What do we do with Barack Obama?
|
Who likes the president? Rich Democrats aren’t coughing up anymore, the New York Times reports. The Goldman Sachs crowd has dropped him cold. His inside circle can’t seem to get out of the White House fast enough. Approval ratings suck. Other Democratic politicians don’t want him on the campaign trail. Black people have, apparently, soured on him, too. The people in the backyards he’s visiting don’t seem very happy about having them in their backyards. Obviously anybody the least right-of-center finds him anathema. Who’s left? There is a block, but they seem stoic, dug in, anti-Fox. And you certainly don’t hear much of a passionate defense from them anymore. The answer is that nobody likes him as much as they did, or as much as they thought they would, or even as much as they thought they should. At this moment, we have a largely unrecognizable figure in the White House. The weirdly continuing questions about his birth place and religion may be not so much a slur as a demented metaphor for his real lack of identity — and friends. There’s a guilty sense, too. People are edging away from him because they now feel they got it so wrong. It’s buyer’s remorse with recrimination — self-recrimination. How did everybody get it so wrong is a question many people seem to be asking themselves — not least of all these people slinking out of the White House. It is not just that he has turned out to be something different. In fact, reasonably, he isn’t that different. The more powerful sense of remorse or at least sheepishness may come from people now asking themselves how and why they came to think of him as different than he was. More confounding, they may not really now be able to remember just who exactly they thought he was. So to refocus the story: Some mass misperception put Barack Obama in the White House and now nobody knows what to do with him. Can there be a more awkward situation? *This article originally appeared at Newser.com |
|
|
|
13 Comments
Being elected at the apparent outset of the ‘gfc’, Mr Obama was always going to be a fall guy, imho.
Loss of an opportunity for genuine reform in America. Not really a surprise how both parties are in lock step to the whims of Wall Street allegiance and cashed up lobby groups. What was the land of opportunity now appears to be the great plutocracy. Social mobility must be at an all time low.
Still, there’s a few dead dogs to throw at the Republican door if the democrats are smart like the Iraq/Afghanistan wars, GFC & wall street bailout.
Pressure should be bought to bear on the Democrats who have not followed the reform program and wasted a majority and mandate for change that the vote represented.
What is a real tragedy is what John Stewart has defined as those who control the conversation and can repeatedly air falsehoods without being challenged. 20% of people in the US believe Obama is a foreign born, muslim, communist.
The best gift he could give if he is on the way out is pushing campaign reform to give power back to the people. If the hypocritical tea party get a majority ironically this may be something they can achieve.
One term President and welcome back Hillary, the stage is yours and probably the nomination.
‘Obviously anybody the least right-of-center finds him anathema.’
Of course they do. He is not right-of-center. (And I get the impression that ‘center’ in America is pretty far right already.) But lots of people who are not, voted him in. He can’t be all things to all people. He is what he is. If America changes its mind at the next Presidential election, they’ll vote in someone else, and opposite (Sarah Palin !!!!)
I get the feeling that Barack Obama has resigned himself to - or at least prepared himself for - being a one term president (a la Bartlett). I think he really values the opportunity to do the good he can do in the time allowed, over historical fame/glory.
Let’s hope the Republicans who get in next time (if that’s how it happens) don’t just focus on undoing the good he has done eg the health care reforms.
That would remind us of the Abbott Attitude.
PS article complete bollocks IMHO
‘People slinking out of the White House’ apparently a reference to Rohm Emmanuel who has a date with the contest for Mayor of Chicago, which makes a lot of sense.
Dr Harvey M Tarvydas
Oh the power of highly deficient, Bush loving Australian ex Prime Ministers.
While he was still PM, J Howard, at the moment of discovering that Obama had won the presidential nomination said out loud to the media, “the Al Qaeda candidate” a worse than any racist comment I had heard forever. Not a squeak from us nor the Indians about it but at least the Indians remember and when he’s knocking on a door that they can keep closed (cricket) they remember while we blaaah blaaah in the racist’s defence.
Like any clever psychopath will tell you, it’s easy to hide ugly truth from the populace especially when it’s ignorant and the media in Aus specialises in abusing the populace by conniving to deliver ignorance in certain areas. The Indians know an ugly racist when they smell one for a number of reasons. JH outed himself having lost control over that racist mouth of his and of course in true Howard style no apology.
Dr Harvey M Tarvydas
Calls on the Liberal Party to expel John Howard for that disgusting comment which everyone is pretending never happened.
The party expelled someone for similar but much less recently. They need a lecture on recognising the ‘trickle down effect’.
I voted for him. And will again, if I get the chance.
America is largely ungovernable by any center or left-of-center grouping. The democracy is become a corporatocracy. The lobbyists and the money are where most of the power is to be found. Obama has this to contend with.
The fact that 3/5ths of the Senate must (these days) agree on anything to see it passed has time and again proven to be - given the steadfast and virtually unanimous obstructionism of Republicans, and on occasion the spinelessness of a few blue dog Democrats - insurmountable.
These things are externalities difficult to control.
I do think, however, that Obama was too dedicated for too long to an ideal of a new and not nearly so partisan Washington conversation and modus operandi. He compromised again and again (here I am thinking of the health insurance legislation) in an attempt to realise this (when it was, in truth, not realisable), to the point that he lost much of his base, or at least much of its previous enthusiasm.
I said that America is largely unGovernable by any center or left-of-center grouping. But it can be Ruled from the right, or even the far right. I prefer ungovernability.
Surely Barack Obama is the only “excuse” OZ needs to untangle itself from the U.S. and its corporate warmongering.
Why must we continue to be America’s lapdogs? We went into VietNam being assured by the Yanks that when the red or yellow hordes over-ran us America would be our salvation. Yeah, right! That war was a corporate deal and the current two are even more so.
Get out before we incur more Islamic wrath and have ourselves as permanent targets of terrorism just as the U.S. will be until it collapses under its own corporate corruption.
Those of you believe America has or will have a decent health care plan delivered by Obama need to do some research. Most of the “plan” doesn’t come into existence until 2014 and in the meantime the Insurance lobbyists are busy, as are the corporations themselves repairing the damage the plan might have caused them.
The only thing the citizenry will end up with is compulsory payment into an ineffective program.
Without the burden of two ongoing wars and subversion in South America and the Middle East, America could provide free health care and free college tuition for all!
Australia needs to get away from America’s control.
Yeah but people think words mean stuff. I remember breaking up with a girlfriend once because I said to her:
“Just because a thought enters your mind, doesn’t mean your first job is to put it into words.”
It was mean a bit, whereas the road to hell is paved with some kind of vaguely goodwill agenda-type intentions, and constructing whole roomfuls of spiderweb worlds with words presumes competence, never mind the Dunning-Kruger effect.
I know someone can do something exactly at the moment they express a doubt, or ask a favour.
The invisible wall between President Obama and the outside world: he is basically a thoughtful, contemplative guy. I don’t think he is overly concerned that some people’s mind cameras didn’t take the photos they expected. The articulate fireworks of 2008 were long in forming, and they were no ordinary words. There was always a danger that those who see words differently - as basically endless, to be used endlessly - would assume that he would be talking endlessly too, just like them.
Obama truly believed that once President, al he needed to do was wave his (like a wand) and his will would be done. He forgot that he got into the White House at the will of the Corporations and his party that’s owned by Corporations. They’d “let” him do little things but anything tht upset the Corporate and Pentagon status quo was a big NO NO!
the U.S. President has no power just Queen Liz has no power. They both are “allowed” to appear to rule. In so doing the masses feel they have control over the process and blame tghe “head” when things don’t work out as promised and so the Corporations set up another to dullify the masses into anothe 4 years of obedience.
Austral MUST get out from under the U.S. thumb!
MoiraS - “one term a’la Bartlett” er akhalyhe (in WestWing) won a 2nd term Did you mean Carter? I think he is a good comparison, a Prz intent on doing good stymied by a rotten system