Obama’s Agenda
P. Schultz
January 26, 2014
This won’t
take up much space. The headlines in the NY Times today is: “Obama Pursuing a
Modest Agenda in State of the Union.” And here is one paragraph in that story:
“After five years in office, Mr. Obama
has, by his own account, come to feel acutely the limits on his power and the
shrinking horizons before him — all of which make his nationally televised
speech to Congress on Tuesday a critical opportunity to drive an agenda that
may yet shape his legacy.”
Ah
yes, the “modest agenda” in pursuit of “his legacy.” Well, as near as I can
tell Obama’s agenda has been and will remain preserving the status quo as
nearly as he can. And this is not because of “the limits on his power and the
shrinking horizons before him.” [But how do horizons “shrink?” Just wondering.]
No, it is because this is what he chooses to do and has been doing since he was
elected in 2008. Of course, he pretends otherwise, playing the “oh, we
politicians are so powerless, what else could we do” card!
Except
at the margins, it is almost impossible to distinguish the Obama presidency
from the Bush II presidency. We still torture or facilitate torture; we still
are at war in Afghanistan, the allegedly “good war” started by Shrub; we still
are bailing out Wall Street and almost no one has gone to jail or prison for
the recent “recession.” I am sure you can think of other ways in which the
Obama presidency has done little more than continue the Shrub presidency.
And
why does this seem like a weird assessment? To me, it is pretty simple: We are
taught, in a host of ways, that politics is about change, about “reform.” But
in fact, most of our politics is about maintaining the status quo and this
rather simple, and all too common political phenomenon – those who have power
and status want to keep it – is overlooked for the most part by our
commentators and is disguised by our political class, as if there were a big
difference between most of the commentators and our political class.
And
so we go on thinking, reading, and saying that Obama, for example, has an
“agenda” for change that will make his “legacy” as a “great president.” In
point of fact, however, he is just another ambitious politician, the kind of
politician that the founders thought would populate their new, “large,
commercial republic” to a good end. Well, as one of my colleagues said a long
time ago about a my characterization of him as “fucking nuts:” “Well, Peter,
you got it half right!” We are inundated with the ambitious but the results?
Not so good.
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