A year ago, if we had read in the paper that employers were hiring again, that health care legislation was proceeding without a bump, that Afghanistan suddenly became a nice place to take your kids, we would’ve known we were being lied to. Back then, we recognized that the problems Obama inherited as President wouldn’t go away overnight.
During his campaign, Obama clearly said that an economy that took eight years to break couldn’t be fixed in a year, that Afghanistan was a graveyard of empires and would not be an easy venture for us. Candidate Obama didn’t feed us happy-talk, which is why we elected him. He never said America could solve our health care, economic and security problems without raising the deficit. Instead, he talked of hard choices, of government taking painful and contentious first steps towards fixing problems that can’t be left for another day.Right after Obama’s election, we seemed to grasp this. We understood that companies would be happy to squeeze more work out of frightened employees, and would be slow to hire more. We understood that the banks that had extorted us out of billions of dollars were lying when they said they would share their recovery. We understood that a national consensus on health care would not come easily. Candidate Obama never claimed that his proposed solutions would work flawlessly right out of the box, and we respected him for that.
But today, the President is being attacked as if he were a salesman who promised us that our problems would wash off in the morning. He never made such a promise. It’s time for Americans to realize that governing is hard work, and that a President can’t just wave a magic wand and fix everything.
This article appears in Jan 7-13, 2010.
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I am a state and local government affairs professional for a major corporation. While I do not manage federal government, I consider myself to be (relatively speaking) very knowledgeable in how government, and government leaders operate. I think this column should be posted on every telephone pole, bulletin board and newspaper in America. Well said. Short and sweet.
Dear Ellie,
There are some who see cups as half full while others see politicians as full of it. I voted for Barack Obama, as the lesser of two evils. Today, I’m not sure I’d make the same choice.
Let’s run down a brief list of promises broken.
1) Then: Guantanamo to be closed. Now: Closure postponed indefinitely
2) Then: Obama promised to filibuster FISA extension. Now: Even as a Senator Obama reneged and left the campaign trail to vote in favor of the extension.
3) Then: We’ll stop torture and extraordinary renditions: Now: We continue to render “bad guys” to third party nations and we swear they don’t torture. Countries like Egypt and Syria, for instance.
4) Then: Promised to remove all combat troops from Iraq. Now: No combat troops have been removed from our permanent bases across Iraq, and we are using special forces troops today in Yemen, Somalia and Northern Kenya, which is an escalation from the Bush years in those countries.
5) Then: Promises were made to rein in the banking industry. Now: Empty promises of populist reform continue to be all we get as no significant reform is advancing and a new fake Financial Investigative Commission grinds on until well past the 2010 elections. In contrast, FDR started his reforms the day he took office.
6)) Then: Obama promised to increase our war effort in Afghanistan. Now: He’s escalated the war not only in Afghanistan but in neighboring Pakistan as well, dangerously destabilizing the government there.
7) Then: In 2002 Obama stated that a single payer option was the best health care reform possible. Now: Obama has horsetraded all useful reform out of the health care bill, abandoning single payer and leaving us with a rotten bill that forces millions of underpaid workers to cough up for insurance industry CEO bonuses in an outrageous mandate for wealth transfer to the rich.
I think it might be time for Americans to be more honest with themselves. We have a one party system in the U.S.A. This is the Corporate Party and the corporations own and control politicians of both wings of their party by means of bribery. That’s the plain, unvarnished truth about where we’re at today. The looting of the America public by special interests will continue as long as we allow ourselves to be blind to the reality that oligarchs run the show in America, and we don’t have anyone in the Federal Government capable of standing up to the corporate interests on Wall Street and in corporate America.
So Ellie, if I can offer one word of advice from someone who came of age politically in the 1960s it would be that patience is not a virtue, and it is only wishful thinking to believe that giving Barack Obama more time is going to correct the direction of the ship of state. I no longer believe what Obama says, no matter what great rhetoric he employs. I believe my own eyes in this matter, and what I can plainly see is that those who are describing what we are witnessing as ‘Bush’s Third Term’ are not far off the mark. Obama is a well-spoken servant of an imperial oligarchy. He is not and he never will be a champion of the little people. We’re on our own in this nation, without any representation at all in Washington.
Obama said he would provide transparent bipartisan government. He said he would broadcast the Congressional debate on healthcare reform on C-SPAN. What we have is Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, and selected democrats working behind closed doors to bring about a bill which will not lower the cost of health care one iota. Obama is a huge disapointment.
You guys are chumps. This “ellie light” is an opperative for the Obama White House, and this professional message has been sent to over 50 newspapers in 23 different states.
see here: http://patterico.com/2010/01/23/ellie-light-obama-astroturfer-or-very-very-very-energetic-but-independent-letter-writer/
and here: http://hotair.com/archives/2010/01/23/ellie-light-obama-astroturfer/
Feel free to dismiss me as a right wing nutjob. But you cannot deny that “ellie” is an astroturfing plant.