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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 12/11/09

Obama's Squandered Presidency

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Message Jon Faulkner

After Reagan and Bush the elder, came Clinton who didn't inhale. Afterwards the radical right found their champion in a particularly dense, immoral simian, named George Bush. Junior bumbled into office nefariously and deceptively. Progressively inclined Americans are now met face to face with the grim reality that perhaps no progressive presidential contender is ever going to come forward. At least not one with a chance of being elected. Obama was thought to be such a man until, after his election, his embracement of progressive ideals were revealed as little more than an election ploy.

Obama flew to Norway where he picked up his Nobel Peace Prize, and $1.4 million in cash. His exquisite timing, with his announcement that he's authorized the deployment of 30,000 more American troops to Afghanistan, will surely stand as one of the great hypocrisies of our times. If he were an honorable man, he would have refused the prize, and at least defended the significance of the Nobel. But Obama chose to cheapen it, very much like he's cheapened the votes of the millions of progressive Americans who helped put him in office. Ronald Reagan, acting in the role of president, had more credibility than Obama.

Congressional Democrats, eager to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, have back pedaled on health care until any bill with a chance of passing will be another resounding victory for health care lobbyists. And to think, the health care industry had actually worried that a health care bill, coming from a democratic majority in Congress, might impact their outrageous profits. Obama has clearly demonstrated, in a years time, his inability to lead. The health care industry can hardly believe its good fortune, as the closer the democratic House and Senate come to passing some kind of health care legislation, the more profit the private health care industry stands to gain.

Obama is very busy undermining the goals the progressive community sought by his election. The republicans, anxious to regain the congressional majority, and get Sarah Palin or her equivalent elected as president, are attacking the soft underbellies of the shameful cowards that make up a Super Majority in Congress. The House and Senate leaders are so frightened by the eventuality they may be expected to make a decision they appear as tiny figures seen from the wrong end of a telescope - their comparatively tiny voices squeaking in dismay. With no leader to encourage them, they have predictably abandoned ship.

They shrink to inconsequence when a rising star of the Democratic Party, like Alan Grayson, the Junior Representative from Florida, wins recognition by the sharp contrast he defines between himself and his frightened colleagues who tip toe softly, and may or may not carry, a fly swatter. Representative Grayson has no problem standing on the House floor and openly referring to republicans as knuckle dragging Neanderthals. Grayson doesn't mix metaphors or message when confronting republican troglodytes for whom he pays not the least respect. Just as the republicans daily disparage liberal (read immoral, traitorous, wife beaters, perverts and every unwashed malcontent ever seen tipping a paper sack disguised as a bottle of cheap wine) democrats.

Leading by example, in Grayson's case, has been a largely thankless task. Imagine Nancy Pelosi, or Harry Reid, growing a spine. Now imagine talkative soup that suggests the next spoonful is better than the last. The Democratic Super Majority, terrified and rendered helpless by its new found power, rolls onto its back and hopes the republicans will forgive its unexpected and unsought new powers.

Today's Congressional Democrats are desperately reaching for some comfortable purgatory where edging further right is not acceptable to their base, but any leftward leanings will anger the republicans. So they compromise, as it were, by floating like gas filled balloons that are easily smacked back and forth across the middle. Obama is the heir apparent of these new, gaseous democrats.

It has always been known that politicians come and go along with their half baked agendas. Private enterprise has been set back a time or two but always re-emerges in pursuit of the same goals ii has always had. Greed, after all is changeless, and is a prime motivator. Obama, the first legitimately elected president in eight years, had an opportunity to bring meaningful change to the socio, economic culture of the U.S. He had an opportunity to reverse some of the worst damage his predecessor caused.

But as cautious and hesitant as a tortoise, Obama has squandered the opportunity that fortune so generously gave him. Such opportunity is rare, and will not present again in the foreseeable future. Progressives, growing ever more cynical and jaded, will not be flocking to the polls in the numbers they did in 2008. Why should they? If the republicans could float George Bush into the presidency for two terms, there is every possibility that Sarah Palin, and hubby Todd, may not be far behind.

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Jon Faulkner is a licensed Master Mariner. He has long considered the conservative republican mindset a form of mental illness. He lives in northern Maine.
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