That Hopey Changey Thing
9/2/12 06:57![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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talkpolitics
Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek. Barack Obama
I recently posted regarding our current situation in America. Some saw it as pessimistic, cynical and without a bright outlook for the future. I saw it as a inventory of our sins that has lead to our current situation. These were the conditions inherited by President Obama.
Before I start, I am going to anticipate a common confutation. Bush’s administration is over and Obama has been President for the last 3 years. In the Soviet Union, they had a trend that occurred when a party leader fell from favor from the party. The leader disappeared from the public eye and was not heard from again. Apparently, G.W. Bush has had the same phenomenon with the Republican Party. Contrary to Republican expediency, erasing him from history isn’t as easy as you may think. His legacy still remains.
I knew this was going to be a tough time for us all. I posted in my own blog about this right after Obama’s election. Let’s review some of the top promises that haven’t been fulfilled to the satisfaction of Obama’s critics:
- Guantanamo Bay hasn’t been closed. This was another mess inherited from Bush. The Guantanamo Bay Detention Center was a fiasco that was assumed incorrectly to be beyond the reach of the U.S. Constitution. This is going to continue to be difficult to unravel and no one is offering solutions to this. Though we already have extracted all the information we can get from them, we don’t know how to unload the most dangerous of the prisoners while keeping them from being a further threat to our troops.
- Foreign Policy. This was an area where he received the most criticism during his 2008 campaign. Despite wins with bin Laden, Iraq and Libya; Obama has had the sense not to go all in with unwinnable situations such as the Israel/Palestinian impasse. He has shown outstanding courage with Pakistan despite it being a nuclear power.
- Obama promised change and an end to business as usual in Washington. Obama promised The Change We Need not the change that makes us feel warm and fuzzy. His attempts to reach across the aisle in Congress have been rejected by both sides of the aisle.
- TARP and the Stimulus were supposed to restart the economy. This claim was never made by either Bush or Obama. The economy went into toxic shock when credit froze at the end of 2008. TARP and the Stimulus were nothing more than life support for the economy until the private sector could recover enough to grow the economy. Unfortunately, the private sector has been DOA with nothing but excuses and no real American productivity.
- The Obama administration has been spending wildly. There have been some Obama initiatives that have had high price tags. These have not been the long term litany of unfunded programs that have been passed under the Bush administration which include the protracted military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Bush tax cuts, Medicare Part D and the $1.5 trillion budget deficit that was passed on. The Bush administration ran up the credit card. The Obama administration has been left to pay for it.
- The Obama Healthcare Law. This is a campaign promise that has actually been fulfilled and is his landmark achievement. This is something that administrations past have tried for decades and have failed. It has come under fire because it actually requires Americans to take responsibility for their own actions; an apparently great bumper sticker, but an unpopular requirement. We don’t like that it is a hybrid of workable ideas instead of a bunch of fantasy giveaways.
- The Obama administration is leading us into socialism. This is one of my favorites. Bush did the closest thing to socialism when he nationalized Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac during his administration. The auto industry was subsidized by the government through purchase of GM and Chrysler shares of stock. Although unprecedented, so is the success of the recovery of the American auto industry.
- Obama is doing wealth distribution. Some say this is unfair. A child going to bed hungry because his single mother, despite her holding multiple jobs, can’t afford to feed him is unfair. Focusing on the welfare of the majority middle class at the expense of the few lavishly affluent is democracy in action. We have more guys. We win.
One of the huge demands for the election of 2008 was transparency in government. The secrecy of the Bush administration spurred this because the American people felt that we deserved the truth regarding our security and we should be able to make our own decisions.
It seems that our entire American political landscape consists of a marketing campaign created from sound bites, 140 character mass texting (or Twitter, if you prefer), vitriolic and melodramatic tabloid talk radio, equally scandalous internet memes and 24 hour cable news channels abandoning truth for ratings. We haven’t been able to hear the general public for all the noise. The Republican side is no longer about governance, but about political theater. America has not become more divided. We have just become more uncompromising.
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