It's hard to own the disappointment I feel over our moderate corporate Democratic President. The whole Obama phenomenon brings up memories from my distant past: the good-looking guy who talks real good, whose line you don't buy immediately but whose charm is so dazzling that he gradually convinces you that this time it will be different.
Yeah. Right. Really different.
What the current administration is giving us is minimal change. And not because the President hasn't had the time to do better; if he had truly wanted to make fundamental change, he would have gone in there fast and done his own version of shock and awe in the first hundred days. And not because he didn't realize how mean all those Republicans can be, either; Obama knew what he was getting into, and if he didn't, then he was as unprepared for the job as his opponents said he was. I see so many people now -- many of them men, interestingly enough -- tangled up in an almost school-girlish, co-dependent, apologetic relationship with this President. As though "poor baby" should be tacked onto the end of every description of his failures.
I must admit, I never thought all that much about Obama to begin with. I voted for him because the alternative was unthinkable, but his policies on education reform and health care reform seemed much too corporate-friendly for me (no single payer for health care, pro-merit pay/standardized testing/charter schools in education) and I really had to hold my nose to pull the lever.
But even I didn't think his administration would match the Bush administration in Wall Street bailout dollars, nor did I think he would cave on any meaningful financial industry reform. Couple the pro-privatization tone of the Race to the Top competition (the states that close the most public schools down and replace them with privatized charters win the money), the half-assed mortgage relief act that seems to have caused more harm than good, the jive he has been feeding the gay community on DaDt, and the corporate whores he appointed to the Department of Agriculture (only former Monsanto employees wanted), and you have the makings of a very corporate-friendly administration that pays lip service to liberal causes like health care reform or financial reform, but only if those reforms are corporate-friendly.
I am glad to see Ms. Williamson articulate her disappointment at Huffingtonpost. I do hope the jive turkeys at the White House are reading the blogs, because there are a whole bunch of liberals who voted for this guy in 2008 who intend to stay home in 2010 and 2012.
Why vote for a Democrat when all you get is Republican-lite?
It will be interesting to see how many Daily Kossacks and other liberal shills peel away from President Obushma before the midterms and how many keep apologizing for the same corporate-friendly policies that hammered Bush for.
No comments:
Post a Comment