ParisTampaBlog

Barack Obama was sworn in as this country’s 44th president on January 20, 2009. What happened on that day was something that I hadn’t believed possible, at least in my lifetime, that a “Black” would be living in the White House.

Even if he never did anything else as president this in itself, I thought, would go down in history as a huge accomplishment — Barack, Michelle, and their two children, Malia and Sasha, becoming rightful “owners” of the White House. What a thrilling message from a country of one time slave owners this sent to the world.

Also the swearing-in ceremony meant that George Bush was gone. This was good news for the country. While George Bush wasn’t at all a bad man, he was clearly a bad, probably terrible president, perhaps the country’s worst ever.

Bush lacked judgment, of what was possible and what was important. Witness his sophomoric attempt to replace Social Security with private retirement savings accounts. This was never going to happen and he wasted much of his first term of office promoting it.

But most of all Bush, without a realistic vision of his own for the country, quickly fell victim to the persuasive powers of the men about him, men with agendas of their own, in particular Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their neo-conservative mentors, and with their encouragement led us into long and futile warring in the Middle East, much as in Vietnam earlier, war still costing us more than we can afford, both in regard to our soldiers’ lives and our country’s wealth.

In addition, Bush, instead of trying to reign in the country’s increasing entitlement obligations, that which Republicans were supposed to do, created even larger, more unaffordable entitlements by his Medicare prescription drug Act of 2003.

However, the first black family to occupy the White House, while of huge importance, would not be enough to save the country from the wrong turns of the Bush years. Obama would have to do this himself.

For one, he would have to somehow stem the country’s rapidly expanding budget shortfalls while leading the country out of recession. On its face an impossible task in that increased Federal spending in the form of stimulus money seemed to be the only response available to him to stem the recession and accompanying job losses.

But if Obama had just limited himself to stimulus spending, sending hundreds of billions of Federal tax dollars to shovel ready work projects throughout the country, that, even meaning as it would higher budget deficits, might have been acceptable.

But Obama didn’t stop there, and here is where I most fault the president. For one he continued to expend our lives and treasure in futile war efforts, that which Bush called democracy building, both in Iraq and even more so in Afghanistan, in that country growing imprudently to say the least our already heavy commitment of dollars and soldiers.

For two, he put himself fully behind an ill-timed health care reform bill, not even of his own creation but that of Democratic politicians in the Congress. Obama was thereby committing the country to additional hundreds of billions of dollars in new deficit spending.

Needless to say none of the efforts of the first year of his presidency are going well. And worse, he is blaming others, most often the Republican leadership in the Congress for the failures. But is it party politics and party obstructionists that are most at fault?

Isn’t it rather the President’s highly risky commitment to old (war and entitlements) and new (health care reform) expenditures that is arousing the opposition, not just  from the Republicans, but also from some members of his own party, and most of all from large numbers of Independent voters, those who may very well now make up the country’s largest voting block, and who need, therefore, to be listened to.

After a year of passively accepting the will of a politically Left leaning Congress in regard to social welfare programs, as well as the will and positions of the congressional Right in regard to the so-called anti-terrorist wars in the Middle East and elsewhere in Africa and Asia, Obama ought now to turn his back on both groups and lead the country in directions of his own devising.

Clearly it’s just not enough to be the first black in the White House. Obama should follow the examples of earlier presidents, in particular Roosevelt and Truman, Reagan and Bill Clinton, and do what they did and take the country’s problems into his own hands, and stop relying on those whose primary concern is always their own political futures.

No longer should the President give the excuse that the problems he faces were not of his making, no longer should he wait for the leaders of the two parties in the Congress to come to him. He should go out to the people with ideas and plans of his own, plans to change the status quo both in regard to the war on terror (which he should end) and Federal entitlement obligations (which he should reduce), perhaps the two greatest problems that the country now faces. If he does this the politicians, for their own survival, would have to follow.