In the last year and a half I have been accused of being a liberal, a socialist, even a communist, mostly by people who don’t know what communism is about . These accusations, however, may have had some basis because in looking back over the last year of this blog, I have to admit that I have certainly been unbalanced in my coverage of the political parties. I thought about this a lot before writing this column and I finally came to the conclusion that balance is not the measuring stick by which we must judge who is right and who is wrong, who is trying to help the country and who will destroy it. That measuring stick must be logic, that process by which we use intelligent thought supported by a moral basis to uncover truth.
I realize, that as soon as I mention logic and intelligence, I have lost a certain percentage of my readership. Be that as it may, there must be some objective criteria by which we measure and judge what is going on in the world around us. I have tried to opt for that and so I have come up with an unbalanced blog. That does not mean that I am blind to the foibles and failures of President Obama and the left. Though they are many, they just don’t stack up to the seemingly deliberate attack on our society posed by the right and especially the far right.
I have spent a great deal of space dealing with the problems of the right and in all fairness I will not rehash them here. Rather I will point out what I feel are the shortcomings of the President and the Democrats in the first three and a half years of the Obama administration.
Barack Obama promised us an awful lot in his campaign for president and while he has delivered some of it, there is still an awful lot that has gone unfulfilled.
He started out like a house afire, backed by Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate; he was able to pass a healthcare bill, a financial regulation bill and a Stimulus bill. These were massive accomplishments but for many reasons none of them were complete or fully financed and so none of them can be considered truly successful. Let’s look at them one at a time.
The Affordable Care Act, a monumental accomplishment after 60 years of unsuccessful attempts, still lacked some very important parts. It should have been a single payer system. To me that is almost incontrovertible. The loss of the 20% plus, that is the profit margin of the insurance companies is the difference between the plan being affordable and not. Both Obama’s failure to arm twist effectively and the Republican threatened use of the filibuster, killed this most necessary provision, which would have eliminated most of the fiscal objections to the bill
The bill does not include tort reform. This was the fault of the left. Liberal congressmen refused to see the need for reform in this most wasteful area. Sure we need protection for patients but right now we have a ludicrous system that is run mostly for the benefit of lawyers and to the detriment of the rest of us. There are other sections of the bill that need reform but this isn’t a forty page article.
So, despite its obvious need and importance, this monumental accomplishment is left flawed and open to attacks from the right.
The next accomplishment of the administration was the Stimulus bill, roundly attacked by the right and also obviously flawed. The main flaw is that Obama didn’t demand enough money to get the job done, thereby leaving himself open to attacks from the right about wasting $800 billion and doing very little to solve unemployment.
The bill did save over a million jobs in the auto industry and most of the money spent on Detroit has been paid back but too much of the bill’s financing had to go into extending unemployment insurance benefits to rescue families from the Bush/Cheney depression, too much of it had to go for food stamps and other social programs that exploded after the previous administration almost wrecked the country. There was really nothing left for, what should have been the main thrust of the Stimulus, the kind of infrastructure rebuilding that creates jobs.
There should also have been enough money in the program for job re-education because most of the jobs that have been lost will never be replaced and that segment of the population that is out of work will have to find something else to do. Again, it was the failure to backroom fight, along with the Right’s determination not to let anything Obama proposed work, that left this great bill, far short of what it could have been.
Then there’s business reform. When Bill Clinton let the Glass-Steagall Act wash down the drain in 1999, ( not his finest moment) it meant the end of all practical financial reform in this country. It was probably the greatest failure of Clinton’s administration because it allowed the banks, the investment houses and the insurance companies to meld in huge, unmanageable conglomerates. Obama’s reform bill was aimed at fixing this problem, ending the horror of too big to fail and the possibility of taxpayer money going to bail out an investment house’s bad gambles. The problem with the bill was that it didn’t have it’s own financing attached and subsequently it has never been enforced. This was a perfect instance of the Right, who didn’t want the bill, outfoxing the Left, which was desperate for it.
All of the failures in the three bills outlined above are examples of Obama not being politically astute enough to get his way and the Democrats not being organized enough or gutsy enough to force their way, despite majorities in both houses of congress.
Once he lost the majority in the House, Obama was completely hamstrung. He did not show the political acuity and his party did not show the organization or the determination to push through any significant legislation and this is what has hurt them the most. Obama has been accused of not addressing the most serious problem facing his administration, jobs. It’s true that he didn’t address the problem, except for the Stimulus bill, as quickly as he should, but when he did address it, the Republican’s, instead of jumping on board and tying to help the nation recover, stuck to their avowed policy of doing nothing to help Obama get re-elected again, even if it meant holding to a completely obstructionist position on job creation. So a jobs bill, aimed at alleviating the problem and sponsored by Obama has sat unaddressed on the House floor for over a year.
Obama’s biggest failures, however, have involved both the war in Afghanistan and Constitutional freedom as it has been practiced in this country for the last two hundred years.
Obama closed down the war in Iraq rather quickly and the Iraqis made sure that it was definitive. That’s great. It should have happened years before but everyone was worried about what would happen after we left. The answer was simple – chaos. The same thing is gong to happen when we leave Afghanistan. Anyone who doesn’t see this is blind. So what are we hanging around for? It’s absolutely obvious that no matter when we leave, there is going to be chaos there. The troops we are training, are now killing our own troops. Do we think this is going to change if we hang around a few more years? Are we as brute stupid as we seem? Get out now, Mr. President, today, before we lose more boys and spend more money. We will get nothing out of this war, just like we got nothing out of Iraq and we can hang around until we’re blue in the face but that’s not going to change one iota.
The second and most serious accusation against Obama’s presidency is his seeming inability to see that his internal and security policies are robbing the American people of their human and constitutional rights. I’m not even going to address Guantanamo. Obama didn’t start it and frankly, I think he just doesn’t know how to shut it down. I don’t see an answer to it so I really can’t justify complaining about it, but there is a hell of a lot else to find fault with.
Ever since 911, two administrations have been slowly eroding American freedoms in the name of security. This is a betrayal of everything this country stands for. We got to be this nation by standing up on our hind legs and fighting for what we believed in. Now we quake in fear and give away our rights just so these bad men with beards will leave us alone. The answer is not to hide behind layers of security that erode our freedoms and turn us into “1984” but to go out and kill the terrorists. In this Obama and his team has been uniquely successful but at the same time he has supported legislation that ripped away our rights and exposed us to all manner of personal and private invasions. I am speaking specifically but not only of NDAA which proposed to allow the military to arrest American citizens, on American soil and their detention indefinitely, without charge or trail. This piece of legislation, which is the most unconstitutional bill I have ever seen, is of course, being challenged in court.
The fact of the matter is, that the uproar over terrorists has been so overwrought by our last two administrations that it would be a joke if it weren’t so costly an error. Yes, no question, a bunch of Saudi Arabians attacked the World Trade Towers in 2001 and thirteen years later we are still flinching. Since then, we have had more people killed in this country by chopstick assault, than we have by foreign terrorists. Sure we have had domestic terrorists, but tapping phones and the Internet and putting in place, “Big Brother,” type legislation, hasn’t led to the arrest of any of them. Until we find out how to get into their heads, and that will be a true disaster for our freedoms, we will just have to learn to disarm them another way. Maybe by making it harder instead of easier for insane people to buy guns.
The fact is that freedom entails certain risks and certain perils. If it didn’t, it probably wouldn’t be wroth preserving. It’s time Obama and the fearful Democrats leaned that. It’s one thing to kill bin Laden in Pakistan, it’s quite another to spy on a whole nation here. One doesn’t lead to the other. When we give up our freedoms because we’re afraid of the terrorists, they win.
Obama is currently lending his support to the prosecution of Bradley Manning and Julien Assange. He’s wrong. Right now this country needs as much transparency as it can get and both those guys have tried to make that happen. Without whistle blowers, leaders have no accountability and without accountability we have dictatorship not democracy. It’s time for Obama and the Democrats to get off their butts and support these two persecuted men for what they are doing for the rest of us.
So, yeah, Obama and the Democrats have a lot to answer for. Not as much as Romney and the Republicans but a not so insignificant amount. I think it’s time they acted like men and delivered on the promises they made to get elected, and that they were elected to provide.