Quote:
Originally Posted by Medusa
Curious now that President Obama has been in office for a couple of years how folks are feeling about his Presidency?
Is he meeting your expectations? Any disappointments? Areas where he surprised you?
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I am actually deeply disappointed and more than just a little concerned.
I am disappointed because in 2007 and 2008, I had mistakenly believed that Obama 'got it' and by 'it' I mean this simple fact: The American people--wonks like myself notwithstanding--are not particularly policy-driven. The average American is only nominally interested in your ten-point plan. What they are interested in is whether you stand for something and will you fight for what they stand for. I thought that at long-last, a Democrat had come along who understood that what doomed Kerry in 2004 wasn't that people didn't like his policies but that people didn't think he could stand up for himself and therefore wouldn't stand up for them. Kerry doomed himself the day he let the Swift Boat Veterans get away with besmirching his good name. NO Republican candidate would ever let a Democratic opponent get away with that. In a similar vein, Obama doomed himself the first time he let the Marxist/Kenyan-born/he-is-a-terrorist accusation slide.
Were there Death Panels or anything remotely like them in the HCR bill? No. Did Obama say that? Sort of, after a fashion, eventually but by then the damage was done. Obama caved in to Wall Street at a time when he could have taken them on. Obama keeps trying to get Republicans to work with him when the Republican party has made it abundantly clear that they are out to destroy him and if that means making the American people suffer, so be it. At first, I thought he was doing some kind of strange political-jujitsu on the GOP. He extends the hand of bipartisanship and it gets slapped away. He does it again, and again it is slapped away. He does it a third time, and the same thing happens. After which he holds a press conference and says "I tried to work across the aisle, but as you know the GOP, taking their marching orders from FOX News and Rush Limbaugh, have set out to obstruct *anything* we do. You can only kick a dog so many times before it will bite, and I'm not about to let the middle-class suffer because the GOP cares more about winning the next election than doing the people's business." I think that people would be behind him if he did so.
That's not what he did, though. Instead he keeps trying to go back to the well and behave as if there is SOME compromise he can make that would motivate the GOP to work with him. There's nothing he can do that will do that, however. Nothing. If Obama proclaimed that kittens were cute, the GOP would say that kittens are ravenous monsters that live only to kill American babies and burn the flag. If Obama said he'd eliminate taxes on the rich and corporations, outlaw homosexuality and Islam, and close down every unionin the nation suddenly all these conservatives would be crying out for punitive taxes on the rich, they'd all come out as gay before announcing that they were going to go no the hajj to Mecca and would wear tee-shirts saying "we are all AFL-CIO now". If you *know* that the other side is going to lie about you and call you everything but a child of god, why act like the facts on the ground are different than that? You move forward and do what you have to do, knowing that if you do something they'll call you a Marxist, if you do nothing, they'll call you a socialist, if you do what they want, they'll call you a terrorist. Obama could have shut down the whole socialist/Marxist thing overnight by saying, quite simply, "anyone who thinks I'm either a Marxist or a socialist, doesn't know the meaning of those words" He could have shut down the whole "he's a Muslim" thing with the following: "You know, for people who claim to love the Constitution, they don't know what's in it. Article VI says: but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States. That means if you love the Constitution, you should put aside sectarian concerns. I’m not a Muslim, I'm a Christian but what if I were? What would that have to do with anything?"
I am concerned because over the last decade, America has reminded me of nothing so much as end-stage Weimer Germany without the hyperinflation. I thought that with the election of Obama, it would *at least* make some necessary improvements, get us behaving like a great nation again, and buy the GOP some time to get its more extreme elements under control or put to pasture. But it would take a strong Democratic President and Congress to motivate the GOP to do so. That's not what has happened. Instead, we have a weak Democratic President who does not appear to know how to stand up for himself or his principles. We have a weak Congress that can only pass bills by making them SO watered down in order to get Republican votes that they aren't going to get no matter HOW the bill is written. All the cultural, political and economic conditions are now in place for a truly scary, classically totalitarian demagogue to emerge.
Because the Democrats do not appear to be the least bit interested in rebuilding the middle-class and because they don't appear to be able to articulate that free-market fundamentalism has failed as egregiously and spectacularly as communism did, they are quickly making themselves irrelevant. Most of their core constituencies stay because there's genuinely no place else to go. Where else do blacks, gays, labor unions, pro-choice advocates and Hispanics go? The GOP? Not hardly.
So one day, we are going to have a candidate who will come along with a Bible in one hand and a gun in the other. He or she will talk about how they are going to go to Washington and kick out the elites. They will talk about how if they are elected they will return America to greatness by restoring America's Biblical roots and can-do independent spirit. People will *hear* that this person will bring the jobs back (but they won't) and that they will clean up Wall Street (but they won't). When that person is elected, they will do whatever they can to make America hostile to Muslims--hostility beyond what we see now and it's not pretty out there. They will pass laws to make America more hostile to queers. They will pass laws to make America more hostile to Hispanics.
I thought that the Democratic party circa 2007 understood where the nation was and what risks to our politics we face. Clearly they don't. They are about to go down the same road that other weak liberal governments did just before the rise totalitarianism--putting their heads in the sand, doing incremental little changes so as not to offend the plutocrats, believing that perhaps they can hold off the inevitable.
“When facism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.” (Sinclair Lewis)