Ranking Obama

B1367-LH140

Ranking Obama

When the wind blows, there isn’t much a person can do about it but to get hunkered down and wait for it to stop. No amount of prestige or adulation, no title or position of power or influence can make the air stop moving. Even a President of the United States must accede to this natural phenomenon and admit he or she is powerless to do anything, no matter what his or her approval rating is. It is said that the measure of a great President is largely a matter of circumstance. A President, it is said by the sages of the chattering class, either grows into his job during a calamity or is cruelly crushed by it. He or she is either up to the task of stopping the wind or is blown over by it.

President Obama is operating under a constant onslaught of hurricane-force winds which have spring up all around him and he is slowly but surely bending toward the ground. For a man of his temperament, his attitude, his promise, and his sense of self-worth, the realization that the middle is not holding must be particularly galling. And the middle is NOT holding. When the trees are bending to the pavement and the rivers are flooding and the rain keeps falling, what’s a President to do? This President seems to go for more of the same. He has not decreased his drone campaigns. He vacillates on Syria (did Assad use chemical weapons and cross the “red line” or did the rebels do it or did anyone do it?). The decision on Egypt has been made, but it is typically vague, ambiguous, and has the punch of a vanilla milkshake (shall we hold back the next check or some of the next check or let the Saudis pay the freight until this little tempest blows over?).

His administration has more prosecutions under the Espionage Act (8) than all previous Presidents combined. He had a hand in humiliating the president of Ecuador, who tried to fly home from Russia and whose plane was diverted and forced to land (I suppose the Obama administration thought Edward Snowden was hiding in some luggage on that plane). His decision on the Keystone pipeline is nowhere to be found (so far, but I’m sure it’s coming soon). He can’t seem to put a foot right with Republicans, and there is a rising, serious, effort to derail the Affordable Care Act and a rising, serious effort in some states—many states—to return the U.S. to the days of James Polk, who acquired the Oregon territory, or the Days Gold when women and gays and immigrants knew their place.

Obama may be credited with helping us out of the recession of 2009, but the cost was pretty high, with his administration filled with Wall Street types and Big Business moguls. The Arab Spring has turned into a bitter winter, while Obama’s pledge to make America respected and a partner in the Muslim world has turned to a shaky, whispered hope in the White House night. One intercepted phone call from a guy in a ragged tent in the Yemeni desert can close American embassies around the world, and he seems hopelessly irrelevant in domestic and foreign affairs. That Affordable Care Act has been “amended” to allow business to forestall implementing it, while America turns into a nation of part-time workers with no benefits and sick, undereducated kids. We plan to spend millions (billions?) on keeping people out of the country, but can’t seem to work up the will to spend anything on infrastructure or education or well-baby clinics. Yes, the opposition party is obstructionist, but that’s part of their job, and Obama’s job is to lead, to cajole, threaten, use the bully pulpit—all of which he is lousy at.

So let’s try to put Obama in a list of good, or great presidents. In that list there are the usual suspects: Lincoln, FDR, Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt and maybe Truman, Wilson, Eisenhower, and James Polk. Obama rates maybe 15^th best, given America’s climb out of the recession, but look around. The country is mumbling, discontented, spied on, lied to, and spawns one terrorist after another. Obama has had, and continues to have, opportunities to be great, to be a leader, to see down the road and lead us there, but so far, everything he touches seems to turn to ashes. Some of this is our fault, more is his, and perhaps more than a little fault may be placed on the structure of our political system.

For instance, there is increasing talk that Hillary Clinton, who is going to run for the Democratic nomination unless Sean Hannity or Glenn Beck pushes her in front of a train, will raise 2 billion dollars for her chance to snuggle into that Big Chair at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Two billion dollars! That’s the GDP of a lot of countries, and way too much to spend on a position which is not as important as that of a primary care physician or a teacher or police officer or EMT or mom or even park ranger. Add the cost of all elections for governor and congressman and senator and councilman and the myriads local officials around the country, not to mention the campaign “advisors and ad folks, and see what that total is. It’s enough to fix a lot of festering problems here. It’s enough to educate, heal, fix infrastructure problems, and it’s enough to show other countries what it takes to have a democracy. The wind is blowing very hard now and Obama is not standing tall. He is looking for an umbrella and seems puzzled that his rhetorical flourishes don’t have any affect: air pushes against air. If that is Obama’s legacy, then I rate him low, very low.

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