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Sober Man’s View of Barackracy
Obama gives me hope and he gives me fright.
Over the past few years, I have endured the common process of maturing from a naive, excessively optimistic youth into a more realistic, but still confidently optimistic young adult. Obama must now endure the same metamorphosis. He must convert his naive, excessively optimistic rhetoric into real, politically muddy pragmatism and results. An unfortunate reality of human nature is that politicians cannot obtain results without muddy pragmatism.
I find it difficult to recall a time in Obama’s career when he has used muddy pragmatism to push the world toward his idealized vision of it. This does not mean that he lacks the ability to do so, but knowing that he has little or no experience doing so disturbs and disquiets me. His optimism for a post-partisan world will be counteracted by the reality of his personal views being far to the left of what most Americans, even most Democrats, want their policies to look like. If he does not adopt a Bill Clintonesque moderate liberal approach, his bedtime fantasies of being the savior who leads us into a beautiful post-partisan world will transform into nightmares of Congressional gridlock. He made many promises to many constituencies, now he needs the courage and the maturity to tell some of those groups, “No, I Can’t. Sorry, but I cannot do it all. I must govern and prioritize as a pragmatist.” Read more…