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After five months in office, the Obama administration’s main achievement is it has managed to tick off the left and right in this country. It’s as if we are all singing along with Mick and the Stones, "I Can’t Get No Satisfaction."
The right is thankfully smaller in numbers these days, so let’s take them first. There is no way for Obama to placate them other than by admitting treason and resigning from the presidency immediately. Call them conservatives or Republicans, they have become the Looney Tunes Party. Can an entire political group go insane all at the same time? If you think I’m overstating the case, read some of the Letters to the Editor in this newspaper on any given week.
The right is not only convinced Obama is sending us all to hell in a handbasket, they believe he wangled a discount rate from Orbitz to accomplish it. Take the recent climate bill that narrowly passed in the House. It sets the most modest of standards for reducing greenhouse gases. The Congressional Budget Office sets the cost at $150 a year for the average taxpayer. The right, which likes to quote the CBO on the cost of Obama’s health care package, suddenly doesn’t trust its figures on this environmental legislation. In fact, the Looney Tunes Party is reacting in the same hysterical way as when it heard that Darwin first discovered evolution. If political form follows, by the time the Senate passes the bill, it will be as diluted as your favorite drink at a local strip club.
No matter what the issue, the loons cry socialism. If you took a poll of the right-wing critics (and probably the American electorate), most would think socialism is the art of being sociable. When Joe McCarthy was around, the right use to cry "communist" at everyone with whom it disagreed, but those days have changed for a reason. There are fewer communists in Philadelphia than Mets fans, maybe even Adam Eaton fans.
Only a loon (or a member of the Dick Cheney fan club, which some people say they are the same thing) would think a president who champions indefinite detention of people without a trial is a left-wing radical. Listening to Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity these days is like viewing life in America through a fun house mirror.
Not only is Obama not a radical, the left is not convinced that he even qualifies as a liberal, and I think they’re correct. True, if you listen to his rhetoric, you might convince yourself that he is ready to change politics in America. In reality, Obama speaks like FDR and, at least so far, is governing like Bill Clinton. There seems to be no principle on which he won’t compromise. His banking bailout made no key changes that would make failure less likely next time around.
His climate bill sets only modest goals even while the scientific community warns that global warming is accelerating at an alarming pace. Then there’s Obama’s health care proposal on which the president ceded defeat on a single-payer system before it was ever presented to the public. Now it appears as if more compromise is in the works. The administration is already hinting that it would accept a proposal to count employer provided health benefits as taxable income. What’s next? Would anyone be surprised if Obama admits defeat on the public option or worse, the concept of universal coverage?
The secrecy that shrouds this administration is particularly disappointing and eerily reminiscent of the previous Bush administration. Why would it want to continue to keep secret the identity of visitors to the White House? How can it justify supporting indefinite detention of prisoners who were never proven guilty of anything and have received no trial, and whose confessions were made under the duress of torture?
The gay community has learned to its chagrin that Obama’s words do not match his deeds. His administration has not only done nothing to end the onerous Defense of Marriage Act, it filed a court brief defending it, using the most shameful justification. The president continues to say that he will end discrimination against gays in the military, but only recently his secretary of defense spoke in terms only of limiting discharges in certain instances, not eliminating them.
Obama’s staff and cabinet, and indeed the president himself, seem to exude an air of entitlement. It’s as if they feel that it’s enough that he is not the woeful George W. Bush. They can stage phony town meetings where the questions are staged and the participants rigged with supporters. They can control the questions from the media by having them screened in advance and deciding whom to call upon. We shouldn’t complain because they’re "the good guys."
Well, it’s not sufficient to aspire to merely be better than the last failed presidency. Obama must be held to a much higher standard. Obama should ignore the loons on the Right who were soundly voted out of office in the last election and do what he promised to do.
In the meantime, it’s likely that none of us will get any satisfaction.
