I want to buy into the program being outlined tonight by President Barack Obama, at least a good chunk of it (not the gas drilling or the veiled allusion to merit pay for teachers), but I am troubled by the nagging reality of the calendar.
Obama was sworn in as president three years ago. He entered office with one of the largest Congressional and Senate majorities in recent memory. Yet, he was unable to parlay this basic reality into anything more than an industry-friendly health plan and a fiscal stimulus that was too small by at least half.
Apologists will blame the Republicans, will point to their obstructionism. Fair, perhaps, but only to a point. Obama failed to understand that he owned the bully pulpit and an early approval rating that gave him a boat load of political capital. Rather than get into the trenches and fight for an aggressive implementation of a Rooseveltian agenda, he bowed to the false god of compromise and bipartisanship.
In doing so, he allowed the political moment to pass. The economy continued to sputter (at best) and the right wing regained its confidence, with a grassroots Tea Party movement empowered by lobbying money supplying the ground troops. The recession no longer was about Wall Street and deregulation, but about over-regulation and high taxes.
Republicans won back the House and gained seats in the Senate, leaving a president whose viewed compromise as more important than any ideology, which is another way of saying that principles are fungible.
The Obama presidency looked in trouble until the reality of the Republican primary contestants (a collection of liars, cheaters, lunatics and morons) set in. Obama likely will win another term, but I hold no hope that he will do anything but fiddle around the edges of the status quo. He is not a transformational figure, but another in a long line of corporate-friendly Democrats who will win the support of liberals and progressives because the alternative is worse.
That explains the speech we are watching tonight, one in which he has cobbled together an agenda from a menu of offerings designed to appeal to as much of the political class as he can. It is an agenda that is a mile wide and an inch deep and will do nothing to alter the basic structural problems we face.
- Send me an e-mail.
- Read poetry at The Subterranean.
- Certainties and Uncertainties a chapbook by Hank Kalet, will be published in November by Finishing Line Press. It can be ordered here.
- Suburban Pastoral, a chapbook by Hank Kalet, available here.
Hank Kalet 