It’s been a year since Barack Obama was elected this nation’s first African-American President..For many of us who didn’t like the path our country was taking over the previous eight years, his election was like a giant sigh of relief.
The country he inherited from his predecessor hardly resembled the country that had been handed over to George Bush. Instead of prosperity we had economic free-fall. Instead of respect around the world, we were seen with contempt. Instead of a country where citizens looked to the future and felt secure, we had seen a culture of fear cultivated.
A year might seem like a long time, but just like anything else, building or rebuilding something takes a lot more time and effort than destroying it.
At the same time, I have to admit that the hope I had a year ago has faltered quite a bit. To be fair, I don’t know that all of the blame for this can be shouldered by President Obama and the things that have disappointed me.
One of the benefits of living in the first-in-the-nation primary state is that we get quite intimate interactions with the candidates. Two local town hall meetings with then-candidate Barack Obama had impressed me quite a bit. He was a straight talker who didn’t create fairy-tales when he talked to people. He was honest that a President is not a dictator and if we believed in the policies and the vision he had for the country, we also needed to send people to Congress who would support that.
For the most part, that has happened. Yet we still seem to be fighting with ourselves.
The economy is not in recovery. The economic free-fall might have stopped, but there isn’t a recovery happening and I don’t see one happening for quite some time unless we change our ways. By “we” I mean the people of this country and not just the leaders who we’ve elected. For the sake of getting cheaper goods, we have sent millions of jobs overseas, primarily to our biggest creditor, the Chinese. It’s pretty hard to enact stricter trade regulations when the country you would like to raise tariffs against happens to hold the mortgage on the country and you’ll likely need them to sign off on more debt in the future.
If we want the economy to recover, we need a fundamental shift in our thinking that supports more jobs in this country. Instead of having eight pairs of shoes in your closet, maybe people could live with five that all are made in this country. A few weeks ago I needed socks. I spend a good deal of time in Wal-Mart looking for socks that said Made in the USA. I did finally find some, but It wasn’t easy and took a half hour. How much have we heard about unsafe products from China? You will get what you pay for and although no system is perfect, I have more faith in the regulations in this country weeding out most of the problems than in what is produced outside of this country.
Money has been thrown at big financial institutions, trying to prop them up. Money has been thrown at the auto industry, trying to prop them up. These problems, though, date back through the years. De-regulation is part of the issue. We have heard a lot in the last year or so about “too big to fail”. If a corporation is “too big to fail” then it is too big, period. We need to stop the mergers and break up corporations that are “too big to fail”. What if, instead of the “Big 3” automakers in Detroit, we had nine or even a dozen? What if each of those brands were actually separate corporations? Then even six could fail and we wouldn’t feel like the auto industry in this country was about to disappear.
Some of the money sent to these corporations have been paid back, but the bulk of it is gone with the taxpayers footing the bill. What if we had just allowed the corporations to disappear and put the money back in the consumer’s pocket? Perhaps that is what needed to be done - an economic system that wasn’t working needed to bottom out so it could be re-built.
Another huge problem in the puzzle is that so much of our economy is tied to oil prices. They go up, the economy will go down. My hope was to see more green energy making a dent. It’s only a year and I have seen a few signs of this, but it’s not as rapidly as I would like. I don’t believe our economy will truly recover until we are no longer dependent on foreign oil and the ups and downs of that market. I know ten years ago I saw fuel-cell vehicles on display by GM with the promise that these would be on the road in ten years. We’re there now - where are the vehicles?
I worry about the deficit, quite a bit. I get the concept that with the economy the way it is, we need to spend money to create jobs. I just don’t feel confident that it’s happening in the most economical way that benefits the most people. I look back at what Franklin Roosevelt did with the CCC back during the Great Depression and what was created by those men back then, and think we haven’t even come close to the same achievements and we have spent much more.
In a discussion a couple of days ago about Afghanistan, I said that I understood why the President was waiting to decide what to do. He is waiting to see what happens with the elections over there. I am not saying I agree with the delay and keeping our soldiers in suspense, but I understood why he was waiting. At the same time, after the poor care our soldiers have received courtesy of our government over the last eight years, I haven’t heard of any great strides made in the care of the veterans who have been injured both physically and mentally.
Then there’s health care, which epitomizes a lot of what’s wrong in this country. We need strong health-care reform that benefit’s the consumer, not the health-care insurance companies. In the name of bipartisanship, there were early concessions made. While many of us just saw that as useless, it seemed like it took those in Washington way too long to figure it out.
None of my criticism, though, means I would ever “switch sides”. As much as some don’t want to hear it, there is quite a bit of racism in the level of hated and obstruction directed at our President. I am not saying that everyone who disagrees with him is a racist. What I have seen are people who were politically moderate all of a sudden become rabidly against anything President Obama says and wants to do or does. These people seem to skewer reality even when the truth is pointed out to them in various ways. As someone once said, When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains--however improbable--must be the truth. Unfortunately, that seems to be the case in the deep-seeded hatred that seems directed toward our President that wasn’t even exhibited by these same people against President Clinton, and I thought that was bad.
The worst thing I could see me doing is losing faith enough to decide not to vote at all. I have thought about that. I have thought about just letting these people have the country they think they want and seeing how bad it would get. We wouldn’t be a democracy, we would be run by the corporations who are buying the candidates on the right. I have said more than once that in many ways, I regret having brought kids into the world. What’s being left to them is a horrible mess that I honestly believe will end with this country no longer a world power and no longer relevant to the rest of the world.
I had pragmatic hope a year ago. I still feel we are better off than if someone else had been elected (especially considering who would have been a heartbeat away from the Presidency), but I don’t have the same sense of optimism that we had really turned a corner both socially and in our policies with the election of Barack Obama.
