As I watch the latest installment of President Obama’s collapse as a hope for many progressives in this country, I’m reminded of that classic American play, Inherit the Wind. In this drama, Henry Drummond is a defense attorney representing a high school biology teacher accused of teaching evolution in a small town American school in the 1920’s. Drummond recounts his experience as a child, being fascinated with a rocking horse, “Golden Dancer”. He wanted that toy, and he got it, but it broke in two the very first time he rode it. “All shine, no substance. When you see something bright, shining, perfect seeming…look behind the paint.” Sadly, many of us who supported Barack Obama in 2008 are getting a dose of reality as we see the unvarnished truth behind candidate Obama, who, as president, has turned out to be just another politician, only worse, because we naively expected so much more.
I don’t know which feels worse, the performance of this president, or that I was duped into not only voting for him but also contributing to his campaign. Like an adolescent with a first crush, I fell in love with the shell, not the character. I and others were entranced by everything about Obama: his age, his race, his oratory, his cool, his pretty wife, his jump shot, his un- George Bushness, but as it turns out, it was all superficial. It was a pretty package designed to win votes, and it did. Unfortunately, after the party comes the cleanup, the job behind the fun.
Mr. Obama has been a disappointment on issue after issue to those who most supported him. Pick an issue, any issue. Health care reform? Monthly premiums have never been higher for Americans. What better evidence of the winner in the whole health care debate than this fact: in the first half of this year, the best performing sector in the American stock market has been the health care industry, up 13%. Better than energy, better than information technology, better than transportation. Obama was elected partly on the belief that the US would get out of foreign conflicts that take American lives and resources. Yet, here we are in Afghanistan, more troops on the ground than ever, a result of Obama’s own version of the Bush surge in Iraq. Earlier this year, Obama caved on the Bush era tax cuts. He may have liked to have raised taxes on the wealthy, but at the first sign of the opposition stonewall, he collapsed. This week, the president has shown his willingness to cut Social Security and Medicare in order to reduce the national debt. At every turn, Obama has been a disappointment to the very constituency that was so enamored with him just 3 years ago.
There’s a lesson to be learned in this president’s performance, though it’s a lesson this old teacher should have known all along. After all, I taught Inherit the Wind. The lesson is a simple one: if something seems too good to be true, it usually is. It’s a lesson that applies to politicians every bit as much as it applies to rocking horses.
