As we drive toward the 2012 Presidential election, one thing is clear – ‘we’ need to deal with some serious challenges, while at the same time resisting ‘our’ own tendencies toward dogmatic thinking. Our issues are not only being driven by an economy that is upside down, but worse, a Chief Executive who seems unable to grasp the divisive nature of his decision-making, whether it involves an insistence on ramming a clearly unappreciated health care agenda down the country’s throat, daily ‘Big Brother’ rants on YouTube, or apparent belief that he can channel the spirit of Martin Luther King, Jimmy Hoffa, Ronald Reagan, or Vlad the Impaler at will, while continuing to assert psychological stability with a straight-face.
In general, I have no problem with politics or politicians, instead preferring to ignore them entirely. However, during my 60 years as a student of history I have, nonetheless, experienced various positive and negative impacts associated with Presidential decisions by a number of modern American Chief Executives, ranging from professional managers such as Dwight Eisenhower, to intellectual visionaries like Jack Kennedy, clearly unethical Presidents like Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, or spineless political wastrels like Jimmy Carter. But until now, I have never experienced Presidential decision-making that appears to be more directly threatening to the core premise of American culture than the current tenant of The White House.
My perspective is not based on party affiliation, nor is it a policy-based conclusion. Traditional party evolutions come and go, along with the election cycles they spawn. As a result power, money and focus of administrative goal-setting shifts accordingly. But, what we are dealing with now is something entirely different, and is highly disruptive to the body politic, because this President appears to avoid healing wherever he can, and instead seems to be entirely committed to creating as much upset and pain as he can inflict on his constituents.
In my experience, I have never seen a President end up on the wrong side of nearly any argument with the citizens he’s responsible for. Yet, over the last three years, Barack Obama has repeatedly told everyone whether it be friend or foe, “I won. I’m right, you’re wrong, and my personal opinion is the only opinion worth discussing.” As a result, it doesn’t matter if today’s societal and financial turbulence is driven by his culturally offensive decision to support the ground zero mosque, daily snide remarks about the majority of Americans who desire a repeal of his malignant health care boondoggle, or his resistance to traditional Democratic Party doctrine by picking up the pace of his ‘Remotely Kill a Terrorist A Week Victory Tour;’ its always about Barack’s needs alone, while at the same time, ignoring the desires and needs of the American people.
Frankly, at the risk of sounding like a political conspiracy wanker, Obama’s incessant Pravda-like rhetoric periodically smacks of some Machiavellian goal, based on triggering the second coming of Lenin. Perhaps I could understand his thinking if he was the President of Belarus, where that country’s political history offers a clearly Communist social experience. But, whether Obama knows it or not, America fought a series of bloody wars to destroy the dual political and financial evils of Fascism and Communism. So, why then, does this President appear to always lean toward the philosophies of Il Duce, Mao Tse Tung or Karl Marx first, as opposed to simply picking up the Declaration Of Independence for intellectual sustenance? Clearly, ’tis a puzzlement.
Regardless, America has always been, and always will be a self-healing social/cultural organism, if for no other reason than the Constitutional hard-stop afforded by a four-year Presidential election cycle. Having said that, however, I think this time around we shouldn’t bank on the result of the term-limit to get by. Instead we should become educated to just how bad this President has been for this country during the last three years, because another four years of ‘Obama In The House’ won’t excite our economy, put people back to work, drill our own oil and gas, feed more American kids, or get his highly pervasive Federal bureaucracy out of the ‘people’s business.’ The only way to effect that change is to vote for the ‘other guy’ next November, while insuring that the new Chief Executive will be driven by service to this country at large, rather than being just another self-aggrandizing cardboard cutout of what a ‘real’ American leader should look like.
