Well, now that I have your attention let me soften up a little here. Any Presidential Inaugural in the United States should be an occassion of joy. In what other part of the world would you see the reins of government for such a powerful nation change hands so smoothly?? Bush is out and Obama is in, and not a single person has been incarcerated or worse.
Well, maybe I’m premature. Given the low temperatures at the Inaugural and the fact that you have limited bathroom access and seating, you may yet see a few casualties of the new government. A word of advice to our older readers: don’t go. This standing around for 6 hours in freezing cold is for the young.
And it is the young that should be celebrating; they are the ones that put Obama over the top and elected him President. In their excited fugue state, they are going to go and throw a fantastic party next Tuesday to celebrate the first African-American President of the United States. But I’m here to throw a little cold water on your party, a little dose of reality on the Change Band-Wagon that rolled so smoothly over the remains of the GOP ticket last November. You voted for change but what you’ve been getting is pragmatism: your new President has limited options in the face of a melting economy. You voted to punish the rich, but it seems that we still need the rich to kick-start the economic engine from its current stupor. You voted yourselves a ticket to the opening of a cornucopia of endless green energy and bio-fuels, but instead you are standing in the soup line with the rest of us. Better get out of the line and get behind the serving table: we are going to need all the help we can get.
The euphoria I expect to see next Tuesday reminds me of a fantastic wedding day put together for a couple that never gave much thought to what is needed to form a long-lasting marriage. The couple was so focused on having a great time at the wedding that they did not plan out the rudiments of a real marriage: a firm financial and emotional foundation for the life-long effort that lay ahead.
I have heard so much about the menus for the different Inaugural celebrations being held but not much about how folks are going to pay for the meal and the entertainment. Is this money disposable income or is it coming from your unemployment benefits? Is it worth spending a piece of your future to get a short-lived high?
This is akin to the feeling you get when your team wins a game. For a few moments life seems wonderful, but it is a feeling that is built on a meaningless event. Roger Ebert has a great article on the feeling of elevation and how you get it at the movies: it is a great sensation but it is built on something less than reality. When the movie is over, so is the feeling of elation. It take a little extra effort to turn the memory of that moment into action that lasts a lifetime. I can only hope that that is what will happen on Inauguration Tuesday. Go get your jollies that day, but don’t lay the weight of the future on Mr. Obama; only you and the hard work of a few million others can make it as bright as you are expecting it to be.
I’ll be happy when every channel stops using the expression “First ever”.
First ever bla bla senator, first ever bla bla president, first ever bla bla invocation priest now for goodness sake let it go.
What sucks is, it will start all over again in 4 years if Obama is the first ever RE-ELECTED black president, followed by the first ever female matchup when Michelle Obama runs against Hillary Clinton.
Don’t laugh. It’s coming.
The silver lining comes when we have the first ever election with a zero voter turnout.
I guess with Bush, it wasn’t even the first time we had a president’s son become president. Or the first ever president named George Bush, for that matter.
But it does seem like they’re taking cues from sportscasters with their obsession with broken records for every micro-category. Most running yards in the third quarter of a playoff game by a quarterback not implicated in a dogfighting ring. One for the record books, indeed.
Steven Colbert made a good point. I think the excitement is not so much in electing the first black President, Barack Obama, but addressing George W. Bush as former President, George W. Bush. It’s like a huge sigh of relief. I think that’s a big part of the celebration, too.
Well, there were prenty of celebratory outbursts when the Bush helicopter headed out to Andrews for the trip back to Texas. I think it went something like: “na-na-na-na, hey-hey, goodbye!!”
But don’t start congratulating yourselves and licking each other’s ****s just yet. We may yet live to see the day when we miss good ol’ George Bush. I’m thinking of current Iraqis that are looking back to the good ol’ days under Saddam Hussein. Who could blame them ??
In my own, uneducated opinion, I believe that history will judge George Bush a lot kinder than we have. Think of Truman and you don’t remember his flagging approval ratings or his miserable trip back to being a regular citizen. All you remember is Truman at Yalta, Truman dropping the Bomb, Truman and “The Buck Stops Here.” Our memories and our view of the world change with time.
It always bothers me when people latch on to Truman as an example for George Bush. Yes Truman had low approval ratings, but you also have to look at why. The why is very different for these two men.
Truman was unpopular because he had to make choices that disagreed with an America that had sacrificed a lot for the war effort. People felt that their need to sacrifice was done once the war was over. The country was going through economic trouble. We forget that the country was very insular before the war, and after the war we had to make a lot of choices which ultimately solidified us as a superpower. It was largely the tough times at home contrasted with commitments and dollars spent abroad that caused Truman’s popularity to plummet.
Truman threatened to draft striking railroad workers into the military to break a long lasting deadlock which shut the economy down. Truman ordered US involvement in Korea to fulfill an obligation to the UN. Truman authorized aid to countries (like Greece) which many felt were not deserving of that aid — especially since things were not peachy at home.
Contrast all this with Bush. There’s no question that he’s made some tough choices that will be viewed in better light in the future, there’s also no question that he is no Truman.
Where Truman sacrificed and compromised to build worldwide coalitions to tackle worldwide problems, Bush did not. This is the big one.
Where Truman was an unlikely champion of civil rights for minorities, Bush was largely exclusionary.
Where Truman began a war to repel a communist north from a semi-democratic South — an unpopular but needed war, Bush launched a preemptive and unneeded war. Whatever reasons or arguments about that validity of starting the war in Iraq, one can not argue now in retrospect that it was necessary.
The bottom line is that for Truman, the choices he made did much to extend our power in the world. He helped to cement our status as the good superpower. This is why he is well regarded today. History will of course be the final verdict on Bush, but it cannot be said that he did much to extend or maintain the American footprint on the world in a positive way.
I doubt he will find a Truman like swing in popularity in 50 years.