The Republicans Take The House
No matter how you spin it, this week's gavel exchange at the House of Representatives was a humiliating event for President Barack Obama. His steady fall from grace, reaching a high water mark this week, makes Obama seem either incompetent, naive, or arrogant. At the end of the day, the president brought this on himself. Like most black Americans, I most especially want to defend and stand by this president, but a truthful and colorblind assessment of his overall performance leaves me disappointed. In 2012, the GOP will need to run someone with real humanity, real gumption and real intellect. All qualities I've no doubt the present has, but most of which he seems incapable of displaying.
I suppose the best I can hope for
is the Republicans end up being at least as arrogant as the Democrats. At the end of the day, I presume these folks all do themselves in. My heart sank when Speaker of The House Nancy Pelosi—of whom I am not a fan—handed Minority Leader John Boehner the speaker’s gavel (as Boehner had done for her four years before). I am saddened not for the president, not for Democrats who, divided, distracted, disorganized, un-united morons they are, surely had this coming. I am saddened for us, for America. Saddened to see how utterly gullible and ridiculous we are to think this crowd of self-serving corporate whores and a smattering of crackpot tea partiers—not one of whom has articulated a single, reasonable alternative to Obama’s agenda—are somehow the answer to the nation’s historic woes.
The truth is, for the most part, Obama was right. Everyone knows
this, most especially the GOP professionals. Obama was right on
the stimulus, but made it too small trying to appease
Republicans. An economic meteor is about to destroy all life on
planet earth, but, out of political concern, Obama negotiated
the size of the nuke we sent to destroy it. The remedy was too
small, and thus the president got blamed, anyway, for the
economic mess that was the Republicans’ own doing.
Obama was right on health care, but gutted it of its
effectiveness chasing a handful of Republican votes. He got
none, and most of health reform's tangible benefits won't kick
in until 2014. Obama was right on the auto industry bailout, which were
successful, loans repaid early and with interest, yet Obama is
still being pilloried for his “massive bailouts,” likely even by
some of the several millions—with an “m”—of workers whose jobs—in
the auto industry and in the industries that supply to and
support it—he saved. He was right on Iraq, but gets no credit.
He’s been right on Pakistan, continuing the unpopular drone
attacks and surveillance because he knows—as do we all—the
Pakistani government is a house of cards. He’s been right on
Afghanistan, a thankless, no-win quagmire George W. Bush
mismanaged that now requires more investment than is politically
expedient. The president was right on Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, on
Supreme Court nominees Sotomayor and Kagen, on Iran and North
Korea, on trade deals with China and the new nuke deal with Russia, on the debt
ceiling.
But he fails every single political test. He saved America from
a second Great Depression, but that’s all lost in the noise of
ignorant people demanding tax cuts as the nation teeters (still)
on the edge of anarchy and economic ruin. Called, by some, a
brilliant politician, the president seems painfully inept at politics.
It is either his humility or his arrogance that prevents him
from taking a bow. George W. Bush never stopped bowing. Arguably
and provably the worst president in U.S. history, George W. Bush
was either a brilliant politician or surrounded himself with
brilliant politicians who kept the American people from
noticing—for eight whole years—how empty the milk carton was.
Our current president has surrounded himself with men and women
who seem to do the exact opposite: paint an extraordinary,
once-in-a-generation leader as inept and ordinary. He is
neither. But you’d never know it.
President Obama’s reluctance to investigate obvious and provable crimes by the Bush administration will be rewarded with likely dozens of nuisance subpoenas from Representative Darrell Issa, a sniveling dweeb who makes absolutely no secret of his intent to investigate the Obama White House in an unending fashion, using the House subpoena powers for political purposes. Issa recently called the president, “one of the most corrupt presidents in modern history,” a completely ridiculous charge. None of the president’s most ardent detractors (including even the most racist, out there, whack-job Obama-hating Tea Partiers) have ever called him corrupt. Yet Issa is preparing to waste perhaps millions of dollars on witch hunts, skulking through the White House dumpster looking for dirt with which to politically embarrass the president. And the American people—nitwits that we are—made this possible.
At the end of the day, the presi-
dent brought this on himself.
Like most black Americans, I most especially want to defend and
stand by this president, but a truthful and colorblind
assessment of his overall performance leaves me disappointed.
The president’s accomplishments are routinely outshone by what
comes across as a brick-like disassociation from the realities
of beltway politics. The president seems to have no gumption, no
fire. Meanwhile, the Republicans have brazenly obstructed his
every move—even initiatives of their own the president has
embraced. They’ve forced the president to water down every
important piece of legislation, backing him off real reform. And
he has allowed this to happen, astonishingly, even when he had a
60-vote “super” majority in the Senate. The president could have
walked every single bit of his agenda straight through Congress
but instead chose to put bipartisanship before the needs of the
country.
The administration’s main motive, so far as I can tell, for not
skipping, gleefully, up to Capital Hill and ramming their
progressive agenda through was a concern for political cover.
They didn’t want to own it, own the risky, big-ticket
legislation on the president’s ambitious agenda. It simply
amazes me that these very smart men and women did not see, could
not see, or could not make the president understand that, no
matter what, he would end up owning his legislation anyway.
Watering down important, landmark legislation in the name of
politics was just sin. Sin the president is now paying a high
penalty for as the impatient, gullible, ignorant, and largely
racist public now stupidly reward the Republicans for doing
absolutely positively nothing, handing power back to the
same group of morons who got us into this mess in the first
place.
His steady fall from grace, reaching a high water mark with this
week’s gavel handover, makes Obama seem either incompetent,
naive, or arrogant—dismissing sound advice. There’s just no good
way to spin the president’s bizarre failure to man up against
evil, yes evil, men and women who routinely put politics ahead
of the American people. It’s as if the president just doesn’t
get it: these people hate him. It’s personal. He might as well
have gone on and gotten things done. If that made him a one-term
president, so be it. But at least he’d be a one-term president
with historic achievements that changed the course of American
history. Now, should he fail to win reelection, he’ll be a
one-term president who got his butt kicked all over Capital
Hill. It’s lose-lose.
Many have expressed a concern that Obama might be a little too
much like Jimmy Carter. Like Obama, Carter got a massive amount
of important legislation through Congress. Carter was hardly
weak. He was a shrewd political operative who knew how to work
both sides of the political aisle. But he is remembered not for
those achievements but for the seeming unending saga of the 50
U.S. citizens taken hostage in Iran. Today, it is the hope
Barack Obama represented that has been taken hostage. And the
president comes across not so much like Jimmy Carter as like
George H.W. Bush, whose disconnection from the nation’s economic
woes and his inability to convincingly display gumption of any
sort made him appear to be a kind of non-human that Carter’s
warmth and humanity eclipsed in a political contest.
The worst thing the GOP could do is run an iceberg like Mitt
Romney or an airhead like Sarah Palin against Obama. But New
Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s searing honesty, which he wears
like a hood ornament on a Bentley, would damage the president
perhaps beyond repair. The president’s base of eager,
starry-eyed youth has seen him, again and again, get rolled by
Republicans simply because Obama won’t or can’t get his pants
dirty in the playground. Christie, a cross between Tom Bossley
and Tony Soprano, is the anti-Obama: smart, intellectual, but
exuding the kind of strength and conviction the president only
claims to have. Christie says he’s not running, but the GOP
needs someone like him to contrast Obama’s aloofness. They need
to find someone substantially less cranky than John McCain, but
someone who, like McCain, Democrats and independents don’t hate.
Someone with real humanity, real gumption and real intellect.
All qualities I've no doubt the present has, but most of which
he seems incapable of displaying.
Christopher J. Priest
9 January 2011
editor@praisenet.org
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