You know, when I see it all laid out like this I have sympathy for all the challenges Brother Barack has faced since he took the Oval Office. Does he have it worse than any other President we can remember or are our high expectations of him and his ability to affect change at play here?
I know I want to see him go all 'Shaft' on BP but is that really the right strategy? It may be cathartic for us to witness (trust me I would love to see Barack put that BP head executive's head in a vice) but at the end of the day does that get results?
Is getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan something that can only be done over several years due to the sheer logistics of such an operation? What is in his control and what is not?
Do we look at the health care legislation as a glass half empty or half full when we look back at the difficulty ANY President had with making such a massive change in a country that really doesn't like things to change so drastically?
He started his Presidency behind the eight ball when a huge 'off the books' deficit was handed him by Bush jr. Combine that with a global recession and you can see how little wiggle room Obama really had to introduce his own policies. It seems like he has been plugging holes in the leaky dam just to keep his nation's head above water.
For these reasons I have to give him credit. The previous President seemed to be AWOL and on vacation when 9/11 and Katrina hit. Barack is at least showing up to work everyday knowing that it just won't get any easier for him. I get that he gets the awesome responsibility he has. The Presidency is not some entitlement to him. He takes it seriously.
I just wish more people could have his back and put the same kind of blind faith they had for Bush, into supporting Obama. He's earned that respect and from day one too many people have been rooting for him to fail. I don't see how getting their wish makes the world better for anyone.
Oh and in case you didn't know - hurricane season has already started.
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5 comments:
Yes! You're exactly right. It's like Bush was an incontinent elephant dumping everywhere, and Obama is a hard-working Donkey, sturdy and steady, moving forward and doing his best to haul the mess away.
It's complicated. There are times when Obama disappoints me, but I really have to remind myself that a lot of that is projection of what I wanted in the next President after Bush onto a guy who really was a pretty standard moderate. I get continually frustrated with the way American politics works -- just two years after their policies resulted in the country laying face down in the gutter, the Republicans stand to reap electoral gains this year because while we might have lifted our face, we're still largely in the gutter.
And there are times when I wish Obama would fight for things a bit more readily. While I'm glad the the health care bill passed and regard it as the type of starting point for a better policy down the road that virtually all such big policies started off as, I also end up thinking, "It didn't have to go that way." If you ask for more than what you want, you stand a better chance of getting exactly what you want, so I have to believe that if Obama had pushed for a full single-payer system, the lamented public option might have been the compromise position instead of being the default left position.
But even as Obama isn't the guy I hoped he'd be, I've been around long enough to realize that unless I'm a Kool-aid drinker of the Republican sort (those people worship Reagan even though he really didn't give them nearly as much of what they wanted as they like to think he did), no President is going to be the person I want them to be. And Obama's had a lot of solid accomplishments thus far.
The real test now is how he addresses the employment situation in America. Citizens don't care about the stock market or the growing GDP numbers; they care about jobs. He needs to focus there, pronto.
Obama can't win, but it's not for lack of trying. Despite his dicizive victory in becoming elected America is still polarized. How can a president win in that environment when he is constantly being accused of being too liberal/not liberal enough, too angry/not angry enough, too black/not black enough?
As for the BP situation, anger and legal threats are only hindering the situation. BP is not an American company. It's very easy for Obama to heap derision on their efforts, but what about the two American companies that were involved, Transocean and Haliburton? You don't hear a peep about those two, yet they must share some of the blame.
As for hurricane season it will not be as bad as is being predicted, nor will the effects of a hurricane be as devastating as some are fearing. It is juts as likely that a hurricane will help mitigate the oil spill effects as it is to exacerbate them
You are so right. Even the media dumps on Obama continuously after giving Bush an almost free ride to screw up the whole country without a backward glance. It seems that we have chosen evil over good after a fashion. Sickening.
@Kal - Agreed.
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