Go ahead and flame me. I am about sick of all the "Obama should become populist uber-man" crap I read on this site. I am particularly sick of the professional lefties who use this blog to beat up on Obama because he didn't do what they thought he should do. The straw man that has been set up is: Dems will lose because Obama didn't shove all their populist/leftist ideas down the country's throats.
So the latest "victim" of loyalty to Obama, Velma Hart, who has a good job but is worried about how she'll send her kid to a $50k/year college, now becomes a rallying point for the whiners to once again pile on the president. You see, he should have spoken out like Michael Douglas at the end of "The American President" after he had taken heat for not going grand-eloquent on his critics.
The one thing that always amazes me about Obama's critics from the left is the fact that none of them have ever put their asses on the line in an election. They just stand on the sidelines hurling stones and never have to hold up under the pressures and limitations of elected office. They couldn't hold up.
Velma Hart has it pretty good compared to many Americans and she would not have liked the real answer to her question any more than she liked the one her president gave her:
The economy is never coming back--not the one most Americans long for. Not the easy credit, middle-class lifestyle with 401k w/out a college degree America. Not the America of cheap energy with no concern for environmental impacts.
Velma Hart and all the other crybabies in the audience are almost as delusional as the Teabaggers who want "their" white, male-dominated, proto-Christian country back. You see, Obama would have to lie through his teeth if he gave Ms. Hart the answer she really wanted.
Teddy Kennedy is dead. Jack and Bobby are long gone. Rich people DON'T fight their own economic class any longer so that the middle class can have a good life and the poor can join the middle class. Obama came into power leading a coalition that really didn't want to feel the pain that will be necessary to get America past its current crisis.
Most people use 70% of their 100 IQ just to get to work and balance their checkbooks; they cannot think in the abstract about a derivative world economy that went from $40 trillion in 2002 to $650 trillion in 2008! or what that really means in terms of the value of their assets or college costs, or who stole small increments of billions from that ponzi scheme and why it will take years or decades to unwind that mess!
The "power" Obama held in January 2009 began to deteriorate the day after his inauguration by characters like joke lieberman and benedict-arnold nelson, who are parasites feeding off the walking wounded of this scared mass of humanity that values 24 hr. a day shopping at Walmart more than the writ of habeus corpus.
Velma Hart was asking President Obama to draw a straight line from her problems to a solution 51% of Americans can accept--and that line is an illusion. He doesn't have the math. India and China have the math because they are willing to relegate hundreds of millions of people to permanent economic disenfranchisement. Obama can't tell Ms. Hart that in order for him to quickly fix her problems he would have to tell 60 million American workers w/out a college degree or advanced skills that they will never make enough money to enjoy a comfortable retirement. She wouldn't want to hear that, would she?
Life is not fair. The rich and powerful generally win--if winning constitutes dying with a lot of money in the bank. There WAS an age where the good life was defined qualitatively, not quantitatively--but that age is a reliquary. It lives on in myth in places like Walden Pond, which is now a tourist spot.
Jesus said that it is harder for a rich man to enter the Kingdom than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. I've lived in truly poor countries. It still baffles me how people seemed so happy, how they shared what they had out of a sense of abundance even though they sent their children to the garbage dump every day to bring back scraps of rotting food and hunks of rusting metal so that they could patch their flimsy shelters.
I attended christenings one week and funerals for the same babies the next week, and I only ever heard the parents of the dead say how good God had been to them.
I suppose I should post this diary as a rant. I'm sorry. I just can't stomach all the whining and moral superiority of the front-pagers who are pissed that Obama didn't chart the course, the straight line, that they set. How dare he think that he was president of 50 states, some of them blue, some of them red!