Obama After One Year

I thought about writing this article about a month ago but then I thought that in all fairness maybe I should wait a bit. I did. Today, January 19, 2010, I begin to write this and in a few hours the Massachusetts Senator election will be taking place and I am confident that a Republican will take it, which is unheard of in a Blue Democratic state. However, this is not about the elections but it is about President Obama's performance in the first year. In my opinion Mr. Obama deserves a solid F because in my eyes he failed miserably. I must say this is not an easy thing to say because I voted for President Obama and I really want him to succeed. However, so far, he did not.

Mr. Obama fails first and foremost because he ran on the message of change and that is why I give him an F. Because, essentially, change did not occur and business in Washington D.C. continued as usual. The government is moving too slowly if at all. The politicians are arguing and bickering about the most stupid and insignificant things. The rich is getting richer and the poor poorer. The White House is not listening to the people and completely ignoring them. The senators are trying to simply help themselves and not the American people. They are working for big companies who seem to be in control of everything. And this does not even begin to describe the whole picture.

Mr. Obama all of a sudden seems to have shut himself out and continues to live in this magical land where the Republicans will support his decisions. It seems to me that he is so in denial in what is happening in rural America and he is simply listening to some advisors who only want to win the 2012 re-election when the time comes. Therefore, they are already trying to make deals with senators and corporations to make sure that they and consequently Obama stays in power.

This fails on many levels because first of all it hurts the regular American who is trying to just get by. It allows the Republicans to attack the president. It also allows the Republicans to stop any sort of legislation that Obama is trying to pass. To this date, the Republicans did not vote on anything that President asked for. They have established already that they will not back him up on anything. They fail to see that they are hurting regular Americans by just blocking everything while lying and say this will help the country. How blocking every vote helps the country? If they have something better then please bring it to the table. If they have a productive opinion then they should announce it. However, sitting there complaining, blocking every bill, and not doing their work is not really productive. Some people are dying because these ignorant, greedy, selfish, rich politicians do not really care about them. Furthermore, trying to cut these business deals allows the Democratic senators to also just worry about their own re-elections, which are coming up in 2010 and not worry so much about what this country needs. Therefore, essentially it is the survival of the fittest and the people of this country are the ones who are being trounced a long the way.

Obama's agenda was, maybe is, certainly grand. He wanted to pull out of iraq, close down the prison in Guantanamo, provide universal healthcare, improve the economy, improve education, harnessing the power of new and alternative energy, increasing the trust in the government, and many more issues. In all honesty, these issues are big and cannot be solved in a year or even two and I applauded Obama on his aspirations.

The president started well and tried to tackle many tasks at one time. But then he started hiring people, that did not really promote a message of change, such as Timothy J. Geithner, Ben Bernacke, and Lawrence Summers. These men, to put it simply, are out of touch with the people and were always there to help out big companies. Nonetheless, The big companies started crumbling, the economy got worse and the answer was a bailout. While, I can never blame Obama for the economy, I must say the handling of it has not been ideal especially when he hired Bernacke who under his watch predatory mortgage increased and big corporations put our nation's economy on the brink of a total catastrophe. Bush appointed this man and he brought us in this mess to begin with! My conclusion is, if you ever worked with the Federal Reserve, which is not federal by the way, then you should not work for the government.

With healthcare, Obama did not really send a clear message to the people of what he is trying to do and therefore, the people never really responded. Thus, now people are listening to the Republicans and not the President. Furthermore, more and more he stopped talking about healthcare even though it is one of the major issues that he wanted to solve. His advisers concentrated on the politics of it and what can they to gain from it than to actually passing the law. Therefore, after several months of constant bickering we are nowhere with healthcare and it seems that nothing will change. What is more ugly about this is that we no longer are talking about healthcare but we are talking about insurance and that is a huge difference. Healthcare is free while insurance is not. Therefore, if we are talking about insurance, we are implying that a company must insure us and therefore we will be paying. Which means, that there has been a deal that has been done behind closed doors between the White House and the big health companies in order to pass this bill, which I doubt would be universal healthcare.

Then, there is Afghanistan, which I completely disagree in sending more troops because the time has come for us to leave this place no matter what position it is in. There are a lot of places that are very poor and harbor terrorists around the world that we did not invade. Afghanistan is not the first and it will not be the last either. But, leaving Afghanistan aside, Obama has not clearly stated when is he planning to exit out of Iraq. Things did stabilize in the country and yet we still have an expansive military base there, which is costing us trillion of dollars. I believe that if we started pulling out of countries, we are not supposed to be in, then terrorism against us will diminish without doing anything. What was the last terrorist act that was done against a country like Finland ? Japan ? Brazil ? Romania ? Australia ? These countries from first world to third world are not interested in being on every corner of the earth like us and therefore no one has a reason to attack them. We, however, stick our nose in everybody's business with invitation and without. We fight, on every corner of the earth because we are the world's police. George Washington said in his Farewell address that for the US to grow as a nation we must close our doors and work on our domestic issues. We did this for a long time and we did grow. I am not objecting to helping other nations in need but we must do this in collaboration with other countries and only when invited with a well-defined exit strategy.

It is great that President Obama want to unite this country as one nation, Democrats and Republicans. However, he needs to realize that it is not working and to stop doing that. He needs to shine some light on their destructive, yes destructive, behavior. Then he needs to bring the attack to them because I am frankly tired of them attacking the President for a reason or no reason. It seems that this is their strategy and some even think it is funny. Not only is he supposed to do that but also all the Democrats need to do that as well. Thus, whenever a Republican comes out with a lame attack on something the President said or proposed then the Democrats should fire back. But I am not talking about personal negative attacks that are pointless. I am talking about showing the truth to the people and showing how they are unhelpful. Sure, this is not constructive but it will be once the people of this country see the truth. Once the Republicans realize that their strategy is failing then, and only then, they will start cooperating.

My attack on the Republicans is not for personal issues but it is because they truly do not care at all about this country. If we look at the history we will see that the Republicans never wanted to have a middle class. Since the beginning of this we mainly had upper class, a very small middle class and the rest of the country was poor. The founding fathers were upper-class, rich people who controlled everything and the rest of the country was made of farmers and slaves. That continued through the civil war and World War I. This middle class did not start existing until Roosevelt, a Democrat, came to power. Furthermore, it was the Democrats that created all of the programs, such as Social Security, Welfare, and Medicare, that helped the Middle Class. But that is not the only problems with Republicans. They also try to scare the general public so we don't go to vote. If the general public does not vote, then they certainly will win elections. This is what happened before and will continue to happen if we do not pay attention. This country is made up mostly of Democrats and if the Republicans can scare the majority then they will win seats. This is a scare tactic and it is not generally an honorable thing to do but that is what they do. They will try to point their nasty guns and throw everything they got to smear their opponents just so they can get what they want. This is why, to me, Republicans are deplorable and this why we should attack them and not wait for them to attack us. This is not about right and left. This about right and wrong!

In conclusion, Obama's first year has not been so great. He is the leader of this country and he needs to lead. He needs to stop putting things on the table to compromise with the Republicans. Democrats in general need to unite and "man up" against the obstructive Republicans. This is the time to do some actual work for the middle class before it becomes extinct! I have not given up hope on Obama yet and I am certainly hopeful that he can turn things around just like Clinton did. However, if he does not then I am fair enough and responsible enough to admit that he is doing wrong things.

P.S. When I started writing this, it was election day and I predicted that the Republican Senator would win. He did. Not only that, but the Supreme Court decided that Corporations can be treated like people ! This means that corporations can finance the campaigns of candidates. But to make this more ridiculous, there is no limit on the spending of these campaigns if it is by corporations. Yet, if it is an actual person then there is a limit !!! This decision by the Supreme Court was approved with 5 to 4. The five are of course Republicans.