Is Our President AWOL?

Frank Rich’s  All the President’s Captors (New York Times, Dec.4)  article is a must read for anyone who voted for Obama in 2008. It’s beginning to look like President Obama is AWOL on the issues which gained  the presidency for candidate Obama. As Rich puts it:

The cliché criticisms of Obama are (from the left) that he is a naïve centrist, not the audacious liberal that Democrats thought they were getting, and (from the right) that he is a socialist out to impose government on every corner of American life. But the real problem is that he’s so indistinct no one across the entire political spectrum knows who he is. A chief executive who repeatedly presents himself as a conciliator, forever searching for the “good side” of all adversaries and convening summits, in the end comes across as weightless, if not AWOL. A Rorschach test may make for a fine presidential candidate — when everyone projects their hopes on the guy. But it doesn’t work in the Oval Office: These days everyone is projecting their fears on Obama instead.

After all his campaign rhetoric, it now appears that Obama once again will cow tow to the G.O.P. . This time around he will cave in on his promise to end the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy. The middle class will be the major source of revenue for the government - the wealthy will get essentially a free ride. They paid for it in the midterm elections! With this shameful retreat , his legacy may very well be highlighted by a financial meltdown rivaling that of Bush’s 2008 meltdown. From Rich’s article:

We’re now at the brink of a new economic disaster that will eventually yank a chicken out of every pot. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calculates that the extended Bush-era tax cuts will contribute by far the largest share to the next decade’s deficits — ahead of the recession’s drain on tax revenues, Iraq and Afghanistan war spending, TARP and Obama’s stimulus. The new Congress’s plan to block any governmental intervention on behalf of 15 million-plus jobless Americans guarantees that the unemployment rate, back up to 9.8 percent as of Friday, will remain intractable too.

These words scare the s#!t out of me. I know what it’s like to see a chicken yanked out of the pot and it’s not the kind of future I want for my children, grandchildren and great grandchildren.

Obama's State of The Union message may very well be the defining moment in his presidency. He'll either renew hope for an end to our wars and a revival of the economy or he will go down as just another ward healer. According To Marge, " Obama is beginning to find out that the skills he acquired as a community organizer in Chicago's South Side neighborhoods are not enough to make him an effective President of The United States".