I plan to listen to President Obama’s State of the Union speech tonight. I’m hoping that the man I thought I voted for will please stand up. I’m prepared to be disappointed.
A year into his presidency it’s clear that while there’s not a whole lotta’ shaking up of the status quo going on, a lot of people have been bamboozled. While I know that group includes those who voted for Obama and for whom having a symbolic and ineffective Black president isn’t enough, I’m not quite sure if Obama is among that group. Either he’s one of the bamboozled or he’s a bamboozler.
What I am sure of is that the president today looks very little like the candidate I voted for. I’d like to think Obama the candidate was real and he’ll be back, but I’ve seen enough science fiction moves, from Day of the Triffids to Night of the Living Dead to Terminator to Avatar to know returning from the dead is make believe. We’re likely stuck with this Obama, the one who after saving the banks, Wall Street, and the auto manufacturers has nothing left for the millions of poor, working and middle class people who actually voted for him. The Obama who days after announcing an escalation of 30,000 troops to Afghanistan at a cost of at least $30 billion and untold lives, held a jobs summit and announced before it even began that the government had no money to create jobs. This in the worst economy since the Depression?
What’s depressing, shocking, and frightening is that Barack Obama seems genuinely disconnected to the apprehension, fear and insecurity about the present and future most Americans are feeling, a malaise and melancholy that permeates the country like cheap air freshener in an unmetered taxi. Even Obama’s eloquence and elegant use of language falls flat when he talks about the crisis facing average Americans, a crisis he’s apparently incapable and unwilling to seriously address.
This at a time when all indicators are that things are bad and getting worse. When everyone I know – hell, everyone I don’t know – who works for a living is worried. About holding on to their home. Or job. About family members. About the price of everything. About their children’s future. About retirement. Worrying if the next unknown bad thing to happen will be the one that knocks them into the abyss. We all live enveloped in a relentless, free floating anxiety that expands every day. What’s frightening is that Barack Obama, scarily like too many of his predecessors, seems to live in a Washington, D.C.induced bubble, not even remotely in touch with the pressures that real people are under. He may have campaigned as the outsider but he’s surrounded himself with so many thick, larded, insulating layers of career policy wonks, former Clinton administration employees, Wall Street titans, corporate capitalists, and tenured, complacent academics, that he couldn’t feel the chill from the real world if his life depended on it, which his political life does.
Leaked previews of some of the proposals Obama will make tonight offer no cause for hope. A 10% cap on the percentage of income that can be used to repay federal student loans? Still exorbitant and more government approved usury by the banks. A tax credit for child care? Too little, too late, and what good does it do if there are no jobs to be had? Financial help for those squeezed by caring for elderly relatives, merely a symbolic drop in the bucket. A spending freeze on domestic programs - nutrition, education, national parks, air traffic control – to reduce the deficit – barely! – at a time when Americans are desperately in need of these programs? As usual, no freeze on the endless flow of tax dollars to the military-industrial complex. Why focus on deficit reduction now? The Republicans are the only ones I hear whining about the deficit, and they’re the same idiots who didn’t say a word when George W. Bush turned a Clinton-era surplus into an astronomical deficit. Makes you wonder who Obama’s governing for and brings back that old sinking feeling, but worse. As a friend said before he fled the country a few months ago, “It’s almost worse with Obama, because I’d gotten used to being hopeless with Bush.”
People need jobs that pay more than a subsistence wage, jobs with benefits. We need an end to bank foreclosures, and an across-the-board reduction in interest rates. We need to put Americans to work rebuilding our infrastructure: roads, bridges, schools, parks, public buildings. We need to get out of Iraq and Afghanistan and spend those billions here at home, in New Orleans, or abroad, in Haiti, places where it will make a transformative, human, peaceful difference. We need real, comprehensive health reform, not a symbolic spanking of the insurance and pharmaceutical industries, and then back to business as usual. We need a President of the people, not the fat cats. What we don’t need are more lofty words, more soaring rhetoric, more hope on a rope. That’s a no-win proposition now that the hope’s slipping away and we’re left holding just enough rope to hang ourselves.
Jill Nelson 1/27/10 – The blog with the musical notes!
I’ve seen a lot of similiar commentary lately. My question to you is “How much better do you believe things would be if the other candidates were in office?”
People want real jobs and a living wage and an end to the war $$$ bleeding us dry. Where will the jobs of the future come from? The financial system is mysterious–does anyone understand the market economy? Such eloquence–great rhetoric! A trillion in debt-seems like more details should be offered. More and more I wonder about a secret shadow group of powerful elite that supposedly rules. So little really changes. Signed, “want to be hopeful”
Long live Little Richard!
What truly is sad is the way in which you disrespect the President. Your words sound like the mass of stupid people who are confused and refuse to see that he no matter what he tries to do, he has to go through a big pile of bile.
Your eyesight and common sense renounce the fact that his naysayers whom apparently you believe can do better are the ones deliberately manipulating public opinion. His opposition strategically stalled the health care votes. Deliberate mislead the pubic cause Caucasians to lose the remainder of their minds with fear and lies.
Whom does he have standing by his side apparently nobody; you sound like to lily-livered Dems who will not stand up to the opposition and say “shut the $*
%& up sit your @%# down we have work to do!” Since you have so much memory of the past, please share with the public who is responsible for getting this Country got into this predicament in the first place. People like you make me sick—good thing I have enough health insurance to go to the doctor.
It is very sad indeed, that even black America is now turning slowly against the American president. I am certainly not surprised at all. I did pray that Mr. Obama would not be elected, because I knew that the honeymoon would very soon be over. The truth be told, America’s economy has long been in shambles way before Obama became president. Wonder why black America thought that a black president would be able to get things back on tract? Please get for real. I believe that Mr. Obama very well meant all he promised in order to get elected, but you had better believe that the powers that be will never allow this to happen. He stands alone, even within his own party, and even the ones that pretends to support him do not. Everything that goes wrong is his fault, and even things that were wrong way, long before the Democrats took control is still being heaped upon him. We are now looking for a “Black Hope”, and it just aint going to happen. The president is just a little over a year in office, and we expect him to produce what a white president could not do in two terms (8 years). Please with me, even before George Bush, the handwriting was already on the wall. It seem as if the American public contnues to suffer from mass blindness. Baby, you had bettrer believe that Jim Crow is still alive and well in America today!!!. He has only gone undercover. My prayer for the black American President is that God will protect him and his family for what remains of his tenure. I also pray that Obama would have the wisdom to be a one term president, because he will never be able to do what he in his heart desires to do for this country. Look at the news, listen to the lying commentaries, see the hate in the eyes of those in the media that wish he would just drop dead. I am most sorry for the black American president, and black America’s “Black Hope”; He was put on the democratic ticket to be a fall guy, and this is exactly what is happening today. America is in deep trouble economically, and otherwise; sad to say, but this poor well intending, and stand alone president will not be able to change things. The truth be told, neither will the next American president, even if he is white.
No, I agree with the article, Obama is the President and the buck stops at his door. Blacks are holding him accountable. That does not translate into we are against him. The real problem is that we do not hold enough of our black leadership accountable. It is not about Obama’s blackness, it is about his leadership of this country. Yes, he walked into a mess. The mess became his. Yes, he is getting a raw deal from the Republicans, but he needs to kick them where the sun doesn’t shine and do the will of the people. I pray that he go back to his organizing roots and become the great one. If not, he will be a one term President.
I am disallusioned and feel as though I am living my life through some type of fog. I lost my job because I went to work for a start-up company that was quite stable or so I thought, he basically begged me to come work for him after the healthcare company I worked for went out of business. went out of business. The day the doors got locked, I had three solid offers and I went with him, “A Brotha”, who was making it happen. Three months later he calls me one day and says I am really doing well and gettnig access for the company that he did not have before. The next day he calls me and tells me for what he pays me I should be doing more for his business. My future looks bleak…I ask may I please keep miy job until after Christmas. He says, Yes”. The first week of January he fires me. I request unemployment.. He reluctantly agrees. My judgement is off. I needed a job. I voted for Obama, I asked everyone I knew to vote for Obama, I really did believe he wanted Change. I really thought he would end the wars we are spending billions of dollars on when New Orleans is still devastated, folks still not in homes, in trailers in cities with relatives sleeping on couches with no jobes. It is scary. I have av very personal relationship with Jesus and I pray a lot like all day about everything. I got really stressed because Social Services said my unemployment benefit was $6.00 over the monthly liimit after submitting a dozen documents and going through a long, laborious interview that probably would have left a more timid, sedate woman in tears. I have never needed any SOCIAL SERVICES. I have worked since I was 13. I turned 50 in November and I feel like sometime I am floating along in a melodrama. However, it is a lot of work being unemployed, being broke but not broke enough for any REAL help…Some food stamps, some electricity money, something…..Obama has worked so hard for health care…which I now cannot afford since I am unemployed under any circumstances because I am illl and broke. But Jesus provides..Obama should have worked on JOBS before he spent a year on healthcare…People are not concerned about healthcare if they dont have jobs. It is absoluelly crazy…I have several close friends who have wokred for 20 years or more sucessfully and I believe because they were making “too much money”, have lost their jobs. Good people who did ggod work. Mr. President we cannot wait 2 years for Jobs, Our children have to eat and get shoes and continue to participate it life and if cost. I am disappointed in Mr.Obama. Bush really screwed things up and I know he has and had a myriad of things ot fix, but we have to work. We need work to eat and pay mortgages and light bills and car notes and dentists and psychiatrists… and everybody else who requires reimbursement for services. We need help Mr. President…you kind of forgot us…the people who voted for you and worked for you. I am not so foolish to put my faith and trust in someone who has not earned it, but Mr. President….You got me…You really got me….Please dont get so caught up in your personal agenda that you forget about the folks who got you where you are. For one whom much is given, much is required.