Centrist or Not, I Just Don’t Like Him

As a centrist, you might think the current administration would be somewhat to my liking. But you’d be wrong. It’s easy enough to cherry-pick issues from both ends and call yourself a centrist. For example, suppose a politico supported gay marriage, but wanted to repeal Roe-Wade. That’s centrist, isn’t it?

Or maybe they wanted to end our military engagements and slash the defense budget, but also wanted to get rid of entitlement programs? That’s Ron Paul’s mix, but I don’t think many people consider him a centrist. In fact, he claims to be the only true conservative in the election, and many people agree, while others think he’s the most liberal. Most people just think he’s nuts.

If you support legalizing marijuana, you’re a liberal. If you support tax reductions, you’re a conservative. In the polarized political ideologies of the times, people tend to think everything is black and white, overlooking all those lovely shades of gray in between. Or to put it another way, between the extremes of left and right, smack dab in the middle is the heart. Without the heart, left and right couldn’t exist. Well, I guess they would still technically exist, for awhile, but the rapid decomposition would make them rather disgusting! Or maybe I should say it would make them even MORE disgusting!

Here’s a little exercise in centrism. If we legalized marijuana and imposed a very heavy tax on it, most users would gladly pay the high tax in exchange for legalization, and at least half of Americans would probably buy legal marijuana if they could buy it like they currently buy legal alcohol. The revenues generated by the tax would allow for reductions in income tax, or help pay down our country’s debts. This is a sensible centrist approach that is neither black nor white. In fact, it’s not even gray. It’s more like Green Goddess, Acapulco Gold, and Panama Red. [Edit to remove two colors that someone thought didn't fit. Mea Culpa. Everyone's a critic! Sheesh.]

This whole left/right political divide is worse than it’s ever been. The extremists seem to have captured both parties. And the moderate voices of compromise are being drowned out by the shouting of the divergent ideologues at the extremes. I think the ideal visualization of politics should be shaped like a football — small at the ends and fat in the middle, like most Americans. Instead, the political graphic looks more like a dumbbell, with fat heads at the opposite extremes, like most of Congress.

Another way of visualizing the divide, instead of as black and white, might be to think in terms of food. Most of us might consider sweet, sour, salty, and bitter as opposites, but we rarely find them totally objectionable except when improperly mixed. Most people like “sweet and sour” in combination. Lemonade, for example. Sweet and salty? Cookies! Bitter and salty? Beer! Sour and salty? Chips and dip! See? It all depends on mixing things in the right proportions, but not all varieties of flavors are the same. Sweet and bitter together are found in dark chocolate, sweetened coffee or tea, etc. But that doesn’t mean that ANY combination of sweet and bitter are good together. Just try adding some Sweet’N Low to your beer and see how that tastes!

So back to politics, you can’t just pick issues from each end of the ideological divergence to prove you are a centrist, and then expect that all centrists will embrace your centrism. Just because Obama is a war hawk who has continued and increased some of the worst policies of the NeoCons, and also pushes for left-wing issues like national healthcare and endless spending on entitlements, that doesn’t make his version of centrism appealing to all centrists. In fact, his policies often fall into the category of “you can’t be all things to all people,” or “by trying to please everyone, he pleases virtually none.”

But with Obama, his failure to please is not about being a centrist. Even if he somehow managed to be a centrist that struck just the right mix of left and right policies, the issues that make him a bad president have little or nothing to do with his centrism, but his ego-centrism.

Obama has shown his arrogance from the beginning. It’s not just the way he so often, and so literally, looks down his nose at people. It’s more in the way he spends most of his time living like a one-percenter on the taxpayers’ money. Jetting around the world while advocating green energy and austerity for the rest of us. Spending more time on the golf course than in the Oval Office. And throwing lavish parties in the White House while a good many of his constituents are being evicted from their own houses.

His insensitive arrogance brings to mind the French Revolution and Marie Antoinette’s famous quip – when told the people have no bread, she joked, “Then let them eat cake!” Oh, the people had quite a good larf about that one! And another as her head fell into the basket!

And then there are the issues surrounding his sealed records, his lack of known history, his suspicious associates, and his unexplained rise to the top from out of nowhere. He’s still never been properly vetted for his position. He’s confessed in his own writings (if they are actually his own writings) that he was a drug user, a racist, and a sympathizer to Islamic causes. And why have we not heard from old friends and girlfriends, fellow students, or anyone else who knew him before he became a rising star in Chicago politics? His private life holds more secrets than the Catholic and Mormon Churches combined!

And what about his backers? Who paid for his education and got him into political power? Who is pulling his strings? Who does he owe favors to? And where did all that money come from in his political coffers? These are things I’d really like to know! And the mainstream media seems to have no curiosity about these issues. Not even the National Enquirer!

It’s no wonder some of us consider ourselves, lowly bloggers, to be “above” the MSM. It’s like the media reporters who used to dig for the facts, investigate politicians, and follow the money to the real stories, have all been beaten down, reduced to cheerleading scribes. I used to revere reporters on “60 Minutes” and at the Washington Post, among others. I used to thing being a reporter would be a really cool job, a position for which I was definitely unqualified. Now they’re all a bunch of corporate yes-men, or perky model/spokeswomen. Bah! Now I sneer at their spinelessness. Hacks, the lot of them! Or worse. Stenographers!

So why are the media reporters not investigating and exposing Obama’s secret past? Who knows? Because they just looooooooove him so much? Certainly not all of them. Intimidation? Could be a lot of that, and I don’t mean just thuggery from Obama’s actual team, but also from his rabid supporters. If you’re the only voice in the room expressing antipathy toward the Obama administration or just Obama-mania in general, you can get a lot of peer pressure to keep it to yourself. They can make you feel like a turd in the punch bowl.

I realize, as a centrist, that Obama is probably trying to please too many points of view. The left thinks he’s too conservative, and the right thinks he’s too liberal. So, yes, it can be said that Obama is trying to be a centrist. But that doesn’t equate to being palatable to me. I still don’t trust him. I still think he doesn’t have the gravitas to be a good president. I still think he’s too inexperienced and doesn’t have the depth of wisdom to be a strong leader. I still think he’s hiding his past because it would show him to be dishonest and therefore not trustworthy. And besides all that, I just don’t like him. Period.