The voices are getting louder! The populace is unhappy with Obama - and perhaps with more than a degree of justification.
Three op-pieces, form different quarters, would seem to reflect the thinking in America. Of course, the opinion polls are excoriating Obama.
From The Daily Beast:
"With a stinging budget defeat behind them and unemployment in the black community soaring to 16 percent, members of the Congressional Black Caucus say they’re done waiting for Barack Obama to fight their battles for them.
Instead, the 43 African-American lawmakers say they’re taking matters into their own hands and will carry the fight to Tea Party Republicans, whom they blame for Obama’s latest lurch to the right.
“The Tea Party discovered something. That is if they organize, if they talk loud enough, if they threaten, if they register to vote and elect a few people, they can take over the Congress of the United States,” said Rep. Maxine Waters. “They called our bluff and we blinked. We should have made them walk the plank.”
Charles M Blow in "Obama in the Valley" in The New York Times:
"But one person I never thought would fall into this valley was Barack Obama, the charismatic candidate who electrified the electorate in 2008 and whom many saw as the fulfillment of the dream of the even-more-electrifying Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Yet here Obama is, down in the valley, struggling to connect with the American people and failing, increasingly coming across as dispassionate to some and outright revolting to others.
Of course, Republicans haven’t helped. They’re absolutely committed to, and obsessed with, his failure. But that cannot be the excuse. Great leadership isn’t shaped in the absence of opposition but in the presence of it. Great leaders draw us together by our universal humanity; they galvanize the wills of the willing; they draw clarity from the spigot of chaos.
But that is not how this president is performing at this critical moment, and people are growing increasingly unhappy with him. A Gallup poll released on Aug. 15 found that Obama’s approval rating had fallen to the lowest level of his presidency, and Gallup polls released a few days later found that the number of people not satisfied with the direction of the country and who disapproved of the president’s performance on the economy, budget deficit, job creation, education and foreign affairs had reached the highest levels of the administration.
The country needs the president to rise to this crisis in word, spirit and deed. We need him to reach out of his nature and into the nation’s need. We are on the precipice. There’s growing concern that we may slip into a second, more painful recession. There is little optimism that the housing crisis will loosen its grip on the economy anytime soon. The unspeakable truth is that we may well be on the leading edge of a prolonged period of national stagnation, if not decline.
A robotic Sustainer-in-Chief with an eerie inhumanity will not satisfy. At this moment, we need less valley and more mountaintop."
Finally, Maureen Dowd, also writing in The New York Times:
"Is Obama so isolated he can’t see that Americans are curled up in a ball, beaten down by a financial crisis, an identity crisis, a political crisis and a leadership crisis?
He got the job by blaming Washington. But once you’re in the White House, you are Washington. It’s like the plumber who came to fix the sink waiting for the sink to fix itself."
Three op-pieces, form different quarters, would seem to reflect the thinking in America. Of course, the opinion polls are excoriating Obama.
From The Daily Beast:
"With a stinging budget defeat behind them and unemployment in the black community soaring to 16 percent, members of the Congressional Black Caucus say they’re done waiting for Barack Obama to fight their battles for them.
Instead, the 43 African-American lawmakers say they’re taking matters into their own hands and will carry the fight to Tea Party Republicans, whom they blame for Obama’s latest lurch to the right.
“The Tea Party discovered something. That is if they organize, if they talk loud enough, if they threaten, if they register to vote and elect a few people, they can take over the Congress of the United States,” said Rep. Maxine Waters. “They called our bluff and we blinked. We should have made them walk the plank.”
Charles M Blow in "Obama in the Valley" in The New York Times:
"But one person I never thought would fall into this valley was Barack Obama, the charismatic candidate who electrified the electorate in 2008 and whom many saw as the fulfillment of the dream of the even-more-electrifying Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Yet here Obama is, down in the valley, struggling to connect with the American people and failing, increasingly coming across as dispassionate to some and outright revolting to others.
Of course, Republicans haven’t helped. They’re absolutely committed to, and obsessed with, his failure. But that cannot be the excuse. Great leadership isn’t shaped in the absence of opposition but in the presence of it. Great leaders draw us together by our universal humanity; they galvanize the wills of the willing; they draw clarity from the spigot of chaos.
But that is not how this president is performing at this critical moment, and people are growing increasingly unhappy with him. A Gallup poll released on Aug. 15 found that Obama’s approval rating had fallen to the lowest level of his presidency, and Gallup polls released a few days later found that the number of people not satisfied with the direction of the country and who disapproved of the president’s performance on the economy, budget deficit, job creation, education and foreign affairs had reached the highest levels of the administration.
The country needs the president to rise to this crisis in word, spirit and deed. We need him to reach out of his nature and into the nation’s need. We are on the precipice. There’s growing concern that we may slip into a second, more painful recession. There is little optimism that the housing crisis will loosen its grip on the economy anytime soon. The unspeakable truth is that we may well be on the leading edge of a prolonged period of national stagnation, if not decline.
A robotic Sustainer-in-Chief with an eerie inhumanity will not satisfy. At this moment, we need less valley and more mountaintop."
Finally, Maureen Dowd, also writing in The New York Times:
"Is Obama so isolated he can’t see that Americans are curled up in a ball, beaten down by a financial crisis, an identity crisis, a political crisis and a leadership crisis?
He got the job by blaming Washington. But once you’re in the White House, you are Washington. It’s like the plumber who came to fix the sink waiting for the sink to fix itself."
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