If a head football coach does not take his team to the championship in two years, rumblings abound for his termination. We will sit in the drive-thru for ten minutes at McDonald’s while the lobby is empty.
Needless to say, we as Americans have become spoiled and impatient. Unfortunately, this way of thinking has translated to how people view the president.
In a little over a year, President Obama has fallen short on his ambitious agenda, and people are freaking out like that kid in the YouTube video “greatest freak-out ever” when his microwave turkey dinner doesn’t heat fast enough for him.
Some progressives are freaking out because Obama is not the magic bullet cure-all they unfairly expected. Repub-licans are freaking out because they lost and, like Rush Limbaugh, are hoping the president fails.
The truth is, most presidents don’t accomplish all the big things they promise in their first year in, and Obama has only just entered the second year of his term. When Obama entered office, he knew about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, America’s dwindling role in the global economy and a failing health care system, but he could not have foreseen the crushing recession, major auto companies going under and unemployment skyrocketing into the double-digits.
Of course, opposing politicians believe they could handle all that with ease. Just drill, baby, drill, and have more tax cuts — get real, people.
And remember, when conservatives were afraid of what a liberal like Obama would do with all that power as his party had control over both the Senate and Congress? Well I guess all that fear was for naught because Obama has not received that majority support for his major agendas.
That’s hard to understand because three years ago, when the then-junior senator decided to run for president, he gave a speech that outlined how he planned to change America by reducing partisanship, rebuilding America’s world image (through actions like closing Gitmo) and achieving universal health care.
Democrats were practically high-fiving and slapping him on the back. However, it seems that when Obama pushed on with his agenda, certain Democrats said to themselves, “Oh, he was for real about all that stuff!”
Obama hasn’t received the support he needs from either party. That is one of the differences between his administrations and the previous.
Because of 9/11, Americans made the decision to come together as a nation and support our president. Bush was practically given a blank check as to how he wanted to run the country. This support also led to Bush’s high approval rating, while Repub-licans love to point out the low ratings for Obama — even though Reagan’s approval rating was just as low at this same time in his term.
So before we freak out more, let’s read what Obama said in his 2007 announcement speech: “What’s stopped us is the failure of leadership, the smallness of our politics — the ease with which we’re distracted by the petty and trivial, our chronic avoidance of tough decisions, our preference for scoring cheap political points instead of rolling up our sleeves and building a working consensus to tackle big problems.”
Doesn’t sound like much has changed since then. So instead of being impatient and spoiled about the change Obama has promised, maybe we should make a change in ourselves.
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