic collapse. He has succeeded in passing preliminary health care reform legislation for one of the few remaing advanced industrialized societies in the world (America) that still does not provided universal healthcare coverage to its citizens. Obama's efforts here were fought by a multi-million dollar television propaganda campaign financed largely by the for-profit health insurance industry since June of 2009.
In Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, the media were controlled by and for the state. In modern America, the media are operated by and for their own profits-- and for the active promotion of the political agenda of the moneyed interest groups who own the media. This problem will become even more severe in the future, because the U.S. Supreme Court recently struck down a century of "Progressive" attempts to reduce corporate financing of political campaigns. In short, we are left with "the best Democracy that money can buy" through mass media advertising. The end result, in my opinion, is that any totalitarian Caesar Augustus type figure to emerge in modern America would 1) need to have the financial and media backing of America's ruling class-- the corporate CEOs and the upper 2% financially who own the majority of our American assets and media. 2) From a Populist standpoint, any such American totalitarianism would most likely be based on right wing "Evangelical Protestant" fascist militias recruited from the ranks of the American military and police forces-- loosely analogous to the Brown Shirts of the Nazi Party in the 1930s Weimar Republic of Germany.
That said, I certainly hope that America does not devolve into a fascist totalitarianism of any ilk. If Obama prevails in his policy objectives, I would foresee our society moving further in the direction of the more prosperous, socially and economically functional models of the Western Europeans-- though not without persistent kicking, screaming, and disinformazia from the moneyed interest groups who prefer the Reaganomic tax breaks of the past 30 years!
