American Elephants

When a new president takes office, he or she is expected to take charge of the executive branch of the government of the United States.  The problems of the country become his problems to solve.  The world situation is what it is.  The Congress is composed of those who were carried over and those newly elected.  A new president chooses those whom he wants to advise him and those whom he feels will most satisfactorily run the various departments.

He doesn’t get to choose the state of the world nor the state of the country.  He must lead and manage to the best of his ability, with the assistance of those whom he has selected as valued advisers.

It has long seemed to me that Barack Obama didn’t get that simple fact. He has been complaining ever since January 20, 2009  about the country that was left for him.  It wasn’t fair.  He expected a country in good shape.  He had plans to fundamentally transform America, and neither the time nor the inclination to deal with a lousy economy and people out of work.  As he told an audience of well-to-do liberal donors at a Massachusetts fundraiser this weekend:

And so part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now, and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time,  is because we’re hardwired not to always think clearly when we’re scared.

The country’s sour mood was a result of this trauma, by which he meant the financial panic and the recession, not the two years of spending and takeovers and bailouts of liberal governance.  But he is blaming the economy that he was elected to fix for the anti-Democrat reactions of Americans.

Politicians are always apt to look for someone or something else to blame.  New Presidents usually enter office with things that they hope to accomplish,  and sometimes they do manage to get some of them done.  Voters are a little more cynical about campaign promises, for they know them to be ephemeral.  But they do expect the newly elected president to take charge and do his best.

Obama, instead, had a country to fundamentally transform, so he turned the hard stuff over to an eager Congressional leadership anxious to wield power.  That is why he has been so ready to blame his predecessor for the unwanted challenges that faced him. He was sure that the world could be transformed by simply asserting at last that America was no longer a bully and no longer exceptional and eager to please.  So he has blamed George W. Bush, and he has blamed the Republicans in Congress, and now he is blaming the people and blaming his base.  It’s all just so damned unfair.