It shows Obama and his marketers working effectively to create a false left impression among certain targeted voters. As I demonstrate, Obama posed as a left-leaning antiwar and social justice progressive, donning deceptive rebel's clothing in numerous speeches, town hall meetings, and television commericals through much of the primary campaign. He claimed falsely to be a dedicated opponent of American emprie, war and inequality, even going to the sickening point of telling Iowa voters that they could "join the movement to stop the [Iraq] war" by Caucusing for him. For all his claims to be a nobel reformer "above the fray" of America's plutocracy and "ideological" politics, the real Obama excavated in my study is no special exception to -- and is in many ways an epitome of -- what the still-left Christopher Hitchens called (in his 1999 study of the Bill and Hillary Clinton phenomenon) "the essence of American politics. This essence, when distilled," Hitchens explained, "consists of the manipulation of populism by elitism.
-- Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics author Paul Street ("Why Barack Didn’t Hire Me: On Obama, Niebuhr, and the Manipulation of Populism by Elitism," ZNet).