With today's announcement of salary freezes in the federal government, Jed just wrote a fine post about "President Gimmick". I look at this a different way....gimmicks are like $1 hot dog night at the ballgame. Something to entice customers, or voters in this case, to buy the promotion. The salary freeze is not that....it's a lame attempt at showing concern about zooming deficits. It's HALF-ASSED. Which is why I'm about to embark on a rant about our half-assed president....
President Obama entered the race for President in 2007 in order to change Washington. Instead, he has changed, or been changed BY Washington.
He was going to evicerate special interests. Instead, the corporate interests and lobbyists seem to be having more of a field day than ever in DC. Obama was anxious, eager even, to meet with Big Pharma, for example, to hammer out a lobbyist proposal on how to proceed on HCR.
We got HCR in the end as he promised he'd do. But it was not what we really wanted, was it? IT WAS HALF-ASSED.
We got stimulus which he signed right here in Denver where I write from. But a third of the stimulus was in the form of tax cuts that had no multiplier effect, and created no jobs to speak of. HALF-ASSED!
We got financial reform, but it too was written by the financial industry for the most part, and kept the ability to create and gamble with unknowable derivatives and other "financial weapons of mass destruction". It also contains many loopholes that New Yorker detailed in their wonderful piece on Wall Street. HALF-ASSED!!
President Gimmick is really "President Half-Assed".
I say this not to bash Obama, the person. I think he's well-intentioned. Really, it is meant to passionately show that he has not followed through on his campaign promises, even if he has nominally accomplished many of the legislative "achievements" that he set out to do. They are really PR stunts more than solutions to our nation's ills. They will not, I repeat, NOT win him a second term. I see the food fights here on DailyKos every day lately between the disappointed like myself and Cenk, the site's lightening rod, and those apologists and deniers of Obama's lame half-assedness. That's a sure sign that Obama could lose in 2012, even to the dimwit Palin, if he doesn't shape up and show more strength and leadership.
As I just commented in Jed's front page diary, everything Obama does is half-assed, and I am frankly sick and tired of it. He's also half-hearted about his campaigan promise to end the tax cuts for the rich, which I haven't even mentioned up until now.
WHEN will President Obama exert some PRESIDENTIAL authority and backbone to advance what he actually promised to us in the campaign?!? Instead of passing HCR and financial reform that are incremental improvements but troubling in their half-assedness, why doesn't our man really do the changing and fixing that he said he'd do? Start by fixing Washington, and getting the money out of politics. He's done NADA about that!
Is Obama incompetent, insincere, or just half-assed? If the latter, he's halfway to losing in 2012, halfway through his term.