A Survey Response
I recently received a survey from the Democratic National Committee, asking for my opinion on how the President and the Party were doing. To coin an old saying, be careful what you ask for. This was my response.:
Really want to know what we think? Okay, here’s what we think. People, who had such high hopes for a new president, for real change in Washington, for actual solutions to some of our problems, are now scratching their heads and wondering how they could have been so bamboozled, how new and fresh could turn so quickly into business as usual. Don’t get me wrong, a McCain/Palin White House would have been a total disaster. But even knowing that isn’t good enough.
Perhaps it’s true that the qualities one needs to become president are not the same as the qualities one needs to be president, but holding nothing more than popularity contests every four years is how we keep digging ourselves deeper and deeper into ruin. Mr. Obama comes across as aloof, weak, naïve, and in over his head. He has surrounded himself with the same garbage that’s long been wrong with Washington – Emanuel, Rubin, Bernanke, Summers, Geithner, to name just a few and, across the board, he is taking some very bad advice. The result? Instead of fixing the problems left behind by the Cheney/Bush regime, he’s compounding them. Change we can believe in, eh? When? Where?
Campaign promises should be kept. Or they should not be made. Health care reform is a joke. The economy, from most people’s perspective, is still on the brink of collapse. Financial reform is even more laughable than health reform. And I just can’t wait to see what an energy bill would look like! Even with the kind of majorities in both houses that Republicans can only dream about – you can’t get anything meaningful done.
The only thing folks in Washington seem to care about is making sure their own pockets are lined. If our government doesn’t give a damn about making the lives of ordinary Americans better, then everyone in Washington should just get the hell out. How about Congressional term limits? And true campaign finance reform? As I’m sure you know, both are amazingly simple to do. If the DNC really cared about this country instead of just getting more Democrats elected to office, you’d insist on it. That is, if you aren’t just as corrupt and incompetent as the other side.
And while you’re at it, get us the hell out of Iraq. Get us the hell out of Afghanistan. Enough good men and women are already dead. Enough money has already been squandered. And then there’s foreign aid, a wonderful thing, to be sure – but don’t you think it should be dispensed only after a country first takes care of its own homeless and starving and sick?
Al Qaeda isn’t going to destroy America. It won’t have to. We’re doing a first-rate job of it all by ourselves. And China – the next world super-power – is waiting in the wings, just watching it happen. . .and maybe giving it a little nudge now and again.
We want universal health care. We want financial reform that will curb greed and never allow anything like this decade’s debacle to happen again. We want a serious jobs bill. We want clean energy now – not after every lake and bay and gulf and ocean has been destroyed. In other words, fix what you were elected to fix, or a lot of us will be looking elsewhere in 2010 and 2012.
