On the Contrary

Do you get the feeling that we are drifting?  I think the Obama drop in the polls reflects that feeling.  We had high hopes to change the direction of the nation and yet we seem to be drifting along on the currents of left over Republican policies.  I will grant you that the devil is in the details of change, but real change has not happened.  Let’s look at a few of our failed attempts:

• First and foremost was the financial crisis.  So we bailed out the banks to save them from collapsing and they paid us back by raising the rates on credit cards, not lending, and there has been no real change in the way they do business.  We are swept along on the current of the status quo.

• We enacted a stimulus package which was not focused on real programs for a new America, but a collage of spending in too many directions that has not been effective at either stopping the loss of jobs or investing in a new direction.  We just invested in the same tired old projects that have gotten us nowhere.

• We had high hopes for turning our war policies around.  Yet we are simply ramping up to spend another decade in a very backward part of the Middle East with no real end game.  We continue to waste vast sums of money and American lives in a region of the world that has little strategic value and we need the money at home.

• The end of torture, hooray! But then the cover-up continues.  Secrecy under the guise of protecting national security becomes supreme again, and we consider indefinite detention.  This is not change; it is a kinder, gentler, supremacy of the Executive Branch.  When will we be grown up enough to deal directly with the facts our government seems so intent on protecting us from?

• With much fanfare the House passed a climate bill with cap and trade policies for controlling carbon dioxide emissions.  But it was so watered down to protect coal interests and to court conservative Democrats from the Midwest that the real change was wrung out of it.  The Senate, it would appear, can’t even stomach this anemic bill.  So we continue to buy subsidized gasoline and nothing changes.

• Health care reform is lost in the myriad details of trying to hold on to the old system.  The rest of the industrialized world has figured this out and yet here we sit trying to reinvent the wheel.  On this one, the whole enterprise begs for leadership.  It needs someone to standup and say simply a single payer system, reconfigured to incentivize savings, paid for with a surcharge on our taxes (we all share), and a role for private insurance as an extra to the basic coverage.  But instead it is left up to the lobbied Congress who thinks in the last century to devise a plan.

So we are adrift, falling back into old ways and falling further behind as a nation.  Unemployment grows, the middle class loses more ground, the mortgage crisis continues, but the market had a surge so we are saved, or so we are told.  I will give President Obama his due.  He has changed many things, but where we really need him, he has failed.  That need is a vision of the future and a detailed road map to get there.  His fatal flaw was thinking that Congress, that bastion of the status quo and easy money, could rend change from within.  So he gave them a rough road map and said go to it.  They changed the destination back to the same trip we have been on for all these years.

If we have any hope of a future, one that our children are better off than we are, then we don’t need just leadership, but bold leadership.  Instead of allowing the give and take of Congress to gang rape an idea into submission, the policy and its details must be laid out in stone.  What works is no longer debatable.  Where is the line in the sand where doing any less will not only be unacceptable, but seen as counterproductive?  Where is the courage to say no if the plan is not enough?  Where is the courage to tell people what they don’t want to hear and push for policies that while not popular, will work for our future? He promised he would ask for sacrifice and then we are asked for none.   If you want alternate energy and get off our addiction to oil, then price gasoline like the rest of the world and use the tax to move us on.  It isn’t popular, but it will save us.

President Obama could take a lesson from Abraham Lincoln.  He was never very popular during his presidency and he had to make hard decisions that did not endear him with the electorate.  He did what he had to do, in his mind, to save a nation.  And he was one of our greatest Presidents.  President Obama faces that dilemma.  Does he want to be a popular president who just scratches the surface of change, and in effect leaves us no better off than we are?  Or does he want to risk his popularity by standing firm for what will take this nation in a new direction; to lead us, to educate us, to convince us?  To date it would seem that he is pursuing the former and tricking himself that it will make a difference.  In the meantime, we are just drifting.