President Barack Obama: File photo by Luke Thomas.
By Jill Chapin
August 18, 2010
Millions of Americans wrapped their 2008 social calendar around the debates and primaries as certified political news junkies, and developed a collective lump in their throats and tears in their eyes when former Senator Barack Obama won the election.
Now their social calendar is wide open for anything except political news. Obama’s inspiring words and agenda have mostly evaporated, replaced by a nagging feeling that once again, another pol is speaking to political expediency.
We all know that Washington is a tough town, and decision-making is fraught with bribes, backroom deals, blackmail and palm greasing. Still, it was thought that the following areas would be those where our president would follow through on his promise to do what’s best for “ordinary citizens.” Now they’re not so sure.
Consider the following:
– Supporting the legalization of marijuana should be one of his easiest decisions. The hypocrisy for its scarlet letter status is embarrassing in this 21st century. We all know that cigarettes and alcohol can be more life-threatening, that laws that already criminalize drinking while driving or on the job can be applied to pot smokers too. We all know that legalizing marijuana would mean a new, enormous taxable commodity that can only help to alleviate our soaring debt. And we all know that making marijuana available in stores would slash those dangerous drug dealers’ raison d’etre.
— His refusal to acknowledge the rights of gay Americans to marry is so last century. Gay marriage harms no one, it won’t turn straight kids gay, and it certainly won’t harm heterosexual couples who are doing a fine job of decimating the sanctity of marriage on their own with skyrocketing divorce rates.
– Forcing Americans to purchase health insurance is going down a slippery slope. We must obey thousands of laws that outlaw certain actions. Now we are considered outlaws if we engage in no action?
– Cutting a deal with the pharmaceuticals is one of Obama’s most revealing disappointments. He promised them that any healthcare legislation would bar the government’s huge purchasing power from negotiating lower drug prices for Medicare. His support of a ban on importing Canadian drugs as being potentially dangerous exposes his back door deal making. It couldn’t expose his ignorance; this is a smart guy who knows that drugs are not molecularly rearranged in a sealed bottle when crossing the border.
– His ease with ballooning our deficit to unfathomable numbers is most disturbing of all, as he is now on course to permanently mortgaging our grandchildren’s future. And repaid TARP money, which we were assured would be used to pay down the deficit, may now be used to further his economic stimulus plan.
– His desire to provide a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants is simply a vote-getting tactic. But he doesn’t speak to those of us who are actually able to vote for him – or not. His parsed words really mean amnesty, and it frosts those of us who are punished – not rewarded – for breaking our laws.
I’m a white middle-aged heterosexual, non-marijuana smoking grandmother, whose insurance premiums are paid by my husband’s employer, who is on no prescription drugs, and whose grandparents were legal immigrants who had to wait in line to get here.
Why then should someone like me who is living the American dream be so upset about all of the above? It’s because of those grandchildren I mentioned – mine and everyone else’s.
I imagine many of Obama’s former ardent supporters are leaning toward not voting for him again, even though they know of no one who would be a better replacement. But that’s sort of like Winston Churchill’s observation that democracy is the worst form of government in the world, except for all the others.
The Hunger Site
August 19, 2010 at 7:37 am
@Ralph, corporate dominated democracy is an exercise in futility.
Calling out corporate dominated democracy is an exercise in futility.
Tolerating corporate dominated democracy is an exercise in futility.
Is damned if you do, damned if you don’t the best we can do?
-marc
August 18, 2010 at 5:19 pm
sorry to say there is no third party in a 2 party nation.
August 18, 2010 at 3:07 pm
Ugandan American journalist Milton Allimadi has been a diehard Obama supporter but today his paper, the NYC-based Black Star News published an editorial by one of its regular African American columnists, Frederick Alexander Meade, on the formation of another Third Party, the Freedom Party, by African Americans who are tired of the Democratic Party assuming that the African American vote is their birthright. http://www.blackstarnews.com/news/135/ARTICLE/6752/2010-08-16.html
August 18, 2010 at 1:38 pm
Marc, you seem to constantly snipe from the sidelines hoping for Armageddon, which is unlikely to occur in our lifetimes. Aren’t you just engaging in a perpetual exercise in futility?
August 18, 2010 at 1:09 pm
@Ralph, Obama made concrete promises to deliver closing Guantanamo, heeling the US to the rule of law, a public option for health care finance and an end to “too big to fail.”
He has delivered on none of that.
These are not solutions to hangovers lingering from the evil Bush II, rather baby steps in reversing the past 30 years of economic malpractice, class warfare, that is turning the US into India.
Compromising on baby steps is not the change we need, chance that we can count on.
It is Obama who is risking the return to power of the GOP, not the base he’s alienated.
-marc
August 18, 2010 at 12:06 pm
Marc, as I understand your rehtoric, the bottom line is that you are essentially agreeing with my comment..
August 18, 2010 at 11:45 am
@Ralph, the only thing that politicians understand other than money is the credible threat of their own political annihilation.
In fact, the weaker they perceive a political force, the more license they take to abuse it.
The fact is that on every judgment call Obama has had to make, he’s screwed his electoral coalition in favor of a very different governing coalition.
There is a straight line policywise running from Reagan through to Obama. The difference is that the predecessors were adept at the kind of arm twisting and “offers one cannot refuse” required to leverage the power of the presidency into a tool capable of delivering for the electoral coalition where Obama is detached.
The proper response to this abandonment is a primary challenge in the next election with the threat of electoral abandonment in the general.
-marc
August 18, 2010 at 10:47 am
In 17 months, Obama couldn’t correct the problems left behind by the Bush administration, the Republican party of “no”, the Blue Dog Democrats, and Senators Lieberman and Nelson. Shame on him. Guess we will have to vote for all the Republican candidates at the mid-term elections and Sarah Palin in 2012. Or we can let the Republicans win by default by not voting at all. That will show them.
August 18, 2010 at 9:44 am
The Health Insurance and Pharmaceutical Corporate Welfare Act of 2010 was an act of political suicide for the Democrat Party.
Where exactly is the constituency for mandating that Americans purchase private health insurance without price controls and without mandated levels of coverage and that we are forced to pay the highest prices for prescription drugs in the world?
We need to just suck up to the fact that providing health insurance via the workplace is economically ill advised and that corporations need to take a 2% tax hike to implement a Canadian style financing program here in the US.
I’m all for a sane immigration policy, especially as applies to Mexico and Latin America, but agree that the political predicate for dealing with immigration in a progressive manner is taking care of those who are already citizens and vote. This does not diminish the importance of sane immigration policy on the lives of immigrants, rather would ensure that there is a political linkage to progress that brings all forward together.
The debt is the least of our problems because it is fabricated out of a fiat currency and denominated domestically where monetary policy is wholly domestically controlled. It is inevitable that the dollar will cease to be the world reserve currency soon and that will relegate the buck to our domestic means of exchange. A domestic US dollar will be completely capable of financing retirement and health care internally, so long as we don’t have to dip into hard currency reserves to import anything.
There are two solutions to economic depression: a wave of bankruptcies that forces the innocent to take a hit for the crimes of the culpable without compensation, or Keynesianism. Whether that Keynesian demand support is financed by selling debt abroad or through other stimulative means is not important.
The key is that demand must be sustained as the economy settles to its new level now that there is global competition for resources and that the US must now deal with emerging nations not so keen on living under brutal dictatorships in order that the US might import cheap raw materials and manufactured goods.
Latin America has already largely divorced itself from the US. The rest of the global south is figuring out ways to back slowly away from the drunk nuclear superpower living in that refrigerator box in the global equivalent of the Tenderloin.
-marc
August 18, 2010 at 8:32 am
I don’t plan to vote in the 2012 presidential election. It’s not possible to win, so the least I can do is not vote, which is as close as we can get to None of the Above or the French option, voting blanche, in this country.
Same re warmonger/war funder, F-22 Raptor defender Barbara Boxer, and of course Nancy Pelosi. Carly Fiorina couldn’t scare me enough to cast a vote for Barbara Boxer.