The Song Is Ended

I am a card carrying Democrat who has voted for every Democratic presidential candidate since Adlai Stevenson. I intend to vote for Barack Obama, despite being disappointed with his presidency. One reason can be summed up by five names; Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, Roberts and Alito. Another is the caliber of the current potential opponents. All are certifiable fruitcakes with the exception of a former Utah Governor whose GPS appears to have malfunctioned and a former Massachusetts Governor who has yet to locate the center of gravity.   

Barack Obama has some accomplishments to his credit, such as resuscitating the auto industry and changing the military’s policy on gays. But these are fringe issues compared to the more important ones on which he has attempted little if anything. On the environment the flat earth types still hold sway and our unbalanced tax code is fundamentally unchanged.

The capitulation to raise the debt ceiling is was inexcusable. To give in to the legislative demands of a political party threatening the solvency of the nation was a craven concession to blackmail.  Common sense should tell us that this same tactic will be repeated the next time the ceiling needs to be raised, unless the president at the time happens to be a Republican. Obama declined the preferable options of calling the blackmailers’ bluff or invoking the part of the 14^th Amendment that says that the validity of the public debt “shall not be questioned.”  

Many of his former supporters complain that Obama should be more like Truman. The short answer is that he’s not Truman, nor was any intervening president. It can be added that no person of color could have become president behaving as Truman, who even his critics never claimed to be anything other than “true blue” in ethnicity and religion. Barack Obama may be more articulate than any president my lifetime, a gift that has value in explaining issues to the electorate. Yet some of his most important decisions have been a major disappointment to those of us who had such hopes when we voted for him. Facility with words is an important quality for the presidency. But to paraphrase an Irving Berlin lyric, when the song is ended it’s the melody that lingers on.