Obama gets to drive the bus, but can he do it?
by Bob Hoig, Publisher
Midlands Business Journal
After years of second-guessing President George W. Bush, our new president, Barack Obama, and his congressional Democrats at last get to navigate international crises via the windscreen rather than the rear view mirror.
Seeing how Obama, in the driver’s seat since January, is floating above, around and through really vital issues similar to those Bush handled — mostly to Obama’s dissatisfaction — one wonders if some newfound Obama modesty awaits.
It should, because his reactions so far to serious crisis prove he has a lot to be modest about.
This writer would mention indecision to the point of stalling over an Afghanistan strategy, while our troops are fighting and some dying.
Likewise, no profile in courage goes with his cozying up to rogue dictators who menace the U.S. – Ahmadinejad, Chavez, Zelaya in Honduras, to mention a few. Neither has his ducking away from freedom fighter groups in Iran and Venezuela and most recently in Tibet, whose leader the Dalai Lama is currently persona non grata in the Oval Office.
In its own spotlight is Obama’s affinity for spending billions to trillions on counter-intuitive programs such as stimuli, which can’t be shown to work, and for the chump change cash-for-clunkers which gave off an illusion of working, but only shifted limited benefits from one month to another, disillusioning many in the process.
On health care, Obama seems incapable of producing a bill with specifics, seeming to prefer handing blame for failure off to Democrats in Congress. This reflex action to avoid blame seems to go back to his penchant as a legislator to simply vote “present.”
Here is an aside, but those 1,000 page health insurance bills coming out of House and Senate committees seem to encourage all the things that U.S. corporate CEOs get blitzed about. That would be corporate fuzziness or worse, saddling the public with financial mumbo jumbo. With Congress itself, no problem?
Remembering candidate Obama’s lustiness for the role of the “anti-Bush” might excuse a certain twinge of Republican “schadenfreude” – German for finding pleasure in the pain of others. That’s pettiness and we oppose it, but it’s hard to argue that Obama’s persona — at once arrogant and naïve — doesn’t invites it.
We think especially of candidate Obama’s know-it-allness over our military’s toppling of Saddam Hussein. “Wrong, wrong, wrong!” up to the point of our winning.
Democrats don’t much like to recall Saddam. But the run-up to his ouster might be instructive in handling another dictator just like him, Iran’s Ahmadinejad.
Parallels include Saddam’s threats and bluster. Europe’s and America’s endless recitals of his atrocities to no purpose. His using poison gas on his own Kurdish population. His refusing to cooperate with UN inspectors. The 17 UN resolutions against Saddam. The western hopes that he would stop demanding the destruction of Israel and “The Great Satan,” us.
Finally George W. Bush and America’s armed forces did something liberals can’t understand. He stopped talking and acted.
Substitute Iran for Iraq and Ahmadinejad for Saddam Hussein. Toss in some of the other crises that Bush dealt with such as the economic implosion after the dot.com stock market bubble achieved under Bill Clinton burst and the liberals hand-wringing over common sense issues of how to get city-saving information from the worst of the 9/11 terrorists.
The suspicion watching Obama respond to stress is that he is baffled and that what goes around comes around.
On the hottest issue, Afghanistan, that country can no longer be simply a stage prop for Obama and the Democrat leadership in the House and Senate to gild as the “good war.”
Something there needs doing.
October 2009
