Amerika

The first person to speak gave the president a somewhat larger jolt than if the world’s heaviest man was in bed and gave his wife a Dutch oven. This first questioner, who the New York Times felt it necessary to point out is African-American ahead of the fact that she is a mother, military veteran, and chief financial officer, very bluntly said, “I’m exhausted of defending you, defending your administration, defending the mantle of change that I voted for.” She went on to state that “I’ve been told that I voted for a man who was going to change things in a meaningful way for the middle class and I’m waiting sir, I’m waiting. I still don’t feel it yet.”

In a way, this lady was expressing frustration that many who voted for Obama in 2008, and millions who did not, are feeling these days. Change was expected of this vibrant, young politician, and in a way, change was delivered in a fashion well below the expectations of many. – Technorati

While we at this blog are totally opposed to Leftist politics in all forms, and recognize that Obama is the least-experienced candidate to ever be elected to the presidency, we’re also realists.

Realists recognize that Obama does not deserve the current wave of critique coming his way because he has made significant steps toward realizing the platform he espoused. Here are his real problems:

• His platform was vague and broad. People remember “hope” and “change” and quietly projected into those whatever they wanted. They did not remember specifics, in part because if you run on a vague campaign like “hope” and “change,” you try to avoid them, and Obama’s team prudently did. Now the price must be paid for that evasion.
• The nature of liberals. Liberals are those who are convinced something is wrong with the world that must be fixed by human interaction. This is a never-ending quest; in a perfect world, liberals would invent reasons to be appalled and go on a jihad against these things. Obama cannot ever satisfy his audience because by definition they cannot be satisfied.

When you think about it, the limits to Obama’s success are the limits of liberalism itself. For him to go further than adopting socialized health care, he’d have to do things that would really let the cat out of the bag and show him to be even farther left than European socialism — at a time when European socialism is crumbling.

We’ve seen this pattern before. Both Clinton and Carter did their best to get big ideological progress accomplished early on, and then spent the latter halves of their presidencies hanging out and doing damage control. Liberal reform is never enough for its audience, and the audience will never be satisfied until it really goes over the top, which will have consequences in politics that the audience cannot understand.

Good luck, Barack Obama. We disagree with almost everything you’ve done, but here we say that plainly. We don’t snipe (as some on the right have done) and we don’t play victim (as some on the left are doing). We say plainly what we feel because anything else is disrespectful. Of all things, we believe politics must be founded in sane, respectful, reverent activity and not neurotic chatter, and for that reason this is how we articulate our minority views.

Tags: barack obama, bill clinton, jimmy carter, peak leftism