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.
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Hope Springs Eternal
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Another of the president's promises was to end the risible military policy called "don't ask, don't tell," a policy that has resulted in the loss to the armed forces of thousands of distinguished service members merely because they happen to be gay. When he addressed the Human Rights Campaign on the eve of the gay-equality march, President Obama noted that "progress may be taking longer than you'd like." That's because, some officials say, a change in the policy must suit the comfort level of military personnel. But if the Truman administration had waited for the acquiescence of the average enlisted man, it would never have integrated the armed forces. This is one where the president does not have to convince the posturing right wing of Congress, the one that invented the spurious notion of death panels in the health-care debate. Transformation is within his grasp, in a pen, a signature, an executive order.
Why has that not happened? One reason may be the president's essential character, which is at odds with the persona that developed during the campaign. Perhaps because of his race and his age, much of the electorate, especially those of us who are liberals, succumbed to stereotype and assumed that he was by way of being a firebrand. A year in, and we know that we deceived ourselves. He is methodical, thoughtful, cerebral, a believer in consensus and process. In an incremental system, Barack Obama is an incremental man. It is one reason he is taking his time ending the two wars in which we remain mired, Nobel Peace Prize notwithstanding. On the one hand, on the other. This makes attacks on him as a radical or a socialist preposterous, not to mention ridiculously retro. (Can "Trotskyite" be far behind?) It has also dispirited progressives, whose heraldic emblem might well be the broad stroke. The president is a person of nuance. But on both ends of the political number line, nuance is seen as wishy-washy. There's no nuance in partisan attacks, soundbites, slogans, which is why Barack Obama didn't run with the lines "Some change you might like if you're willing to settle" or "Yes, we can, but it will take a while."
That's really how our government works, by inches. In our long history it seems that the decision to wage war is the most sweeping act of the executive and legislative branches, although the British would likely argue that Franklin Roosevelt even brought an incremental approach to that in the run-up to World War II. In modern times, most true transformation has come through the judiciary: Brown, Roe, Miranda. Perhaps that is because consensus on the court is manageable, with only five of nine required, or because justices have life tenure, and need not spend their days looking to the next election, the focus group, the polls. Although we view the past through a lens of misty historical romanticism, there's no question that the calculus of elected office at the moment is startlingly cynical. Henry Paulson, the last Treasury secretary in the last Bush administration, told Todd Purdum of Vanity Fair that he was most shocked by the perfidy of official Washington, in which members of Congress would tell him privately that they supported policies that they would oppose, even vigorously trash, in public. "I didn't understand the system," Paulson concluded, the system in which men and women have their consciences excised in the course of government service. The small steps an incremental system guarantees become even smaller in the face of pitched partisan rancor, until eventually nothing moves at all.
Americans point to events ranging from the Emancipation Proclamation to the Voting Rights Act to show that America knows how to think—and act—big. But a stroll through actual history, as opposed to the cherry-tree-chopping sort, provides a different narrative. Many abolitionists decried Lincoln's executive order, which freed few slaves and failed to make the buying and selling of humans illegal, while conservatives thought it was radical and unwise. In other words, it was a smallish, moderate, middle-ground measure. And while it has become gospel that Franklin Roosevelt utterly transformed the public weal through the New Deal, he was so frustrated by the opposition of conservative members of his own party that he proposed to Wendell Willkie that the liberal Democrats and the liberal Republicans join together to create a liberal party.
Even the astonishing domestic successes of the Johnson administration in 1965 were built on previous gains; the Voting Rights Act was begotten not only of the civil-rights marches, but also of Brown v. Board of Education. (And of hard-core politicking, of course. You have to wonder whether Lyndon Johnson would have gotten away with handing out public-works projects like cheap cigars if today's blogosphere had been around to record it in real time.) But there is one legacy of that year, a year that also saw the passage of Medicare and immigration-reform legislation, that may be instructive today. It's best summed up by the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. She served as an aide in the Johnson White House, and her voice still carries the vibrato of excitement when she recalls that time.
"LBJ promised the members of Congress that they could someday say they'd made history," she says. "This Congress has never known the joy of that accomplishment. They haven't ever been part of an institution that moves collectively to change history for the benefit of the American people." She also notes that the presidents who have made real change have always done so in the same way: "Each of them had the country pushing the Congress to act, the people and the press both. The pressure has to come from outside." So if the American people want the president to be more like the Barack Obama they elected, maybe they should start acting more like the voters who elected him, who forcibly and undeniably moved the political establishment to where it didn't want to go. After all, in our system, even great, audacious change is never as audacious as it seems: calls for a national health-care system can be traced all the way back to Roosevelt—Teddy Roosevelt, in 1912. When Sen. Olympia Snowe, Republican of Maine, broke with her party to vote a health-care bill out of committee, she said, "When history calls, history calls." And it's not asking for baby steps.
© 2009
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