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From Magic City Morning Star Opinion
While my politics have grown progressively conservative over the years (I began life as a bomb-throwing liberal), I don't identify with any particular party. I think of myself as strictly an issue person with a low tolerance for partisanship. So it wasn't as hard for me as it was for some of my conservative friends to get swept up in the enthusiasm for Obama when he won the election, especially when the Republican candidate was such an undistinguished mediocrity. Maybe there's more to this guy Obama than I thought. Maybe he actually is different. Maybe he really is serious about 'change' and is that rarity in American politics, a principled man. Moreover, I was proud that I lived in a country that could elect a President who came from a disadvantaged minority and I was happy for the African-American community. Obama started out well. Several of his cabinet choices were highly qualified persons of less than liberal persuasion. So far so good. But then came the stimulus package. It was a quick-job crafted by two of the most partisan politicians in the Democratic party, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, packed with liberal pork. Surely Obama could not countenance such an atrocious and irresponsible piece of legislation. He would, I was sure, step in and set things right. Of course I was wrong. Not only did Obama agree with the provisions of the bill, he defended it in terms that were starkly partisan, blaming the financial meltdown on the Bush administration. Now George Bush is a bit of a jerk and he prosecuted the Iraq war with shocking incompetence, but if there's one thing you cannot put on him it was the financial crisis. Anyone who has studied economics knows the problem began with the deregulation policies of Larry Summers and Bob Ruben in the Clinton administration (not to mention mischief perpetrated by Barney Frank, Chris Dodd and Chuck Scheumer) and was precipitated by abuses at Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac, pet projects of the Democratic party. The financial meltdown was by any standard a bipartisan clusterfuck. So, when Obama defended the stimulus bill by blaming the economic policies of the Bush administration, it was not just partisan, it was a shameless and blatant lie. Well, okay, politicians shade the truth, muddy the waters for their own purposes. But wait! Wasn't Obama supposed to be different? One of the jobs of the President and of an effective leader is to educate the citizenry. How does it educate the American people to promote a pork-laden bill by misrepresenting the policies of the opposition? Speaking of education, the real tip-off that the Messiah of hope and change was not living up to his campaign rhetoric came when he tapped Linda Darling-Hammond to oversee his transitions educational policy team. America's schools are in trouble. In fact, due mainly to the stranglehold of the teacher's unions and discredited certification standards, America's educational system is arguably the worst in the industrialized world. If you were to look for a single root cause of all of the nation's ills your search would end with America's lagging school system. The appointment of Linda Darling-Hammond, an unabashed apologist for the teachers unions and the sorry state of America's educational system, was a slap in the face of the 'reform community,' and a repudiation of, among other things, funding for charter schools, vouchers and the very successful Teach For America program. Of course, Obama's appearance as just another weasel politician could be part of a lofty vision or strategy arc invisible to the rest of us earth-bound folk, like Lincoln's appeasement of the Southern slave states during his first weeks in office, but I kind of doubt it. Hope is a perishable thing, and Obama is looking more and more like a precocious practitioner not of the politics of the possible, but of politics as usual. Wm. B. Fankboner Essays and Articles by Wm. B. Fankboner © Copyright 2002-2008 by Magic City Morning Star |