Form has championed substance in the political culture of the United States for so long, it should come as no surprise that many people still don’t know what to make of President Barack Obama.

Going back to the presidential election of 1952, when the popular war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower trounced Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson to become the oldest President since James Buchanan in 1856, the American public has routinely voted an odd mix of hopes, dreams and gut feelings to place in office men who have – almost without fail – served the interests of Big Business and Big Money at the expense of common folk and the natural world.

By every measure, Mr. Stevenson was the intellectual superior of General Eisenhower and, had he been given the opportunity, might have placed the country on a path to truly embrace and capitalize on the forward-thinking ideas John F. Kennedy sought to entertain at the dawn of the 1960s.

Amidst the paranoia fomented by McCarthyism, however, and cowed by the fear of nuclear holocaust attendant on the earliest days of the Cold War, the country looked to a military man for protection, passing up the promise of transformational challenges posed by a man of ideas.

And so it has been ever since.

Whatever degree of progressive evolution might have been portent in JFK’s administration was snuffed too soon for him to succeed or fail, thus enshrining the handsome young blue-blood war hero as a mythological icon forever representative of that which might have been.

Johnson, despite his shepherding into law and signing landmark civil rights legislation, is forever burdened with having failed to recognize the futility of his adventure in Vietnam.

Nixon, for all of his success in raising the country’s stature in international diplomacy and admitting the necessity of a national commitment to clean air and water, revealed to history that no leader is anything but human -- and that even well-meaning humans can be criminal and corrupt and irredeemably flawed.

Ford and Carter represent, for this writer, an almost perfect yin and yang expression of the thesis this essay attempts to describe.

Gerald Ford remains the only president to have served without being elected. If he is remembered to history at all it will be for his incompetence as a negotiator of physical space, the nation’s trip and fall President.

Carter, on the other hand, came out of nowhere, a Podunk peanut farmer who also happened to be a first-rate intellect, who recognized the long range problems facing the nation, had the courage to describe them for the people on national TV and was rewarded by being voted out of office in favor of one of the most magnificent straw men in human history, the mediocre actor and political cipher, master of happytalk, Ronald Reagan.

Reagan, of course, championed the idea that government should be run like a business. Under the direction of his handlers, he set about a methodical program to sell off national assets and privatize functions of government so that 200 years’ worth of the value of the commonweal was transferred to the private accounts of the wealthiest few percent of the citizenry.

Reagan’s administration emasculated institutions of the nation’s collective security beyond recovery. His accountants re-jiggered the nation’s finances to denigrate the importance of education and social security in favor of propagating supremacy of the military-industrial complex. He abandoned all responsibility for stewardship of the environment and fomented a complete rejection of the idea that “united we stand, divided we fall.”

The Rich grew richer while Reagan winked at the operation of a secret government-within-the government that served the interests of a paranoid, venal few in the name of the nation as a whole. It was a breach of his oath of office for which he was never made to pay – from which the country may never recover.

And yet the people still believed external forces posed the greatest threat to the American way of life.

Partly because the opposition had no Stevenson-caliber candidate on offer, America then willfully elected its former top spy to “lead” the nation.

The Black Prince of Darkness, George Bush the 1st, was such a horrible president that people finally became receptive once again to populist messages of Hope and Change and they elected yet another very smart, very savvy, nearly unknown Southern governor.

Despite whatever good intentions Bill Clinton might have brought with him into the White House, he was smart and savvy enough to realize he couldn’t stay there long trying to champion them.

He ended up becoming the best Republican president the United States has ever had.

Never before did a populist Democrat achieve so much for the country’s military-industrial-financial-elites while polarizing the populace so thoroughly it became possible for the very people who orchestrated and operated Ronald Reagan’s unconstitutional, black-hearted government to install a new cipher for the new millennium.

For eight years Americans accepted a vacuous, inept, dry-drunk former cheerleader as president -- on the strength of his supposed resemblance to “one of us.”

In the meantime, his cadre of Reaganite privateers led the country into an illegal, amoral abyss where indiscriminate murder, torture and theft and ruin became the nation’s calling cards, and the whole of the rest of the civilized world began to shun the very thought of American relevance.

And again the unquenchable desire for Hope and Change flowered among the populace. And again the country has accepted a cipher to lead it.

Make no mistake: Barack Obama is a smart man. He may hold in his heart of hearts a wish to leave this world a better place for his having been here, for his having risen to the perch he now occupies as the putative Leader of the Free World.

But also mistake not the power of forces beyond his control that will prevent the realization of his dreams, and of those his candidacy my have inspired in the hearts and minds of many who yet believe Hope and Change are possible.

For the American people have no real Hope and want no real Change.

And thus the prison at Guantanamo will remain open for business because it’s “just technically hard” for Mr. Obama to keep his promise to close it.

And thus windfall gifts to the Insurance industry and mandated new expenses for millions of Americans – failure to pay which may be punishable by fines and possible imprisonment – will be trumpeted as “historic health reform” and “landmark social policy.”

And thus the government will continue to spy on its citizens. And its military will continue to fight wars with no reason and no end, and the value of its currency will continue to decline until – what?

Until the words of another man of ideas -- another icon of that which might have been -- become true.

Until Americans live in a nation where "they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."