As Obama Goes…?
May 2010
Barack Obama is acting full of himself these days after the passage of a comprehensive health care bill that has eluded American presidents for 100 years. Now the monster has caught up with this one, and he’s pretty pleased about it. Monsters don’t always devour their prey on the spot. Sometimes, like the crocodile, they drag it under water and stash it, still alive, beneath a submerged log. Or, like the Cyclops, they hold and fatten it for better eating later. The Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 appears to belong the to second category of nasty creatures. Who guessed Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi hated the President so much? Although Obama has gotten the credit, the determination and elbow grease needed to pass the bill were theirs, not his, but only a week or two after passage Obama’s poll numbers were lower than ever. Many state governments are protesting the added financial burden the legislation imposes on their busted budgets and the medicare cuts mandated in the bill will be felt as early as October. By election day in November, the country, and the politicians, should have made a small but alarmed start at understanding the contents and implications of an act that the Democrats were in so great a demagogic hurry to pass, and investigate later.
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Obama’s historic election less than 18 months ago was widely expected to improve racial relations, if not magically to transform them, in the United States and indeed around the world. As was expectable, the opposite in fact has happened: It has aggravated them. This is only human and political nature. Determined public emphasis on race heightens racial consciousness in a multiracial society, deepening hostilities and sensitivities alike.
Two recent examples of this tendency are a column in the New York Times by Frank Rich, and the controversy regarding Michael Steele and his tenure as chairman of the Republican National Committee. In the first instance, Mr. Rich compares the taunting of John Lewis, the black civil rights activist, and Barney Frank, the homosexual congressman from New York, following the health care vote, to Kristallnacht. In the second, the RNC chairman, who besides being incompetent in his job is currently embarrassed by a $2000 expense account charge incurred at a strip club in Las Vegas, has suggested that the conservative Republicans looking to oust him from his job hold blacks to a higher standard of behavior than they do whites. This hypothesis ignores the facts that Steele, as chairman, had previously exhibited racial consciousness on his own part, and that, as black man, he has “a symbolic value in the context of an Obama presidency,” as one black columnist has written. Indeed, Michael Steele was made chairman of the RNC in a transparent attempt on the part of the Republicans to put a black face on the GOP as an answer to the black face that now leads the Democratic Party.
If liberals really wish a society that transcends the plain fact of the various races of humanity, they ought to get beyond calling attention to race and making a moral, social, and political criterion of it. Otherwise, the more they think and talk about racial identity, the more it becomes a sensitive and, as liberals say, “divisive’ subject for everyone.
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Last April 7, Rep. Xavier Becerra of California, who is the House Democratic Caucus Vice Chairman, took President Obama to task for his inaction to date on comprehensive immigration “reform.” “I think,” he said on KPCC Radio, “there’s a lot of doubt, a lot of concern [among Latinos in the United States]. The president made a promise. He hasn’t fulfilled that promise. Rightfully, I think a lot of folks are questioning where the president’s priorities are.” Becerra’s statement is thought to have significance, given his position in the Democratic leadership. But the received wisdom is that Obama, having shot his wad with healthcare, is in neither the mood nor the position to seek another major battle in Congress, particularly one in which he cannot count on the support of all his Democratic congressmen, but must instead expect significant defections. So far, the President seems to be playing the same game with immigration than he did with health care, leaving it to Congress first to draft a bill for his review. Since no Republican is offering to replace Senator Lindsey Graham, who backed down from his support for immigration “reform” after the health care debacle, as a sponsor of reform legislation, the Latinos may be left to stew in their own juices for now. Meanwhile, there is a rumor going the rounds that Obama may sign comprehensive “reform” into law by executive order. It seems unlikely, but Obama is that strange creature, a willful but essentially weak, man. Were he to do any such thing, however, the country would be talking, not about tea parties, but war parties.
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An absolutely unlooked for thing has recently happened, one that must have shaken the Obama administration and the Pentagon like a nine-point earthquake. President Hamid Karzai, after having been chided in person by President Obama who flew to Kabul expressly for the purpose, retaliated by inviting President Ahmadinejad of Iran to the Afghanistan capital, where Ahmadinejad had the usual unpleasant things to say about the United States and its designs in the Middle East, including Afghanistan. And after Ahmadinejad, the real deluge: Karzai gave a speech attacking the United States and its Western allies in the latest Afghan War, which he concluded with the warning that he may be forced to embrace the Taliban in order to rid the country of the foreign invaders. So much for Obama’s 100,000 troops in Afghanistan. So badly has the war gone there that it has turned the allies’ client government into an enemy of themselves and an ally of its most implacable enemy of the past ten years, short of Al Quaeda which in any event abets it. The word was immediately put out that President Karzai must have been high on drugs, presumably provided by his brother, when he gave that speech, but one suspects the hidden hand of the disinformation agencies at work here. Karzai’s words were far, far more than a firebell in the night. Rather they were a fireball, a very large one that produced a commensurate shock wave. The Afghan war appears to be going the way of the Vietnam War of half a century ago and of the Iraq War, which is relapsing into civil war since the inconclusive elections last March seventh—all despite the expenditure of resources the U.S. government doesn’t have, and all, from the point of view of any American gain, for nothing. Bushes’ wars are now irredeemably Obama’s wars, but the results are looking to be the same. The lovely thing—the only lovely thing—is that both of the two national parties are now equally complicit in, and so equally responsible for, America’s first great disaster of the 21st century. One can only hope that the country beyond the Beltway finds a way, in the next few years, to make something of that fact. If it does, we might all end up with change that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans could believe in, which is the only kind of change worth having in these United States. # # #
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