While tidying my apartment last night, I chanced upon this night I had scribbled last year during my cross-country drive:
The Obama I fear most as a Republican is the one I, as an American most want to see.
I believe I was recalling some of the stirring speeches the Democrat offered early in his bid for the White House.
Had the president turned out to be the unifier he claimed to be, that new kind of politician, his boosters billed him to be, instead of focusing on such items on the liberal wish-list as greater state involvement in heath care, he would have spent 2009 and 2010 focusing on the economy, not just by promoting big-government schemes, but by listening to Republicans and incorporating their pro-growth ideas into his policy proposals.
He, like Bill Clinton in 1995 and 1996, would have veered to the center, helped unite the country and delayed, if not destroyed, anay chance for a conservative revival. My party would have been the weaker, but our nation would have been the stronger.
Obama was uniquely placed to provide some tough love to the nation’s black population: he could have thrown the race hucksters like Jesse Jackson and the Congressional Black Caucus under the proverbial bus.
He could have pronounced as crap the endless indoctrination of black kids with the idea that they’re helpless victims under the thumb of the racists, oppressor white devils.
He could have preached self-reliance and achievement; he could have pointed not only to his own success but the success of other black people – not only the high-profile men like Clarence Thomas but people like Thomas’s grandparents who worked hard to raise a good man.
If Obama could have made even a tiny improvement to the awful trajectory of blacks in this country, he would go down as a great president instead of the mediocre hack that he is.
If only..
SoCalRobert,
I guess the man you were looking for was a Bill Cosby, a Thomas Sowell, a Walter E. Williams. I knew Barack Obama was none of these during his Super Tuesday speech in March ’08. That speech was filled wall-to-wall with the progressive shibboleths I’ve heard these last 40 years. Not an original thought in the speech. At the time I figured him for an empty suit, and assertion I’m more convinced of today.
Truth be told, if Clinton had gotten her party’s nomination, I would have voted for her over McCain.
Hindsight is always 20/20.
Yeah, it’s funny to think about. Some would argue that the Democratic party generally (not just our current president) leans farther and farther toward the far left these days. Am I glad, because I reckon that will make them easier to defeat in elections? or am I sorry to see them pursuing policies that are even worse for America?
I think I take the second position. For one thing, not all voters pay as much attention to candidates’ and parties’ positions on issues as we do; to some extent, some voters will vote for whatever one or both of the parties or candidates are doing, without knowing too much about it. Relatedly, as you say, we want a conservative revival—but to some extent, if the Democratic Party or a particular Democrat politician moves toward the center, that already is a victory for conservatism. If I could choose a future in which the Democratic Party won more of the elections than they do now, but the whole party had given up on abortion, or on the welfare state, or on some other issue formerly hotly contested between conservatives and liberals, I woud take it in a heartbeat.
In the long term, we help the country not by winning this or that election so much as by moving the center, and so the whole political spectrum, further right.