NO EXCUSES FOR PRESIDENT OBAMA
Rebuttal to Anna Quindlen???s Newsweek article (11-02-09)
By Jacqueline Marcus
Anna Quindlen argues in her Newsweek article, ???Hope Springs Eternal??? that we should be skeptical about the way government works. If so, our expectations for change would not be so high. In other words, it???s not Obama???s fault that he hasn???t changed the business-as-usual operations in D.C. Nor should he be blamed for helping the super rich much more than the average, working American. It???s the SYSTEM!
That???s called ???bad faith,??? and it makes for a lousy excuse: blame it on the process of checks & balances, which slows progress down to a near halt. That???s true when the President and Congressional members decide to provide milk money for starving children in our country, but when Wall St. called, it took only ONE day for President Obama and Congress to act. It took one week to deliver an $800 billion dollar check to the super rich, directly AFTER George W. Bush delivered a $700 billion dollar check to Wall St. tycoons before he left office. As Newsweek reported in the same issue, (???Rules of the Jungle: Wall Street bonuses won???t go quietly???) most of those billions are going for individual bonuses i.e. the super rich need more play money! There???s certainly no waiting when it comes to the $10 billion dollars a month for defense contractors, for a war that is increasing poverty, here, and in Afghanistan. The President used to understand, before he started playing golf with the super rich, the link between wars and poverty: bombing people increases poverty, violence and terrorism.
Bottom line: There are no excuses for President Obama. He chose the Bush policies instead of fulfilling his campaign promises, and, like Bush, this War Economy will make him extremely unpopular. Regarding Quindlen???s excuses for Obama: Sorry, but if the President REALLY wanted to solve the 200 detainee problem at Gitmo, he could ask Constitutional lawyer-Professor Jonathon Turley, for the solution, instead of relying on Republican advisors. Rather than spending billions of dollars increasing wars that demoralize soldiers (killing human beings), he should bring the troops home and put those billions of dollars to work through the help of our soldiers. Our soldiers would not be committing suicide or killing each other if they were learning new skills, helping to build schools, homes, and re-foresting our national parks for our country. It???s not complicated. That, too, is an excuse.
Hope Springs Eternal
Assessing a young presidency. Barack Obama campaigned as a populist firebrand but governs like a cerebral consensus builder. The founding fathers wouldn't have it any other way.
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From time to time the American people participate in a mass delusion about how their government works. Such a delusion took place exactly a year ago, when a 47-year-old African-American who had once been accorded little chance of prevailing was elected president of the United States.
History will judge Barack Obama over the long haul. But we've learned something in the short term that is simple, obvious, and has less to do with him than with the Founding Fathers. This is a country that often has transformational ambitions but is saddled with an incremental system, a nation built on revolution, then engineered so the revolutionary can rarely take hold.
Checks and balances: that's how we learn about it in social-studies class, and in theory it is meant to guard against a despotic executive, a wild-eyed legislature, an overweening judiciary. And it's also meant to safeguard the rights of the individual; as James Madison, president and father of the Constitution, once said, "I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." But what our system has meant during the poisonous partisan civil war that has paralyzed Washington in recent years is that very little of the big stuff gets done. It simply can't.
This president promised to tackle the big stuff, swiftly, decisively, and in a fashion about which he was unequivocal, and voters took him at his word a year ago. For those who yearned for a progressive agenda that would change the playing field for the disenfranchised, he promised to do good. So far he has mainly done government, which overlaps with good too little in the Venn diagram of American public policy.
Universal health care is the area in which the gap between what's needed and what's likely is most glaring, and the limitations of the president's power most apparent. It is dispiriting to watch the cheerleaders of American exceptionalism pound their chests and insist that our citizens do not need the kind of system that virtually every other developed nation finds workable. (By the way, if you're confused about the public option, just ask yourself this question: would you like to be eligible for Medicare at 40 rather than 65?) As elected officials posture and temporize, families are bankrupted by health-care costs and forgo treatment they can't afford. Statistical measures of the national health, from life expectancy to infant mortality, continue to be substandard. And because we have that system of checks and balances, in which movement usually happens slowly and sporadically, a great need for sweeping reform may be met with a jury-rigged bill neither sufficiently deep nor broad, which perhaps someday will give way to a better one, and then eventually a truly good one.
All that is a far cry from the health-care agenda President Obama articulated during the campaign. But campaigns are bad crucibles in which to forge the future. They speak to great aspirations; government amounts to the dripping of water on stone. The president promised in January to close Guantánamo, the detention center, created in the wake of the terrorism attacks, that has become a symbol of disregard for due process. A laudable goal, easier said than done: with more than 200 detainees and a congressional ban on bringing any of them to the United States, the administration has been reduced to trying to persuade foreign governments to do what we're not willing to do ourselves. There's been no rush to help, although props to Bermuda, which took four Uighurs, members of an oppressed Muslim minority in China.
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