BENEATH THE SPIN * ERIC L. WATTREE
Healthcare: There was a 3 a.m. Call to the White House, and No One Answered
President Obama is in trouble. How do I know? Because as one of his biggest supporters, even I’m beginning to wonder if I got too caught up in the hype. While I’m still excited over the historic significance of his presidency, the gathering threat that he may be remembered as an ineffectual kiss-up to the Republican Party is beginning to tarnish its luster.
That should come as very bad news to the president, because if a supporter of my unfettered loyalty has begun to wonder about him, that means that tens of millions of others are thinking along the same lines. And based on his atrocious handling of both the Republican Party and the healthcare debate, he only has himself to blame.
In the real world, it’s not enough to have good ideas and the eloquence to express them, one must also have the backbone to wield power in order to bring those ideas to fruition – that’s the reason for seeking power in the first place. But the president doesn’t seem to have the capacity to do that – wield power, that is. He seems to yearn for a utopia in America where everybody is holding hands singing Kumbaya. We need a little realism here – make that, a lot of realism.
The president seems to harbor this burning desire to be loved by everyone. If that’s all he wanted he should have become an entertainer instead of a politician. In politics, the people are looking for a father figure who is fair, but also bad enough to protect them from harm, and President Obama is not demonstrating that capacity. In fact, from what he’s shown so far, he seems to be more adept at taking the coward’s way out. Everyone knows the type – the kind of guy that’s always running up to the bullies trying to become their best friend so they won’t get beat up.
No one wants a president like that, no matter how much they like him. The people want someone that makes them feel secure and protected. Sure, Obama is very intellectual and contemplative, but you can’t think your way out of an ass wiping when a bully’s determined to do it – I know that for a fact, because I’ve tried it with very little success.
The irony of Obama’s presidency is that if he fails in his first term – and if he continues the way he is, he will – it’s not going to be because he wasn’t cultured enough, or intellectual enough, but because he’s not ghetto enough. Just turn on your television and try to find a show without someone being busted in the head. You can’t do it, because Americans respect people who are willing to fight for what they believe in.
If he had just a little more ghetto in him he would have thrown Lieberman to the wolves thirty seconds after he took the oath of office. If he’d done that, the other Liebercrats who are currently blocking healthcare reform would have had second thoughts about the consequences of bucking his initiatives. Americans don’t want to be led by Jimmy Stewart; they want John Wayne, a benevolent bully.
The people want the kind of president who’s willing to tell congress what he wants, draw a line in the sand, then make it clear to every legislator that they buck the will of the American people at their own peril – then setup a special task force in the White House dedicated to nothing but educating the people with facts and figures about the self-serving motives of the legislators trying to circumvent their will.
Why shouldn’t the people know about the connection that Joe Lieberman and his wife have with the insurance industry? Provide the people with that information, then let him go before the cameras and try to look sincere. If the White House had that kind of operation, Liebercrats and Republicans alike would have to check their closets before they decided to buck the president.
But instead, Obama’s acting like that Black cop that we in the Black community know so well – the one who’s so sensitive about being accused of coddling Black people that he goes out of his way to be more insensitive than his colleagues. That’s exactly what Obama is doing to his base. He’s so fixated on appeasing the Republican base that he seems to be totally ignoring his own. As a result, he’s turning a blind eye to why he was voted into office in the first place.
But what’s so unfathomable is that as intelligent as Barack Obama is, he seems to be forgetting that, unlike that Black cop, he has to come back to the community to be reelected – and if he doesn’t spend the next three years undoing the damage that he’s done to his image, never mind the possibility of losing to a Republican, he may even lose the right to run again in the primaries.
The president seems to working under the assumption that being an aggressive advocate for the people is bad politics, so he’s adopted a strategy of trying to win by not losing. That explains why he’s pointedly avoided specifically identifying what he wants in a healthcare bill. He seems to feel that by drawing a line in the sand, every element of the bill that’s shot down thereafter constitutes a personal lost to him.
The fact is, that’s true, but that’s what’s called having the courage of your convictions. That’s why you fight, and fight hard. But he seems to have adopted a strategy of if I don’t fight, I won’t have to bear the embarrassment of losing, which by definition, fails the people who elected him.
This is not the time to indulge in political vanity – save that for the next election season. This is where the rubber meets the road. Now’s the time to put all the pretty rhetoric aside and fight for the people who believed in him, and gave him their vote in the belief that he would fight to protect their interest. But I’m very sorry to say, that he’s failing to do that, to the sincere disappoint of millions. He promised “a change that we can believe in,” but what we’re getting is the same old status quo that we thought we voted out of fashion – politicians first, then the people . . . maybe.
Mr. President, I have never dreaded writing any article more than I have this one. All of my instincts are screaming for me to hang in there with you, but the facts won’t allow it. Every time I go to write a sentence trying to justify you’re actions, I think about an email that I received from a young lady regarding my column. She simply said, “I really hope you’re researching the stuff you say in your column, because I don’t know much about politics, so I rely on you for my information.” So while I would love to give you the benefit of the doubt, Mr. President, my first loyalty must be to people like that young lady.
So, you need to man up, Mr. President, as we say in the ‘hood. You’re looking weak and indecisive: You’re allowing people from your own party to thumb their noses at you, you’re putting thirty thousand of our troops in harms way in order to chase one hundred Eastside Crips in Afghanistan, and you’re fighting to pass a healthcare bill that forces the public to by in, but without a public option. That, in essence, constitutes paying a windfall ransom to the insurance industry in order to protect your image.
But you still have time to change your course of action. You have nothing to lose, and everything to gain. The Republicans are not going to like you regardless to what you do, but by deciding to go for broke in defense of the American people you might still have time to salvage your image in the eyes of your base.
But your window of opportunity is very narrow indeed. At the rate your image has declined in this first year since you took office, if you don’t do something fast – and I mean very fast – by this time next year you’re gonna be typecasted as a weak and ineffectual president, both at home and abroad. At that point you’ll be no more than a caretaker for the next two years until you can be voted out of office. Because believe me, none of your base, including myself, is going to support having a president kiss up to the Republicans for another four years.
Mr. President, I’m convinced that you’re a good, intelligent, and well-meaning man so I’m still pulling for you. But what I’ve related to you here is what many of us call, the actual factuals.
Eric L. Wattree
wattree.blogspot.com
Religious bigotry: It’s not that I hate everyone who doesn’t look, think, and act like me – it’s just that God does.
Let’s take a break from the pity party for just one moment and explore some basic facts about the current Obama situation. You emphasized the need for Obama to display a little more “ghetto” and “man up”. This is a widespread complaint in throughout Obama country, HOWEVER, it’s Obama’s very cool demeanor that helped to MAKE HIM ACCEPTABLE to millions of white Americans who are scared to death to even be in the same room with a black man. If Obama exhibited a forceful extroverted attitude like a number of well known black men, he would have never garnered more than 15% to 18% of the vote in the Democratic primary. So Obama had the perfect public presence and demeanor to allow enough white people to feel comfortable about voting for him to be president of the United States. It was this positive coolness that enabled him to get their vote.
Now those white Americans who were able to set aside their racial fears and vote for Obama are NOT PART of the loud vocal minority calling for him to get tough on the issues. Obama’s current critics crying out from his liberal base hold an image of Obama as a perfect polished political hypocrite, who once in office releases his real tough knuckle busting character. Sorry, the Obama you saw in the campaign, the devout apostle of the gospel of bipartisanship, Capt’n Compromise himself is the man sitting in the Oval office of the White House. This here leopard ain’t changing his spots!
I agree with you 100% that Obama and the Democratic Party will lose the black vote, both in the upcoming Congressional election and in the next presidential election for the exact reasons that your diary reports.If you look at the real advisors Obama has around him, you will find NO input from anyone connected with the black community, and neglect is a killer to a politician’s base. Simply put Obama has done a “Tiger Woods” on his black base and a few White House “recognition” ceremonies won’t fix it. Therefore if Obama is to win a second term, white folks will have to do it, because the black voter will be so busy fighting for survival they will no longer be interested.
Politics is the art of compromise and if we assume that Obama is destined to be a one term president, liberals and progressives must make hay while the sun is still shining. Instead of whining and handwringing, we must find political means and strategic levers to force Obama into positions that he would otherwise not consider or take. Progressives need to form effective strategic planning PACs that practice politics to old fashion way, “they just do it”. Unfortunately liberals/progressives don’t want to do the work necessary to setup organizations with the funding to support the research and the hiring of interns to make such PAcs a real force in American politics. We would rather leave that sort of dirty work to the political right wing and the Republicans. This works out fine as it always gives us a group to point accusatory fingers at.
First of all, when I speak of Obama’s base, I’m talking about his progressive base, not Black base. And secondly, when I say he should “man up”, I’m not implying that he should start acting like Snoop Dog; I’m simply saying that he needs to become more politically assertive. He can allow AG Holder to move forward on the Bush Administration’s war crimes, take a more active role in healthcare legislation, and setup a team in the White House to research the opposition’s connections to the insurance industry, for example. He can do all of those things and still maintain his demeanor.
And when I mentioned being a little more ‘ghetto’, you seem to have automatically placed the term ghetto in a negative context, as though I was talking about walking around acting like a baffoon. Ghetto is not an intrinsically negative term to me.
What I meant by being more ghetto was to display a little more of the intellectual toughness that has allowed us to survive the ghetto experience. You see, since every expereience is a source of knowledge, the adversities attendant to surviving the ghetto experience has made us more, rather than less. So I was simply suggesting that he draw on those resources to sustain himself. So your excursion into Black stereotypes is less than relevant, and way out of context.
To clarify my point, I was talking about Obama’s black base for without it his presidential campaign would have failed. Obama recognized this at the time, which was the real purpose behind his famous speech on “Race”. However since his election he has chosen to ignore this important critical part of his base. I agree with you he has many tools such as the DOJ to address many of these domestic issues. A recent report cites the tremendous disparity between white businesses receiving stimulus money and the paltry few black businesses getting stimulus funds. Some people raise the old circular argument that you can’t blame the Obama administration as it is caused by the failure of black business people to apply for stimulus money. Hence if you don’t apply you can’t participate.
I dismiss this specious argument because the Obama people easily get the word out in the black community and they certainly have access to the Government Printing Office to support a mailing campaign of announcement bulletins.
In regard to your use of the word “ghetto”, in the poppular vernacular it is already a negative term. Have you listened to any standup comics lately? This is precisely why I did not use the term in my response, rather I preferred the descriptive term “extroverted assertiveness” like many well know black public figures. The people that I had in mind were well known public figures like Tavis Smiley, Cornel West or Jesse Jackson.
Finally, you present your personal justification for using the word “ghetto” and what it means to you, and so we are to accept your understanding of the word to be “gospel”? You continue on as if your definition of this term is supported 100% by Webster. You then use this fallacy to draw the erroneous conclusion that because I disagreed with your use of the term “ghetto” in this context, that I was making an unwarranted excursion into black stereotypes. The mention of the name “snoop dog” was in your response not mine, therefore it becomes clear who was making the first descent into the world of black stereotypes.