The Injustice of Being President
by Owen Gray
In a recent essay, David Shribman, the executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, writes that President Obama’s troubles stem from “a moment of great achievement and a moment of great failure.” The irony, Sbribman says, is that the achievement belongs to Obama and the failure does not. The President’s situation reminds us that — if one seeks justice, or at least a modicum of fairness — the presidency is not the place to find it.
Obama’s essential problem, Shribman says,
is not that he gets the policy wrong, as Mr. Johnson did, perhaps with the big spending Great Society, almost certainly in Vietnam. It is that in his first 17 months in office, Mr. Obama repeatedly gets the politics wrong. For if he showed anything in a bruising primary fight with Hillary Rodham Clinton and then a tough general election battle with John McCain, it was that Barack Obama had a political instinct as fine tuned as Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan or John F. Kennedy.
A prime example of Obama’s blurred political instincts, writes Shribman, is Obama’ s health care legislation. It is definitely what the nation needs. Unfortunately, “the biggest benefits of the plan will not be evident when voters go to the polls in midterm elections this November or when the President runs for re-election in 2012.”
And now –when Obama planned to sell his health care legislation to the American public — the Gulf Oil Disaster has completely riveted the nation’s attention. Obama didn’t create the problem. He may not have understood how totally the second Bush administration had destroyed the country’s regulatory infrastructure. But, as Gettysburg College’s Shirley Anne Warshaw says, he and his administration “are paying the price for that right now.”
The ecological disaster in the Gulf of Mexico has become a metaphor for all that was wrong with public policy for the last thirty years. Just as the Wall Street meltdown robbed millions of ordinary folks of their livelihoods and their futures, the oil which is killing wildlife and depositing black sludge on the pristine beaches of the South is destroying a culture and a way of life.
And — because Obama is president — he owns the problem. With each day that the hole is not plugged, citizens lose faith in their president. Some are even suggesting that historians will compare Obama to the well meaning but ineffective Jimmy Carter.
The Carter analogy is misplaced. There is a long way to go before citizens cast their votes. Like Abraham Lincoln, Obama is enduring dark days. And, like Lincoln, Obama finds himself beset by forces which would do the nation eternal harm. The challenges he faces are most certainly tests of his intelligence and his political instincts. But, more than that, they are a test of his character.
Owen Gray grew up in Montreal, where he received a B. A. from Concordia University. After crossing the border and completing a Master’s degree at the University of North Carolina, he returned to Canada, married, raised a family and taught high school for 32 years. Now retired, he lives — with his wife and youngest son — on the northern shores of Lake Ontario. This is cross posted from his blog Northern Reflections.