As I may flesh this notion out in a further post, I’m including it in the “Random Thoughts” category.
After reading the news and blogs last night and this morning in my Kettleman City hotel (due a late start last night from San Francisco (allowing me to spend more time with my Mom & nephew) and bad traffic in and around San Jose, I decided to overnight in the Central Valley) and listening to the President’s speech earlier today in the Hoosier State, I had this sense yet again that Obama has long since lost the chance to unite the nation.
His speech sounded more like campaign boilerplate than a presidential address.
It seems he constantly sees his job as defeating his political foes (often the “straw men” in his speeches of whom you have heard tell)-which is not a very presidential attitude to have, since those supposed foes are your constituents.
From the outset of his Administration, Obama has not surrounded himself with political partisans, accustomed to an “us v. them” universe as opposed to think tank types, accustomed to design policies designed to serve society at large–and to building a broad consensus for said policies. As Michael Barone obseved, “Most of Obama’s top White House staffers are politics operatives, not policy wonks. ”
Just three days after he took office as President of the United States, in a bipartisan meeting with congressional leaders, Obama responded to Republican concerns about the cost of his “so-called stimulus” and his so-called “tax credit” for people who don’t pay income taxes, by saying, “I won. So I think on that one, I trump you.“*
Yeah, but all those people in that room all won their resspective elections. And Obama won, in large part, by promising a “net spending cut” and reassuring voters in the middle that the change he was proposing was not all that drastic.
In any case, it was that very confrontational– and very unpresidential–attitude which has come to define the succeeding six months of his Administration–and has prevented him from becoming the unifying figure his supporters assured us he would be.
*With the statement, “I won,” (designed to trump his elected congessional adversaries) comes the assumption that he is entitled to pass whatever legislation he proposes or supports. It ignores the constitutional framework Madison designed in order to circumscribe the executive and contain the power of factions. The President would do well to familiarize himself with the Federalist.
He could only have united the country by governing as a moderate. Instead, he’s gone hard left on every single issue. He could have passed on nationalizing GM and Chrysler. He could proposed an expansion of Medicaid to cover the uninsured, instead of destroying the entire health care system. He could have appointed a swing vote to the Supreme Court instead of a leftist ideologue committed to “social justice” (i.e. justicial activism). He could have compromised with the Republicans by offering a stimulus weighted toward tax cuts and infrastructure spending, instead of bailouts for irresponsible blue state governments. He could avoided appointing 44 various czars, who are unaccountably, often steeped in corruption, and one of whom (Van Jones) is an avowed communist and another (Holdren) wanted to sterilize the population through the water supply.
He could have been a moderate, but it’s not in his nature. He’s a neo-Marxist. Marxist is as Marxist does.
He seems to have lost the goodwill of the 47% who voted for McCain.
Given the House and Senate are 60% Democratic, one could make the case that Obama has a stronger coalition in Congress than the nation as a whole.
Absent an unemployment rate of <9% or domestic emergency, it is unlikely he can unify the country beyond his electoral tally.
GP, he was never interested in Uniting the nation in the first place. It’s destroy, remake and takeover the country and have himself instilled as Hugo jr. he’s a marxist that is doing everything to destroy this country and obtain unlimited power for himself and his cronies to rule as long as he likes
I’ve been wondering for months why they crammed SCHIP in there if they were just going to Socialize medicine. What was the point in that, other to spend money and control the states?
I am an outsider. I do not trust that man. It has nothing to do with his skin tone and everything to do with his shifty ways.