RED, WHITE 'N TRUE™
BARACK OBAMA'S DREAM
FIE, FI, FIDDLY I O, STRUMMING ONTHE OLD BANJO
by HALLI CASSER-JAYNE
Posted, December 10, 2009, 12:01 p.m.

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After conducting one of the most inspiring political campaigns in American history, what we have in Barack Obama is a once inspiring candidate who has become an uninspiring president.

While some accuse President Obama of being cold and detached, his real problem is that he is no longer inspiring. When the illusion of the Klieg lights is gone, what we are left with is the reality of a man resourceful with the word but in every other way unimaginative.

He is everything but what he led us to believe. At his core he is practical, efficient, and proficient and that is good. But the sparkle that was the inspirational candidate, the dream maker, he sold to the sad song that is America’s current reality.

Perhaps what Barack Obama needs is to take a brush-up course in dream making; maybe an art class that inspires his imagination or a photography course that gives him a new perspective on the world. Perhaps he ought to study the great composers; there are none more creative than they. With their music, they created lasting dreams.

If nothing else, what President Obama needs to do is get on his hands and knees and pray to his higher power for some divine inspiration. Calling Reverend Wright?

President Obama has lost his heart. Unlike Bill Clinton, you sense he doesn’t feel your pain. Unlike Ronald Reagan who was able to convey the feeling that he was on your side, with President Obama you sense that he is on his own side.

There is no doubt these are tough times. There are few who don’t recognize that this country is in free-fall. The Twenty-first Century has not been kind to the United States. What could go wrong, did.

Think 9/11, the gas crisis, the rise in health care costs, the banking industry fiasco, the housing collapse, the U.S. automobile industry implosion, and, of course, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On the world stage, America faces huge challenges. There is the disagreeable Kim Jong-il and the mad-as-a-hatter but cagey-like-a-fox Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to deal with. O where o where is Osama bin Laden? There is the ongoing challenge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There is the ominous problem of the leaders of a malignant Russia once again trying to assert their ills on the human race. This problem our recent presidents seem to wish to ignore.

If we are honest with ourselves, this nation is losing its once stalwart position as the leader of the free world. If money rules, the economy of China puts ours to shame and it’s our shame that China owns us. That’s the world.

But what’s happening here at home in America’s house, is what really counts. In our house, all is not right. The president seems no less inspired in his solutions to our problems here at home even than those offered in his oddly-fashioned attempts to bring peace to the Middle East.

He addressed the troubled economy by doing the usual, bailing out the big boys and forgetting about the heart and soul of America, the Middle Class, or what’s left of it.

But now the mid-term elections loom and the practical Obama is looking at his sinking poll numbers. If President Obama dreams of keeping control of his house, then he can no longer ignore the hardships facing the Middle Class.

And so he offers a better-late-than-never but incredibly uninspired solution to the 17.5% unemployed that is nothing less than a tired old Twentieth Century way out of very real Twenty-First Century problems. Shades of 1950s President Eisenhower, Obama’s solution to creating jobs for the unemployed is an Ike retread: the re-building of America’s highways.

In 1950 oil was cheap, the air then clean, the family car a new idea. But in the Twenty-first Century are we not trying to get people out of the habit of driving cars and coerce them into using mass transit? Do we really need to sink our money and our labor into re-building roads when we could be revolutionizing our railroads by building new, environmentally friendly high-speed trains and tracks instead?

This ridiculous Ike throwback to shore up our infrastructure is nothing short of an insult to those without jobs. It is a thoughtless, short-term solution to a long-term problem if not checked. If nothing else it is Chain Gang mentality vs. the inspiring I’ve Been Working on the Railroad. Clearly, President Obama is no longer operating from divine inspiration.

One wonders if there was any real thought put into the solution. It seems more politically motivated than concern driven, except, of course, for his concern of a huge loss in the midterms.

When you consider the paltry collection of tax cuts he suggests (his moderates will like that) and his odd nod to his left in the offer of subsidies for energy-saving investments, his motivations become suspect.

In the hour of our need, Barack Obama offered much for Wall Street and little for the needy, only words, mere platitudes. He hasn’t presented even so much as a dream of a better day to the downtrodden, which makes me wonder what Martin Luther King, not a dreamer but a dream maker, is thinking up there from his perch in the sky.

Opportunity squandered?

© 2008/2009 Halli Casser-Jayne. Reprints with permission.
An earlier version of this story can be read in Halli Casser-Jayne’s new book, A YEAR IN MY PAJAMAS WITH PRESIDENT OBAMA, The Politics of Strange Bedfellows.

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