Last-Ditch Effort

Note: This was written before the abysmal deal to avert default was struck. Consider the following a moment of brief respite before cynicism swallowed me whole.

I apologize to you, my readers, for this not being the next part of my six-part series on rebuilding America. Work has been hectic, and trying to find time to research both trade policy AND graduate schools has not been the easiest of tasks. Still, I’m making progress and that should be up sometime later this month. In the meantime, I thought I should let you in on a little secret.

For the last couple months I’ve watched with apathy, then disgust, then indignation, then overwhelming rage, as the Republicans have used their control of the House to take the country hostage and attempt to force-feed the middle class a sizable portion of serfdom. I’ve watched as petty criminals have politicized the mechanism by which the country stays fiscally solvent. I’ve watched as an ignorant rider of coattails charged the public for going to his child’s after-school activities while simultaneously gutting the education system that gives that child those opportunities. I’ve watched as an unscrupulous cheesehead unveiled his plan for eliminating the national debt, a plan that ADDS $8 trillion to the debt and gives millionaires and billionaires a trillion dollars in tax cuts while eviscerating Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. I’ve watched as politicians steer the political discourse further and further right even as poll after poll show the American public, as a whole, want their elected turkeys to use their left wings more often. I’ve watched these last two weeks as the House continues to ignore logic, reason, and common sense while making the threat of a second Great Depression more and more of a reality by the day. I’ve grown tired of watching. So today, I did something that under normal circumstances I would never do.

I sent an e-mail to the President of the United States.

Now, let me start by saying that I like Mr. Obama. I think he’s above all else a good man, a man who means what he says when he talks about living up to our ideals. I think he’s a shrewder politician than most people realize, and I think he’s one of the smartest men to ever hold the office (particularly in comparison to his predecessor). I wonder, though, if he isn’t too good a man for the office. You see, Jimmy Carter was a good man as well, with just as much of an intellectual bent (despite Billy seeming to imply otherwise). However, he had very little fighting spirit, and when coupled with his awful choice in advisors, he tended to get steamrolled in most negotiations. Sound familiar? Obama has a good heart, but he also has a seeming obsession with being a conciliator, a person who tries to unite under all circumstances. The fact that he’s surrounded himself with people who seem to directly oppose most intelligent policies, particularly economically (Larry Summers, Ben Bernanke, Tim Geithner, Ken Salazar, Rahm Emanuel…it’s a longer list than you think) doesn’t help matters. That said, I still believe that he has our (and by our, I mean the average American middle class worker) best interests at heart; he just doesn’t know how to fight for them. His pathological need to broker compromise has led to so many give-backs and cave-ins that I once joked “If this Administration was a dog, the only trick it’d know would be ‘roll over.’” I think there’s a part of him that wants to fight (off-the-record quotes seem to indicate he’s been more than willing to drop the hammer on Boehner and co.), but because of the political pressures on him (unprecedented Republican opposition to everything, coupled with an unrelenting barrage from all corporate media and continuous fire-breathing from seemingly all liberals) he’s felt the need to move to the center-right in the hopes of grabbing undecided independent (read: stupid) voters. It hasn’t worked, and it’s not going to work, because as I’ve said before, the American public is the dumbest and laziest electorate on Earth. Unless he’s willing to fight for his principles NOW, his base will erode, he won’t capture those moron independents who’ll jump at the next trendy story (“Hey, that Bachmann sure is interesting” is the sentence haunting my nightmares right now), some impossibly-disastrous right-wing lunatic will win in 2012, and the current economic sinkhole will turn into a bottomless pit. That can’t happen.

So, in an attempt to try an spur the President to action, I sent him an e-mail challenging him to do just that: fight for us now, while there’s still time to salvage things. It’s kind of pathetic that this is even necessary given the whole “in two years he managed what G-Dub and Clin-Ton couldn’t manage in 16,” but that’s America for you. Much like your average WWE mark, if it didn’t happen within the last three weeks, it never happened at all. Therefore, I felt I needed to remind him of what needs to be done. The text of my e-mail follows; it wasn’t as long as I would have liked because the White House places a strict 2500 character limit on all messages (which I’m sure most of you wish applied to all of my writing). I just hope it was enough.

Mr. President,

I recall the early days of your campaign as having enormous promise. Hope and change...I believed in those ideals. I believed that you could be a transformative president, one who could turn the country back from the abyss that Reagan's brainless supply-side economics put us on a path towards and lead us toward the shining potential Jack Kennedy saw. Yet over the last two years I've watched as you've led us further down that doomed path. I understand that you're facing unprecedented political opposition, and I sympathize. That said, I can't help but be disappointed in the sheer number of times you've caved to pressure from the opposing side in spite of public support for your ideas. Allowing the stimulus bill to be watered down to half of what it should have been, caving on opposition to a public option for Republican votes you had no chance of getting, renewing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy despite overwhelming public opposition, continuing Bush-era restraints on civil liberties (and in some cases, reinforcing them), your current willingness to barter Social Security and Medicare rather than demand increased revenue from the wealthy...I could keep going, but there is a character limit. Suffice to say, there are plenty of areas where you could have fought and chose not to.

I know full well that you can't win every fight, but quite frankly, Mr. President, I expected you to at least try ONCE. You CANNOT keep letting the Republicans take the country hostage like this, or those of us without the money to have a voice in Congress are going to get economically slaughtered. It's already started, and I have no belief that things will get better any time soon. Hope died with the public option. Change died when the Bush tax cuts stayed in place. I'm holding on to a sliver of faith that the future still holds some promise, but knowing that the majority of Americans are politically ignorant and will reward the Republicans for this unconscionable shell game, that sliver erodes ever more by the day.

I'm short on space, so I'll end by saying this: it's not too late. Please, sir, do something to show my generation that you haven't abandoned us to the whims of corporate power. We need you to be great. We need you to do for us what FDR did for our grandparents. We need you, sir, to fight.

Thank you for your time.


That’s it. I requested a reply, but knowing politicians like I do, I’ll be lucky to even get a form letter. Whatever response I get, I’ll post here for the rest of you to see. I’m not expecting much; hell, I know that I’ll be lucky if it even gets to his desk. Still, if there’s even a 0.0001% chance that this spurs him to finally become the transformative president of our generation as I’d hoped he’d be, it was worth it. Keep your fingers crossed. I know I am.

Next time: on America’s trade policy and how outsourcing (both the NBC show and the actual practice) are destroying the American way of life. Seriously. I promise.