Yesterday, I went to the Daily Kos, the most liberal blog in America, funded by George Soros, to see what was happening there since the debt downgrade. There is some noise starting about having Obama face a primary election. And, it seems a foregone conclusion there that Hillary will resign soon and Biden will replace her. It will be a great comfort to know the village idiot will be traveling around the world in these dangerous times making foreign policy. Perhaps, Hillary will be that primary candidate to run against Obama. Remember, the last sitting presidents who had primary challenges either quit or lost, Johnson, Ford, Carter and Bush the first.
Anyway, I came across this diary article from one Caelaan Aegana, dated 8-8-11. It’s always good to see how the zealots who put Obama in office in 2008 feel today. Here’s her memo titled:” Mr. President, I can’t watch your speeches anymore.”
Dear Mr. President,
I campagined for your back in ’08. I pounded the pavement in Seattle and danced in the streets on election night. I thought, finally, someone to answer for the destruction wrought by eight years of war, unjustifiable tax cuts, and the intellectual mediocrity that was George W. Bush’s presidency.
I loved your speeches. They were so full of conviction and passion. You made great sweeping proclamations about the character of our country, about dreams and hopes and what is right. It was a magnificent sight to behold.
I know that you aren’t just a candidate anymore. I sense that you and your staff think that being in office means acknowledging a somber reality. And it does. But I won’t pretend to understand why you have seemingly let cheap theater win over poetry, why you have let political buzzwords and the imagined priorities of a small subset of American citizens dominate your ambition.
Mr. President….what happened?
.
I’m a lot more liberal than you are, Mr. President. I try not to hold that against you. I know that you are more like collective America than I am, no matter how much I wish that weren’t true.
When you came onto the stage in the primaries, I thought, this is someone who knows how to negotiate, who is a clever and reliable political strategist. Even if his beliefs don’t go far enough in the right direction, at least he’ll get something done. That’s who everybody said you were.
I thought, with the insurgency of the far right wing into the mainstream republicans, this is who will know how to run circles around them. So on caucus day I joined the throngs of students voting for you in the little church just off the University campus, so full they couldn’t close the doors.
I watched your speeches. I heard the tone in your voice confiding in your audience that your experiences about how great a country this can be were real. I felt like your campaign promises made sense. I thought, if they weren’t all I could hope for, at least they were better than the alternative.
But now I can’t bear to listen when I see you at the podium. Every speech seems to be nothing better than a collection of regurgitated platitudes and political catchphrases. The American people don’t need smart talk right now, it seems to imply, just comfort.
It makes me furious. For I, above all things, liberal, socialist, democrat, college-educated scientist humanist white chick, I am a rationalist. That’s why I liked you, Mr. President. When I am frightened that I might lose my job, that my retirement funds might start out so poor that they will not in the next 30 years recover, I don’t need your whispers about how it will be all right, that those S&P guys are big fat jerks and they don’t matter. They do matter.
I, like most americans with job benefits, have a retirement account. But guess what? Despite the conservative’s favorite mantra on money issues, “choice,” ny snf large I don’t get to choose where my money gets invested. My employer’s limited plan does. I’m at its mercy. I know that the world isn’t fair. I’ve had it easy so far, and I have the not-unjustifiable fear that it won’t always be so good. Treat me like the disillusioned adult I am, damn it.
I want you to tell me that there aren’t just those infamously flighty “Washington” promises standing between me and my hard times. I want a signal that something has changed in the White House, that the endless first-pitch negotiations-that-go-nowhere are being retired. I want to know that the democrats are as willing to stick up for me as I am for them.
Most of all, I don’t want it in the form of a speech. I want it in the form of a law. Despite your position that you only get to offer ideas, Mr. President, I know you have more power than that. Without your signature, these measures go nowhere. You’re in fact a very important part of the equation, so go ahead and dive into the fight.
Don’t be deceived by the poll numbers that made all the newspapers, Mr. President. Democrats may approve of the budget deal by wide margins, but a huge number of voters don’t even really understand what was voted on, or were simply relieved that the US government isn’t doing the big scary default thing the media puts in scare quotes. If you actually ask what they believe, as some polls did, you’d find the majority of Americans, not just Democrats, thinks the bill is shit.
I’ve had it up to here with these bullshit measures. Thirty seconds after they’ve been inked all the jabbering heads step up in their mostly fetid attempts at political theater. But it’s like most theater: Sure it tells a good story, but in the end when the lights come down and all the actors get out of costume and character, it’s empty, full of ghosts and cheap props and lost dreams.
Get off your ass and do something, Mr. President. Knock some heads together. Pull some unexpected dirty tricks. Be the fierce and clever politician everyone always told me was in there. Use your bully pulpit Throw an elbow, man! Make it smart…literally and figuratively.
If you treat congress like little kids, coddle them, spoiled and uncooperative is exactly how they’re going to behave. Don’t let them get away with it, Mr. President.
Or I, for one, won’t be giving you much consideration in 2012