Some people were already passing judgment on the Obama presidency before then-Senator Obama even had the Democratic nomination locked up.
I thought that was a trifle premature.
More people were passing judgment on the Obama presidency in the gap between his gaining the necessary majority of convention delegates (last June) and the actual election (last November).
I thought that was a trifle premature.
Many more people were heard passing judgment on the Obama presidency in the gap between Election Night and Inauguration Day.
I STILL thought that was a trifle premature.
Even passing judgment on the success or failure of his administration on the basis of the speech he delivered immediately after taking his oath of office struck me as needlessly hasty.
Instead, I preferred to calmly sit back and give him a fair chance to settle into the White House, start exercising executive authority, and build up enough of a track record for a reasonable observer such as myself to be able to project some trends and form a dispassionate verdict based on honest-to-goodness evidence instead of endless quantities of rumor and speculation. Not for me the shallow nitpicking arguments of people who quote one sentence from a political speech and then offer us hundreds and hundreds of words of "analysis" of what the speaker "obviously meant to imply" he would do, if and when he gained the practical ability to do anything at all.
But as I write this, the new president has had over twenty-four hours to make his mark on history. I gave him a fair chance, and now, in the best traditions of political pundits everywhere, I'm going to deliver my well-considered verdict!
Some of the rhetoric from and about President Obama had given me high hopes . . . for a while . . . but let's look at the record. Just how much has President Obama accomplished so far?
Precious little.
To name just a few of the problems which this administration has not yet squarely addressed:
A significant percentage of each of my paychecks is still being siphoned away to serve as a blood transfusion for other investors in the elaborate Ponzi scheme which is laughingly known by the name of "Social Security." I have no faith in that Ponzi scheme as a way of financing my far-in-the-future retirement, I don't want to "invest" in it, and nobody ever bothered to ask me if I wanted to take my chances on getting by without it. Nevertheless, money is extorted from me in each pay period.
I haven't seen President Obama doing anything to stop that.
Nothing has happened to wean the USA from its terrible addiction to Middle Eastern oil. I swear, it's like an alcoholic who gulps down another bottle of whiskey each night while muttering, "Tomorrow I'll go on the wagon . . . I swear!"
What's the new President done about that so far? Nothing.
We still have lots of soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and no telling when they'll be coming home. Or when the situations in each country will be stable enough to make it halfway practical to bring them home, for that matter.
I haven't noticed President Obama doing anything to rein in the worst impulses and general lack of accountability of the United States Supreme Court, either.
The credit markets are still a lot tighter than they were just a couple of years ago. How are young people supposed to live the American dream if they aren't allowed to keep spending themselves into debt as fast and furious as their parents taught them was their birthright? Barack Obama is still in his forties, so one would hope he'd more easily relate to the young people of today and do something about this!
Furthermore, the new president hasn't even cured AIDS yet! Is that really so much to ask from "the most powerful man in the world"? I am aware that no other president of the last three decades has managed to achieve that one either, but I thought we were supposed to see a whole new day dawning in America, instead of just the same old politics as usual, with the federal government spending far too much in order to achieve far too little.
Well, so much for that pipe dream!
It is true that President Obama referred to some of these matters in his Inaugural, but any fool can try to score brownie points by simply MENTIONING problems with a concerned tone . . . as other presidents and presidential wannabes have frequently demonstrated. (Heck, even I can usually manage that much!) Actions speak louder than words, I always say. Where are the actions?
Given his failure to meet these modest expectations thus far, I see no reason to think President Obama will not carry on with the slacker behavior patterns which he has now demonstrated for all the world to see; hence, I am already resigning myself to another 3.995 years' worth of disillusioned disappointment.
All of the above is my absolutely impartial and carefully considered opinion, and naturally my desperate hope that Rupert Murdoch will find an opening for me as a syndicated columnist has nothing to do with it.
(Psssst! Rupert! I'll work cheap!)