Obama’s Glass Ball
By Pat Racimora on September 5, 2010 at 5:15 PM in Current Affairs
As a little kid I remember going to the Fun Zone at Balboa Park and asking the strange looking lady in a glass box urgent questions such as, “Will I ever get a puppy?” and “Can I get another teacher because the one I have is mean?” For a nickel she would blurt out a five or six word answer. “Yes, you can count on that.” Or, “This is not in the cards for you.”
Sometimes I wonder if this is how Barack Obama gets his answers. He seems increasingly incapable of critical, empathic, in-depth thinking. Did he just ask some soothsayer, “Is the war in Iraq over?”
Frank Rich’s must read column in today’s New York Times nails it. Though focusing on the “bloodless speech” Obama delivered on the supposed end of combat in Iraq, Rich takes on the full sobering range of disconnects between the realities of our country’s current health and the inability (or unwillingness) of our leaders to acknowledge and seriously address all that is wringing us dry.
Here are a few quick quotes, but please do yourself a favor and read this entire insightful article.
What was so grievously missing from Obama’s address was any feeling for what has happened to our country during the seven-and-a-half-year war whose “end” he was marking…Obama asked the country to turn the page on Iraq as if that were as easy as, say, voting for him in 2008. His brief rhetorical pivot from the war to the economy only raised the question of why the crisis of joblessness has not merited a prime-time Oval Office speech of its own. That Obama did consider Iraq worthy of that distinction — one heretofore shared only by the BP oil spill — was hardly justified by his tepid pronouncements of progress (“credible elections that drew a strong turnout”) or his tidy homilies about the war’s impact. “Our unity at home was tested,” he said, as if all those bygones were now bygones and all the toxins unleashed by this fiasco had miraculously evaporated once we drew down to 50,000 theoretically non-combat troops.
And yet here we are, slouching toward yet another 9/11 anniversary, still waiting for a correction, with even our president, an eloquent Iraq war opponent, slipping into denial. Of all the pro forma passages in Obama’s speech, perhaps the most jarring was his entreaty that Iraq’s leaders “move forward with a sense of urgency to form an inclusive government that is just, representative and accountable.” He might as well have been talking about the poisonous political deadlock in Washington. At that moment, there was no escaping the tragic fact that instead of bringing American-style democracy and freedom to Iraq, the costly war we fought there has, if anything, brought the bitter taste of Iraq’s dysfunction to America.
If only we had a leader who was grounded in the here and now, could tell it like it really is, and make the right calls. If Obama actually believes his own rhetoric (or whatever it is he is fed by his “fortune tellers” who, by now, may be getting weary themselves) we are in for a long, hard rain.
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