President Obama is beginning his SOTU address tonight. I’m remembering him talking about being a post-partisan President and building an excitement that maybe, just maybe the Congress can work together to solve problems. Then, Sen Mitch McConnell loudly announced that his only job was making sure that President Obama was a one term President. McConnell openly admitted that they, the Republicans, would do the very minimum and do their best to block anything. Speaker of the House Boehner joined forces and together with the a few super rich folks sparked fears based on race rather than fact, fears based on defining the President as “other” rather than calling him black. It is a new racism that no one will call out. Remember, “you lie.” Just a good ol’ Southern boy confused at how someone that was not white was voted to lead the country from the White House. The President wants to pull people from to a post-partisan, post-racial vision that our white male power structures just cannot figure out how to embrace. I contend that if they, those keeping our economy hostage to defeat the President, cannot allow someone other than a white male face be successful because this evolution of leadership, power and authority, requires an altering world view of what American is and can be. If our nation does not evolve we will become the Roman empire of old.
Listening to President Obama speak tonight and having heard the Republican candidates for President last night I can only wonder if this election cycle is a vote to hold on to the dream of being a post-racial and post-partisan 21st century partner in the global community. Does conservative mean a “lords and serfs” society where the free market moves money up rather than across the social classes. Does it mean that ”big government” defines the beginning of life, whom consenting adults can marry, that Christianity is the “privileged” national religion, and that we must rule the world with a military made up of the working poor? That is what I hear every time I hear the current crop of Republican candidates speak of their economic plans and vision for America.
The New Yorker magazine offers a great, lengthy article about President Obama’s post-partisan operating reality that is still a dream. It is probably why I will go and vote when I don’t believe voting matters given what our election process has become. The Citizen’s United decision has made it easier to wade in the mud without any accountability, but that is a blog for another day.
The Obama Memos
The making of a post-post-partisan Presidency.
by Ryan Lizza / The New Yorker / January 30, 2012If there was a single unifying argument that defined Obamaism from his earliest days in politics to his Presidential campaign, it was the idea of post-partisanship. He was proposing himself as a transformative figure, the man who would spring the lock. In an essay published in The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan, a self-proclaimed conservative, reflected on Obama’s heady appeal: “Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America—finally—past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us.”
Two well-known Washington political analysts, Thomas Mann, of the bipartisan Brookings Institution, and Norman Ornstein, of the conservative American Enterprise Institute, agree. In a forthcoming book about Washington dysfunction, “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks,” they write, “One of our two major parties, the Republicans, has become an insurgent outlier—ideologically extreme, contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime, scornful of compromise, unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/30/120130fa_fact_lizza#ixzz1kQzNqZpD
