Obama: Disillusionment and New Administration

There are a few diehard "Obamamaniacs" on the board and conservatives but not many Obama supporters who are vocal in their disillusionment on the politics forum, so I thought I'd start a thread to discuss those issues.

I worked for the campaign--seven days a weeks, 15-20 hours a day--and went to the Inauguration and Staff Ball. I had really, realy high hopes for this administration. On the campaign trail, whenever this guy entered a room or made an appearance at a large event, I always had a huge smile on my face. I was a true believer in the man and his message.

Then we got to February and the start of his administration going in full force. He was treating the Republicans like they were still the majority party and came out with a really, really weak compromised stimulus package. Okay, he ran on the whole post-partisan aura he was trying to project. Being nice is fine.

Then he didn't get a SINGLE Republican vote in the House and only got two votes that are still Republican in the Senate and had to water down an already watered down bill to get it. Because of that, we're going to need ANOTHER stimulus package to stave off Depression level unemployment. And this is STILL the guy's approach to "negotiating" with the Republican Party, even when they openly embrace the right-wing nutjobs that want to put a bullet in him.

After that, we get a good look at what a "fierce advocate" of gay rights he is in reality. The Justice Department has repeatedly defended DOMA with extremely homophobically worded briefs. He refuses to suspend DADT while Congress and the courts iron out the latter issue, even when it is completely within his rights to do that. After all that dodging, he signed a really weak executive order that is only good as long as he is President and it was only to contain a fundraising revolt.

He has yet to roll back any of the expansions of Executive power that Bush and Cheney brought to bear.

We still have black sites and have tortured even after we "suspended" the enhanced interrogation techniques.

He has not even tried to follow through on his promise to be the "most transparent administration of all time."

The White House/Baucus health care bill is a long, sloppy blowjob to the health care industry.

The principal villains of the financial collapse are his main economic advisors and--SURPRISE!--they are dragging their feet on regulating the financial industry and developing protections for consumers.

I could go on for pages with this. Is anybody else just completely disillusioned with the guy?

Obama's entire problem is he has proven again and again that he can talk the talk of "spoiling for a fight" with the status quo and entrenched interest but he can't walk the walk. His deal with the pharmaceutical lobby is a perfect example of that. He gave away the entire store to them to keep them out of the fight. That seems awfully similar--or indistinct, if we aren't being charitable--to preemptively capitulating the fight.

Concerning the MSM, the media is completely on the side of the right because the people who own the MSM outlets are the corporate interests that real reform has to take on. The MSM, GOP, and corporate America thus have the same interests. It's the reason why you see the "TEA movement"--that is just blatantly organized by the lobbying arm of those interests--get coverage that treats whether or not it's a genuine grassroots movement as an actual honest question when they bring up the conflict at all. You're never going to get straight coverage from them on these issues, which is why I applaud the administration's aggressive stance on using the media.

Also, Gitmo is still open. The Republicans, at least, have leadership that knows how to get the rank and file members into line. Gitmo, health care, and every other policy initiative that has been taken up since late January shows that the Democrats do not know how to manage their own caucus or, worse yet, aren't actually interested in taking on the issues of reform they ran on. There is something very weird going on when the White House deals with the conservatives who dared to question his Olympics bid more forcefully than they deal with the conservatives in their own Senate caucus who are blocking the first solidly Democratic government in decades from enacting a Democratic agenda.

There are demonstrations on our side, it's just the media never covers them. I myself organized a rally for the public option and the only aspect of it the local media covered was the TEA organization's counter protest. The media wants to run with the story that the public option is leftist, controversial, and unpopular because it is in the interest of their bottom line to run with that spin of the story.

As for the responses that you seem to run into, I think educated people tend to be cynical/realistic and just assume that no number of phone calls or letters is going to get a Senator who is bought and paid for to actually vote the way he should on an issue that involves those purse strings. Right-wingers, on the other hand, tend to be uneducated true believers. The last administration was a master at exploiting that. Just look at all the wedge issues they forced to the fore to get those people off their couches and back into the light of day. It's simultaneously impressive and depressing.

That's one of the truly frustrating things about this administration: almost every single person in the upper levels of the administration is known as a legbreaker in Democratic circles. However, since they actually started governing, every single one of them as adopted the most passive style posible for their position. It's weird. Really, really weird. Even Rahm "I send dead fish to my enemies and threaten them with knives" Emmaunuel has taken a completely passive approach to dealing with people.

I don't think anyone is making the complaint he should have fulfilled every single one of his campaign promises by now, the complaint is he hasn't done a number of things he could have done without sacrificing much time. Take DADT, for instance. Suspending its implementation would be about a fifteen minute exercise for him and he ran as a "fierce advocate" of gay rights. For some reason, his "plate is too full" to do that, but he apparently has the time to fly to Copenhagen to pitch the US Games. Things like that leave a bad taste in your mouth.

You're aware that Nixon is the reason we have the modern health care system, right?

Also, yeah, Nixon was progressive by today's standards. All that shows is how far Reagan shifted the Overton window to the right, not how progressive Nixon was.