I did a bit last week about the Republican National Convention. Well, now it’s time to take a look at the Democrats.
My main problem is that they want to canonize a guy who’s most famous for getting blown in the Oval Office. I mean, yeah, Bill Clinton was the President during great economic times, but first off, I doubt even he would argue that he was responsible for the Dot-Com boom, and secondly, even if he was responsible, times have since shown that a goodly portion of that boom was actually a bubble. Fact is, that bubble has popped, and at this point I think we can all agree with the idea that we’d have been far better served by realistic but steady growth rather than the rocket-and-crash cycle that was the later half of the 90s and the early part of this century. Besides which, things have only gotten worse since then.
Moreover, while I don’t think of myself as any kind of sexual prude, still I think that carrying on an affair in the Oval Office with your only-slightly-fat intern is extremely distasteful. No, it’s not as bad as Ben Roethlisberger raping some drunk party girl in a barroom bathroom, nor is it quite as bad as the Drill Sergeant who extorts sex from his ill-educated and ill-informed female recruits. But it is bad. Given the sheer power and prestige of the office, it’s probably worse than the café manager who allows one of his shift supervisors to come in late every day and skip shifts occasionally in exchange for sex in the break room.
I mean, the Presidency is an incredibly powerful office. The potential for ill-gotten gains is substantial. This is why the checks and balances of the office are so important.
With that said, it’s not overly fair to judge our current President by the misdeeds of our past ones, and in fact, I wouldn’t have done it had the Democratic party not made such a point of getting Bill Clinton up there like some kind of elder statesman/professor emeritus, entitled to lecture us all based on the peace and tranquility of his long-forgotten reign. But it’s hard to judge the current President any other way. He inherited such a colossal mess from his predecessor that whatever domestic agenda President Obama had was virtually stillborn at conception. This is, to all appearances, the reason he co-opted Mitt Romney’s health care plan in the first place—because he knew that anything that was any further Left would die before it even had a chance to be born. And the rest was mostly fire-fighting. TARP, the stimulus, and all of it… that stuff was straight out of the country’s Historical Bad-Economy Playbook. And oh by the way, the country’s been at war for more than ten years now. Four years on, we still have no idea what Barack Obama actually wants to do with this country. He pushed through a compromise health care law that no one actually likes. Beyond that, it’s been strictly read-and-react.
If you ask me, Obama’s biggest contribution to policy—any policy—has been the way he’s prosecuted the war in Afghanistan. Which is to say that he is using targeted assassination in a way that (I think) is wholly unprecedented in American warfare. And while it looks to me like it might be the right policy, it’s had the effect of pushing Pakistan out and away from any real alliance with the US, and it may very well have poisoned the politics in Pakistan and Afghanistan both for the next few generations. There are serious repercussion there. So, bottom line, that policy and its effects are worth a debate, at the least. But no one is talking about them, and in fact, the best we get from Mitt Romney on the subject is that killing terrorists unilaterally inside a nominal ally’s borders without their consent is “a no brainer.”
Really? I call bullshit on that.
Maybe it’s a good idea, maybe it’s not. Either way, it was a considered decision, and given that the Presidency is primarily responsible for the nation’s foreign policy and defense—it is, after all, the Congress that actually passes the laws and makes budgets—it’s worth discussing. Blowing it off with a hand-wave is inexcusable.
And that's the bit that's driving me crazy about this whole debate.
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