Many people thought that, with the election of President Obama, all of a sudden things would get a lot better. That overnight the darkness of the Bush administration would give way to the light of a new era. Happy days would indeed be here again. Now many are disappointed that things haven't changed that dramatically. We still are fighting two pointless wars funneling billions of dollars down middle eastern ratholes. There are still few jobs and large scale unemployment. Getting any kind of reform through Congress is slower than molasses. Obama is a big disappointment, right?
Wrong. Obama has done about as much as any human in his position, given his predicaments, could possibly do. First, rightly or wrongly, he wanted to maintain some continuity with the Bush administration. So he accepted the two wars, more or less. He could have ended them immediately as Commander in Chief. He probably felt that this was too radical a move, too much of a discontinuity in government. Instead, he chose to wind down the Iraq war as previously planned. The only diffrence here is that Obama will really wind it down despite provocations to the contrary. The knee jerk Republicans would have altered that course every time there was another Mosque bombing. There was always an excuse under Bush for sending more troops. Nothing much has changed in Iraq. People are still blowing each other up. The difference between Bush and Obama is that Bush would send more troops after each blow-up; Obama will continue winding down.
Afghanistan is another story. The waste of taxpayer money there and the continued killing of civilians by US troops in support of a corrupt government is appalling. Again Obama didn't want a discontinuity. He's trying, unsuccessfully in my opinion, to accomplish some sort of objective before hopefully winding that war down. I have some hope that the winding down process will begin soon, perhaps after the November elections. He probably doesn't want to give the Republicans another issue to beat Democrats up with. In the meantime it's still a pointless war. I would be willing to wager that Obama will declare victory and get out of Afghanistan some time preceding the 2012 election. If so, Obama could take credit for ending two wars, something the Republicans would never have done. They would have continued them indefinitely.
Obama could have immediately raised taxes on the rich. He didn't do that. Instead, he chose to let the Bush tax cuts expire. Again he chose to maintain continuity rather than do a radical departure. Actually, this approach makes some kind of sense. Obama's impetus is towards the direction of progressivism. It's just not a radical departure in that direction. There is a kind of sanity in this approach. He is moving in the right direction, but he's taking sort of a back door approach rather than an abrupt departure from the previous administration.
Another Obama accomplishment is bringing the economy back from the verge of a depression. He gets little credit for this because it still hasn't panned out for the little guy. He has been criticized for waiting over a year after bailing out the banks before financial reform is being addressed. He could have rammed financial reform down the banks' throats when they were begging him for a bailout. Instead, he just gave them the money, and they were back to making million dollar bonuses without skipping a beat. Why didn't he impose draconian measures on them immediately? The reason is that he wanted the banks to recover first before imposing financial reform. Financial reform before recovery might have felt right and justified, but it might not have brought the banks back from the brink. Now the problem is getting it through Congress.
Never in the history of the US has there been a party like the Republicans who have filibustered every single bill that comes before Congress. Instead of expediting legislation they use every parliamentary device they can get their hands on to slow the whole process down and eventually defeat it if they can. They did it with health reform. Now they're doing it with financial reform. Obama and the Democrats were lucky with health care reform in that they could use another device - reconciliation - to get past the Republican filibuster. They may not be so lucky with financial reform for which they can't use reconciliation. They actually need one Republican to vote with them. This is probably why Senator Dodd seems to be falling all over Senator Shelby on TV patting his shoulder, touching his wrist and all but smooching him. He's counting on Shelby for that one vote.
However, Republicans have been known to lead Democrats on only to stonewall them at the last minute. If they do this again, financial reform - not health care reform - may actually be Obama's Waterloo. It's inconceivable that something so badly needed as financial reform would be let to go down the drain. But it could happen because the Republicans want so badly to not give Obama any victories regardless of how desperately the country needs them. Then too their clients, the bankers, want things left exactly the way they are. And they're lathering the Republicans with money. Money and defeating Democrats so they can regain power are two potent reasons why Republicans may defeat financial reform giving Obama the defeat they couldn't give him with health care. Then they will milk it and spin it for all its worth in the upcoming elections flush with money from the bankers and the Supreme Court's recent decision that corporations can spend an unlimited amount of money on political campaigns.
Obama has a difficult road to hoe. No matter what he does, Republicans have seemingly vowed to defeat him. What's good for the country, in their opinion, is simply to revert to the way things were before the Great Recession, to the policies of Ronald Reagan and the George Bushes. Thanks, Obama, for getting us out of another depression, but now we want to go back to business as usual. They want banks that are too big to fail so that the next time they get into trouble, the taxpayers will simply have to bail them out - again. It's either that or worldwide depression. They have no problem with multi-million dollar bonuses for bankers. They have no problem with the greatest amount of inequality among the American people since the Gilded Age. All they want is lower taxes and fewer social programs. Their problem with health care reform is that it mainly helps poor people while raising their taxes. They don't want their tax money going to help poor people. They only want it used for more war and maintaining American dominance in the world.
So Obama is fighting an uphill battle. Despite that he's accomplished much although he's been given little credit. If the economy truly recovered in the sense that all of a sudden new jobs were plentiful, then Obama would indeed be praised as a hero. There would be a new Camelot, a new Golden Age. In the absence of that scenario, the general public malaise will be vented on him no matter how many marginal turnarounds with respect to Bush policies he accomplishes. And Obama's approach to job creation is not robust enough to do the trick. In this aspect a more radical approach is necessary, but again, he would need Congress' cooperation, something that is unlikelier than water flowing uphill.
