Obama and Expectations on His Administration

Here are a few random thoughts I've had recently regarding our current President and some of the reactions I've been hearing recently...mostly on TV. Which is surprising given how little TV I really watch nowadays. Anyway, what I'm about to say may actually be a bit of a pot-stirring thing. It's controversial. It's opinionated. And I very well remember what a fraternity brother we named Gomer told me: it's pointless to discuss religion or politics with anyone, because you're never going to change minds. Well, I've already broken the rule about religion, so why not go for broke?

So when I had some random thoughts relating to the current administration, I figured, why not?

I've read and heard quite a bit of the bubbling criticism against Obama and his administration's proposals lately. There's quite a bit I don't think that the American people take into account when they're venting.

First, Obama often acts as a figurehead in these situations. It's easy to pin the blame on the President...he is, after all, the President. But do you remember that there are three branches to government? It was put in place to act as checks and balances. Granted, they don't seem to work very well much of the time, but the point is that there isn't a lot the President can do without oversight, ideally by Congress. Things we can blame on the President: his plans, his initiatives, and things he says and does in public to present himself to the people in a certain light. Things we can't blame: anything that has to be vetted by Congress, and does.

Second, the government is supposed to be for the people. It's an interesting system we have here in that we have a nation of people who like to believe they're part of a democracy and most are too ignorant to realize we're not.

No, not because the government keeps us down.

It's because the founding fathers, both to keep power with wealthy landowners and to belay fears that common people were too stupid to govern themselves, set us up with a representative republic. A democracy means you can vote legislation and have a say in the law. A representative republic means we have people sent in to do it for us by proxy, hopefully in our best interest.

If you want something changed, it means getting people in power that have your interest at heart. Good luck with that, though. Most of our representatives spend more time raising money and campaigning than actually doing their jobs.

Third, the expectations put on Obama were huge. Bush (and his contemporary Congress) sent the nation into a war that cost several times what it would have cost to end hunger and housing debts for our population. After the country got fed up with his BS...let's face it, regime changes occur when everyone finally gets tired of the current BS from the current administration...they handed a shovel over to Obama and told him to fix it, ignoring the fact that it isn't just this one guy that can "fix" everything. Congress needs to get their collective heads out of that tunnel called the rectum and get on track to fix things.

Fourth, health care. After my surgery,...oh hell, before my surgery...it didn't take a genius to figure out that health care isn't in the best of shape. One of the few things I HAVE been lucky with is holding a job with decent health coverage...and it was still and major PITA to keep things straight. You'd have to be a bloody moron not to see how the insurance companies and hospitals play games with each other and that in turn ends up pinching doctors and patients in the middle.

Now we have people, usually conservative Republicans, decrying how this would ruin everything to have government-backed healthcare.

It's interesting to me in that the few areas in the US that try managed healthcare seem to fail, while I don't hear much about Canadians running across the border for our healthcare and Britain has a fairly successful national healthcare system. The brilliant scientist Stephen Hawking credits their healthcare system for saving his life.

I have read stories about Americans getting decent healthcare by flying to India, China, Europe...as well as jumping the border to Canada for prescriptions.

Others point out that insurance companies can't compete against a government business. I don't understand why the post office is failing while I have packages delivered by UPS and FedEx. NASA is now having the space race outsourced to private companies seeking the X-Prize. And burglars and muggers have always competed with the IRS.

I really think that a lot of the anger slowly snaking through media reports at Obama is a combination of "I told you so's" and expectations that were set too high. We're in a deep deep pit as a country. It's taking time to re-emerge. In the meantime, we have Americans too busy blaming someone for their own problems.

Now, to be sure, we had lots of help getting into troubles. We had a lot of companies that should have known better encouraging us to get into trouble. We have a lot of companies that continue to keep us in trouble. And I'm no exception to being put into thumbscrews; watching bills and trying to keep them paid on time is slowly increasing my body pains and aches and there are times where I just sit and wonder how I got myself into such a mess and whether there's any light at the end of the tunnel. But at the same time, we collectively helped dig this pit.

• We sat passively by and allowed ourselves to be screwed.
• We obsessively followed football and NASCAR stats instead of Congressional debates.
• We voted for the pretty, the well spoken, the superficial that knew what strings to pluck when they wanted a congressional seat. And that was just the tiny percentage that voted for their representatives.
• We had huge turnouts follow the circus of the stars for voting. Er, the Presidential elections. We all rally around to get "our guy" in. There are two branches we have some kind of say in who gets a seat...one guy that gets his face on TV the most isn't the one with the most influence, people. And yet this is the election that slightly more than usual (and the usual is nearly zilch turnout, as far as I can tell).
• Our population is more concerned with who's voted out of the Big Brother house than whether or not their representative knows what the hell they're voting on.
• We elected...twice, supposedly...a President that was a failure in business so many times over and funded by his father and by foreign oil interests, a cokehead and one-time heavy drinker, a man who declared we were doing God's will when we attacked Iraq, a man with little regard for law, for the constitution...we reelected him. And this man also coincidentally took about a 1/3 of his presidency as vacation time. And he become that rally point for fundamentalists across the country. How did that happen!?
  

Obama is an intelligent man. He may be the geekiest president we've had since Thomas Jefferson. The thing we may have going for us is not only the ability to properly pronounce the word "nuclear" (why didn't that scare other people when the guy that controlled our nukes couldn't properly pronounce the word?), but also that he understands one of the most potent ways to be an effective leader: surround yourself with smart people and listen to them.

Some of the most successful people in business and power have followed that formula. While I doubt that Obama can save the country economically within his term, I am hopeful that he can at least turn the boat a little in the right direction. In the meantime...we're in for one bumpy ride.

Excuse me. I have to go forage for bologna. I think it's the only thing we have in the pantry right now. Except for some cat food...nah...bologna.