Maureen Dowd recently wrote a pretty damning piece about President Obama in her column on nytimes.com, castigating him for not controlling Congress. It’s disappointing to see her jumping on the bash-Obama bandwagon without mentioning how hard he has tried and the kind of mentality he’s dealing with. People who criticize Obama in this way need to put themselves in his position. It’s unlikely that Dowd, extraordinary woman that she is, and fearlessly outspoken, would be able to control Congress either.
This isn’t high school. Obama can't force Congress to behave rationally or to actually represent the people who voted them in. It's humanly impossible. Anybody who suggests that he should do it, and that he somehow can, needs to try. Anybody who can’t understand the futility of even the attempt doesn’t understand how democracy works.
It's easy to blame the President. But the responsibility here lies on the shoulders of voters. America has a Congress filled with men who border on lunacy at times, and who have absolutely no investment in the well-being of all Americans. They represent the NRA, the military industrial complex, giant corporate interest. Anybody, in fact, but those who they're supposed to represent.
It's ludicrous to allow such a group of people to be voted in, and then expect the President to change them somehow. When Obama was re-elected, Republicans appeared to understand that their voter base is dying out, and that they would have to do something significantly different if they wanted to remain part of the political scenery.
But it's a wise person who understands what change really is about and does what they need to do to bring it about within themselves. These [mostly] men are not wise. Their entitlement is neurotic, they’ve been in power for too long and gotten away with murder, and they’re backed by massive wealth and power. They won’t change while that continues to happen. In fact, they probably won’t change at all. Even when they’ve finally been voted out because their voter base has disappeared. They’ll be whingeing then about how unfair it all is.
Democracy is held up as the best and only way to fairly govern a country. It is, but it only works in the interests of everybody when everybody who has a vote uses it intelligently. Since everybody doesn’t, the results of a vote are just a reflection of people’s state of mind. Half of American voters who voted used their vote intelligently when President Obama was elected and re-elected. The other half didn’t.
How did these men in Congress get to be there in the first place? Because people didn’t bother to inform themselves properly. Can’t blame the President for that.
