by Anthony Tompkins

Created on: May 07, 2009

Hope. Change. These were the calling cards of our current President, as he swept into office some few months ago. We were taken on a whirlwind Hollywood style tour, of appearances and sound bytes, all calculated to the maximum and to the minute effect by the pollsters. There could never have been a more eager audience for these themes, vague as they might have been. America found herself in the midst of nasty war that simply had to be finished once it was started, and she was tired.

What have we to show for the eager support we have granted Mr.Obama? At this point, there has been very little to see or say regarding the man that paints him in the decisive role that he seems to have projected for himself. In the midst of a long period of mounting economic woes, which, to be fair, were partially inherited, our leader of Hope seems to have lost his rudder. We have changed, without a capitol 'C', into a nation of fearful people, more comfortable with safeguarding and hoarding away than with sharing and spending, which is the linchpin of the American Economy.

It is easy as a conservative to sit back and point the obvious "I told you so" at the liberal wave that is the new Washington. Unfortunately the problem is an amalgamation of the joint efforts of Congress to be as bi-partisan in their spending as possible, always making sure to leave no rock unturned that might lead to a dollar wasted. This climate is not new to the Beltway, and has been the norm for many years, even further back than the Bush administration, to the chagrin of many Democrats. That being the case, there is no real way to demonize the man in the Oval Office, since as a figurehead, he has been confronted by many things that were beyond his own control.

All this being said, control is one thing, and scope is another. Mr. Obama HAS disappointed at this point in his Presidency, and not for the typical reasons that any sour grapes Conservative might cling to. He has fallen down in a more fundamental manner, and that is not knowing. For a person in his position, this is the ultimate sin. What the current situation has devolved to is something akin to a punch-drunk boxer, blindly throwing hooks, which in this case are stuffed with the currency of our nations future, tossed away into empty air. Mr. Obama as president has reduced the word Billion, as in dollars, to a nominal amount of currency, all for the lack of common sense. In a time that pleaded for patience, America instead was subjected to rash

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