This is not well crafted, because I have to finalize a brief I am filing, but I have to get a load off, and I can't focus on my real work until I do.
A wee bit of foundational background: If you cull through my previous diaries, I think you will find that I am someone who has stood firmly in the President's camp, one of the I-have-his-back folks that falls on this side of the debate of whether our President is doing the right thing for America, and hence, the right thing for the progressive cause. You know the debate. It has been writ large among recommended diaries at this site for weeks and weeks, and its details need not be sketched here. To put it simply: If I say I am an Obama man, you will agree.
I write this now as one with doubt. And it is with doubt that I will be watching the State of the Union.
In my former religion they say, "Act as if you have faith, and faith will be given to you." In my current devotion, to that of the Law, one of its most famous yet fictional practitioners told his two children, "It is not time to worry yet."
These two pieces of wisdom are touchstones I rely on, but they provide little solace to me these days. I am more inclined to believe the hard truth of my childrens' favorite author:
"Perhaps if we saw what was ahead of us, and glimpsed the follies, and misfortunes that would befall us later on, we would all stay in our mother's wombs, and then there would be nobody in the world but a great number of very fat, very irritated women."
— Lemony Snicket
We have all more than glimpsed the follies and misfortunes that have befallen this nation, and will befall it soon. Evidence abounds. Exhibit 1790 in the ongoing trial of the will of Democrats to do the right thing is, unsurprisingly, Harry Reid, yesterday:
The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, deflected questions about health care. "We’re not on health care now," Mr. Reid said. "We’ve talked a lot about it in the past."
He added, "There is no rush," and noted that Congress still had most of this year to work on the health bills passed in 2009 by the Senate and the House.
Mr. Reid said he and the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, were working to map out a way to complete a health care overhaul in coming months.
"There are a number of options being discussed," he said, emphasizing "procedural aspects" of the issue.
Procedural aspects. I am a lawyer, and I know a lawyer's wizardly ways when I see them, and falling back on how you and one of the other most powerful Democrats today are discussing "procedural aspects" is how you telegraph that you aren't discussing anything bold. Patton did not march the Third Army into Berlin on the glorious rallying call of "procedural aspects." Ladies and gentlemen, Harry Reid, the putative leader of the Democrats in the Senate, and one who is not be long for that position, has just announced in his own familiar way that health care reform is as dead as Buddy Holly. Quite the change from November 17, 2009, when Reid stated, with regard to health care reform, "Our purpose and resolve remain strong. We're energized."
My apologies to Coco, but how can one not become cynical in light of this? It's enough to make a Bishop kick out a stained glass window.
Tonight the President gives the State of the Union. Previews leaked to the media are not encouraging, particularly in light of the fact that the single biggest item reported is not a bold New Deal, or even a defense of the philosophical position that government can work to make lives better, but a capitulation, of sorts, to the absurd economic policies that bewitch the Republican Right by the announcement of -- wait for the inevitable tingle, my friends, wait for it! -- a "spending freeze" that is designed, as anyone above an 8th grade reading level can plainly see, not to actually reduce the deficit, but to shore up political support for an Administration and a party that is quickly falling out of favor with vast swaths of the electorate, some of whom are even sane.
I recall vividly that the snow was coming down sideways when I canvassed in Youngstown, Ohio, and while my expectations of the man have always been tempered by my understanding that Obama was never a red-meat liberal, I certainly did not brave the bitter cold to fight against the forces of evil to ensure that one day the Democratic party, having completely jellydicked the effort to reform health care, would adopt, no matter how tepidly, a goddamned Republican gimmick at a time of economic crisis.
How can one man go from being an ardent and enthusiastic supporter to being a guy who horrifyingly realizes, while reading the news during the commute to work, that he has almost subconciously been wondering whether it wouldn't be better to let the whole thing go back to the Republicans just to punish Democrats for being such rudderless sops?
I am not one for overreaction, and I avoid handwringing at all costs, but my limits are being tested. Not by the intentions of the President or Democrats in Congress, or in the rightness of the political principles in which I believe.
Doubt is being sown by the appearance of an inability to get things done. To solve the problems we face, and to do so boldly. A lot has been accomplished, I know, and a greater economic disaster has been avoided by the efforts of Democrats. And I know that the weakest Democrat is 100 times better for this nation than the strongest naysaying Republican, but man oh man.
These are the times that try souls, and the will to keep up the good fight.
Doubt. Such an infectious and debilitating virus of the mind. Goddamit. I have doubt.
* * *
So I will watch tonight, with my doubt, and I will think of the words that help guide me. I will act as if I have faith. I will trust in reason, which tells me that it is not yet time to worry. I will muster hope, and I will watch.
Let me end, then, as I began, with a quote I wrote down after reading to my children one night. I wrote this down for exactly moments like this. Because, despite all the vile, despicable, awful, ignorant, stupid, willfully malicious, crass, thunderously dull, aimless, directionless, blameless, accountless, and awful ways people can simply be, I still believe in some fundamental truths, and this, more than anything, reflects my state of mind most days.
"Strange as it may seem, I still hope for the best, even though the best, like an interesting piece of mail, so rarely arrives, and even when it does it can be lost so easily."
— Lemony Snicket (The Beatrice Letters)
How I hope the best can be found. I keep looking, tiring as it may be at times. And I am tired of looking; to some degree, I think many of us are.
Maybe the best can be found.
I will start looking again tonight. Maybe someone from the White House reads this, and maybe they can start getting it through their skulls that the seeds of doubt are planted in many, but there is time yet to fix this thing.
Give me a reason, Mr. President.