It is 582 days until the 2012 Presidential Election and Barack Obama is in. With a fitting recycled logo and staff of elite consultants he's off and ahead of the field in the 2012 race for the White House.
Obama launches this effort amid much tumult and if not economic depression certainly a ubiquitous psychological depression in the minds of Americans. This malaise, albeit similarly acute in the 1970s, has for the first time (since professional polling began) shown more American's to be pessimistic about the idea that their children's future will be brighter than their own.
Since its passage the American public has consistently rejected Obama’s signature domestic accomplishment – most want Obama's health care reform repealed. Real unemployment as opposed to government numbers is around 18% frankly meaning those able to work are not, regardless of whether they are on the proverbial dole, disgruntled, underemployed, or have taken early retirement. The end result is these people are not producing and in a country where we love to spend, the math doesn’t look good.
On the international stage, although many are confoundingly reticent to admit Obama has engaged us in yet another “war” in the Middle East, there is consensus that he most certainly has had trouble extricating our troops from Afghanistan and Iraq. Moreover, this failure to deliver on a key campaign promise is magnified after another embarrassing and demoralizing gaff paralleling George W’s Abu Ghraib fiasco at the hands of the "rogue" US Stryker Team in Afghanistan. Additionally the ex constitutional scholar not only took direct marching orders from the UN, but didn’t even consult Congress before engaging in his “kinetic military action.” What a line!
The atmosphere is much different for Obama than it was in 2008. The national anxiety was palatable then, the Republicans and George W. Bush had to go, America was ready for change. Barack Obama and Co. hijacked that feeling and manifested it in campaign slogans, songs, and chants around the country, but after the last 2 1/2 years it is unlikely those bombastic slogans and soothing earth-blue tones will drum up the same command and euphoria they once enjoyed.
According to Marc Ambinder of the National Journal:
“The trajectory of Barack Obama’s presidency was supposed to be vertical. He would reform the way Washington worked, restore a sense of pride in government, and bolster the liberal nostrum that government can be effective, efficient, and helpful. He would reform health care and use his Democratic majorities to put a price on carbon. People would feel better.”
The fact is while Obama has served up a different dish than George W. Bush the diet is still the same; unhealthy bloated government sticking their hands in places they don’t belong. Unfortunately the crux of Ambinder’s hope that things would have changed in Washington, that somehow Americans after centuries of distrust for government would have some how come around to finding a “sense of pride in it” and that Obama with all the powers vested in him could convince anyone that “government can be effective, efficient, and helpful” in the face of a mountain of contemporary and historical evidence to the contrary is as naïve as it is benighted.
Obama will be a one-term president and he knows it.
No comments:
Post a Comment