I cannot imagine a worse job than being President of these Untied States in these most trying of times. President Barack Obama has been under siege from every side for the entirety of his time in office. The poor guy just cannot do anything right. Passing health care legislation, wrestling 25 billion out of BP, turning around the auto industry and his many other accomplishments are simply ignored. The good is simply not good enough. In spite of his many courageous acts the common wisdom prevails that he is not tough, not all up in the Kool-Aid of the opposition. A notion complicated by the fact that those who oppose him are often on his home team.
Not tough enough? The guy is made of steel. Governing this wild kingdom of a nation is like a never ending episode of Survivor. Every week we send our leader into a shark tank with a bucket of bloody mackerel around his neck. Then when by some miracle he manages to come back alive with enough fish to feed the team we scream: "What? No tuna? No orange roughy?" "Is that the best you can do"? We moan, we wail, we shake our fists!! "Should a gave those sharks a what for!!" We cry. Then we bait him up again and send him back into the tank.
The recent hand wringing over the temporary tax cut deal is a true case in point. The president does not preside over only like minded citizens. He must govern for us all. I agree with Bernie Sanders on principle, but I applaud the president's deft avoidance of a show down in crazy town. A whole lot of folks most pointedly do not agree with Mr. Sanders or with me for that matter as the last election made exceedingly clear. Obama saved the bacon of the unemployed, assured tax credits for children and college students and prevented the middle class from receiving a bill for 3,000.00 on January 1. We seem to think that he has some kind of magic wand that he is refusing to wave. There just simply is no such thing. He is the president not the King and God help him. Really I mean that, God ... please help him.
The seeming horror of holding the highest office in the land makes me wonder what all this jealousy is about among the members of the Senate. Those little green men (and a few women) who are the true hobgoblins of our eternal gridlock. Poor John McCain has been so eaten up with jealousy that he has shrunk to near invisibility. If a Senator shouts in the woods ... and no one hears him ... is he still a Senator? Much of the argument about the issue should be taken up with Cantwell or Murray or Baucus those who clamor for permanent estate tax cuts. There were 12 Democrat Senators prepared to vote against you and me and our dear determined Bernie if the president had not made this deal. The ground shifts under that chamber so relentlessly that it is a wonder some of the older members have not taken a tumble down the aisle. Mr. Schumer is a smart smart guy, but he holds only one perspective while Obama must behold them all.
One of my biggest complaints (and there were so very many) about the Bush administration was that he seemed to care not a whit about those on the left side of the electorate. He did not seem to be my president. He did not hear my voice or care about my values and it hurt my damned feelings. It also demonstrably hurt the country.
I hear a constant refrain about Republicans. It is argued that they are pure and always get their way due to an admirable lock step in their party gait. The Republicans are finger pointers not problem solvers and I do not envy their approach to politics. The fact is they did not do much governing last time around. They did plenty of war starting and marriage defending, but, very little actual governing. There is a reason for that. Governing this nation is hard and truly thankless, but it needs doing. I most certainly do not want Democrats to start acting like Republicans. I absolutely never want to see Mr. Obama acting like Mr. Bush and if you do then I respectfully suggest that you go back on your meds.
I have great hopes for this president and for the future of this country. I am grateful to Bill Clinton, a man I have had my issues with, for stepping up and having Obama's back this week. It is something we are all going to need to do if we want progressive values to prevail in the end. We need to surrender this idea that political purity is the highest value. Good governance should be the goal. The problem with political purity is that it leads to purging on both sides of the equation. Can we really survive wave election after wave election without achieving the tiniest ripple of consensus? The notion that we lost in 2010 because the White House did not tack far enough to the left is simply unfounded. A struggling economy was not helpful, but every election is ours to lose and we lost because we did not support our team. Turnout among Democrats was terrible especially by the young and newly registered, the very folks whose future depends on the success of this president.
If we turn into the latte version of the Tea party threatening censure of all but the most purely progressive, this country will continue to be torn apart. Let's leave the wringing and the rancor to the Republicans. We are not a party known for its unity, but we are united in our desire to work for the common good and to bend the will of history toward justice. President Obama is not perfect nor is he a purist, but he is on our side. I for one intend to stand by his efforts on this mission near impossible. It is a tough job, but somebody's got to do it and so I pray may God bless him. Really, God please bless him, because God knows he is going to need it. And he is going to need us.
HuffPost TV: Howard Fineman Tells Keith Olbermann 'The Tea Party Won This Round' (VIDEO)
HuffPost TV: Howard Fineman On 'Hardball': 'Substance And Music' To Romney's Tax Deal Opposition
Compromise has already reached "the dirty word" level, so what's next? Anger, fear, and more anger. Governance will occur when one side achieves an superior position of blackmail which cannot be denied, and the public will rotate in and out of being held hostage in each situation.
That is what the future portends.
I have lived my entire life as an optimist, but am about to surrender to the growing realist yelling inside that warns to beware the gathering gloom. No single leader has a chance against the armies of the corporate minions - even our beloved President Obama.
Just plain wrong.
First, this country has been torn apart by the wealthy and powerful - via their workhorses: the republican party. So the issue is and has been that Dems have to restore fairness and justice to the rule of law and international affairs. This President and his enablers believe that we can go that mile down the road; one-eighth of an inch at a time. Problem is, we don't have 30 years to get there. We are hurtling toward 3rd world poverty levels and can't afford to beg for legislative approval from the repugs.
Budget Reconciliation is how the tax cuts got passed in the first place. For no good reason at all, that option was never on the table. Better to add another few hundred billion to the deficit and start underfunding social security instead of taking up the fight - more bipartisan p()rn.
Quit is all we get from this guy. And when the kids who put their hearts and souls into getting the man elected are disillusioned by the President's sellouts and stay home, you dump on them. And you believe that's productive?
You're attacking the wrong people. If there was a REAL candidate with a genuine agenda for change, the young (and others) will return in numbers. Until then, enjoy the extra room on the bandwagon.
Records set in turnout in 2008 (only behind 1972's turnout when the voting age was dropped to 18). If every election turnout is explained purely by what happened in previous ones, then you can get away with your "they never..." quip.
However, it is clearly fallacious to imply that everything is cyclical because 2008 proves it wrong. The young came out in droves in 2008 because they saw a leader they could believe in. If they still believed, 2010 wouldn't have dropped to lower than 2006.
The Easter Bunny isn't real, either. It's really OK to accept facts that you don't want to believe in.
"Cumulatively, these questions lead to a disturbing inference. The Milbanks and Penns of the world invest the time to spin these fables because they think that senior members of the administration hate liberals so badly, and are so desperate for compliments, that they will fall for praise from people that hate them and want them to fail. They hope that the administration will take their advice and destroy itself and the Democratic Party by adopting policies that harm the nation (by making already record income inequality even worse) and require Obama to betray his campaign promises. It’s hard to conceive of a nastier insult to the administration – they’re convinced that Obama and his senior staff are uniformly incompetent."
Liberals spent a lot of capital collecting a pound of flesh from the president, capital that would have been better spent trying to unplug the rank and file Republican from the most sophisticated group think matrix that is Fox News and talk radio whic programs them to allow their leaders to shamelessly stump progress completely against their own interest.
I totally agree we cannot be like the Tea Party who is so bent on ideological purity that they can care less about governing. They allow their leaders to cast unconscionable votes just to defeat Obama, and that's exactly what liberals did by demanding he defeat Republicans even if it meant hurting the unemployed.
Obama and the Democrats could have won most, if not all of these fights. They have had common sense and the majority of Americans on their side. I have considered myself an Obama supporter, even defending his compromises throughout the health care legislation saga, yet when I ask myself what risks he has taken politically to advance his agenda, I come up empty. The fact is, Obama has shown himself to be so incredibly risk-averse and afraid to offend that the credibility of his core principles and positions has eroded.
At this point, I give more credit to Pelosi and other members of Congress who more strongly advanced the Democratic agenda.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christine-pelosi/democrats-dilemma-fall-in_b_795389.html