Quantity, Quality and Quest

Dear Friends,

Tonight certain members of my family chastised me for being too hard on President Obama.  Then I went to read the blogs that I follow and A Little Leeway (here) had the same message for her readers.

President Obama and Vice President Biden ran against John McCain and Sarah Palin and won.  So we should all start every day being thankful for that fact.  The next fact that we should be thankful for is that President Obama is not President George W. Bush.  President Obama speaks in sentences and is thoughtful and has empathy for the people of the country that he leads and for all the people of the world.  This list of ways that President Obama is better than President George W. Bush could go on for pages and pages.

Unfortunately, President George W. Bush and the Republicans left this country in such a mess and with so many crises that President Obama was put in a position that he had to be far more productive than his predecessors.  As someone who believes that he is up to the task, I intend to continue to hold him to a much higher standard.

The 111th Congress under the control of the Democrats and with President Obama in the White House has passed a large quantity of laws, more than other Congresses and this result was obtained despite the Republican Senators' just say no and filibuster policy.  Here are two quotes that lead off an article published by the American Chronicle (here):

"This is one of the most productive Congresses in history."

Norman Ornstein, Congressional Scholar at American Enterprise Institute, Financial Times 3/19/10

"… Congress and the White House have completed 16 months of activity that rival any other since the New Deal in scope or ambition… If there is a theme to all this, it has been to try to lift economic growth while also reducing income inequality."

David Leonhardt, New York Times 5/22/2010

You can see a list of what Representative John Spratt (D-SC) believes are the accomplishments of the 111th Congress here.

There is no question that the quantity of laws passed by this Congress has been impressive.  The next question is what is the quality of these laws.  There are, of course, some big ones like health care and financial reform and the stimulus package.  While these laws are generally heralded as being groundbreaking and tremendous accomplishments, none of them is actually as strong as they needed to be.  The only real solution to the health care crisis in this country is some sort of single payer universal health care coverage.  The financial reform did not address too big to fail so Wall Street can continue to find ways to gamble for huge short term profits with no downside.  The financial stimulus package was way too small and had way too many tax breaks which really are not a stimulus except in Republican dreams.

There were some great laws though that got less attention.  The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act is a perfect example of a high quality law.  It was necessary because the conservative activist judges on the Supreme Court adopted a twisted interpretation of the fair pay laws in order to protect corporations from employees that they had screwed for years. 

So the quantity of laws is great, but the quality has not been what it could have been if President Obama had not been so intent on courting the votes of Republicans and conservative Democrats.  He should have spent his time getting the support of the American people so they would force their representatives to vote for his policies.  He has only made sporadic attempts to do this and often his attempts have come too late.  He needs to talk to the people every day to gain their support and energize them to push their representatives to vote for his policies.

In fairness to President Obama, he was left with more problems than he could possibly fix in the first 18 months of his presidency.  He needs to be on a constant quest to turn this country around.  (The last sentence should not be viewed as a criticism of his weekend vacation in Maine with his family.  The pictures and coverage of that mini-vacation were great for the psyche of the nation.)  He needs to create a sense of urgency and momentum for his plan of action.  To do this he needs to focus his attention on the American people and not the politicians.  Ultimately, the politicians need the people to vote for them.  In fact I often think that getting re-elected is the single most important driving force for our politicians today.

President Obama can do all this because he is very talented, but he needs to get aggressive and stay consistently aggressive, and he needs to understand that only the American people can force the Republicans to break ranks.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal