After looking back at all of my blog posts I find it kind of amusing that a lot of my blog posts seem to contradict one another. At one moment I seem to praise President Obama and his governing style, and the next moment I seem to rail against him for different situations that have occurred during his presidency so far. I think I will continue with this sense of contradictions, because as I look at President Obama and the job that he has done so far I seem to think that he has been doing a lot of good and bad things this past year. Unfortunately, this won’t be one of my more happy posts about how he is doing a great job.
One issue that I constantly seem to be frustrated by is the excuses the Obama administration makes when the issue of not getting anything done comes up. Now in some earlier posts I did argue that the President has not done much this year, but in reality I am concerned with the things that the President hasn’t accomplished so far, but I am also just as equally concerned about how President Obama has tried to dodge the issues by blaming the former administration.
Yes, President Obama did inherit two wars, and yes, President Obama did inherit a recession, but blaming the Bush administration can only take you so far and after looking at the latest Gallup polls we can see that the public is growing weary of his excuses. I think people grow weary of hearing the same thing over and over again and not seeing any resolution or improvement to fix the problems that the current administration has inherited.
The American people want to see change and resolution despite the fact that President Obama has inherited these problems. I think one of the most prevalent cases of this is seeing the unemployment rate rising over the last couple of months. After passing a stimulus package under the Obama administration, the unemployment rate has continued to rise and I think that the American public isn’t buying into the excuses anymore. They want to see change and when the Obama administration blames former president Bush it proves to be more of annoyance to the public.
Another problem with the Obama administration blaming the Bush administration is the increase in the national deficit. When former president Bush left the office the national deficit sat at 482 billion dollars, and now that we have passed the stimulus package and other programs we’re seeing that the national deficit has tripled to 1.4 trillion under president Obama. Once again it must be noted that the reality is under President Obama that the national deficit has increased, and yet he has still used the same excuse to justify his actions for spending more money by blaming the previous administration for leading our country into a recession.
Finally, another issue that has been significant for President Obama is the two wars that he inherited. President Obama has already made it clear that he will pull troops out of Iraq, but what has proven to be a more difficult decision is whether or not we should continue to fight in Afghanistan. After months of deliberation, President Obama did decide he would increase the number of troops in Afghanistan, but before he came up with a decision he used the same excuse of inheriting the wars. I’m glad he has made a decision with the war in Afghanistan, but I think that if President Obama wants to gain more ground with the American public he will start to own up to some of the problems and will stop blaming previous administrations for the issues at hand.
To a certain extent, I think that he has the right to blame some of the current problems on the past administration, but I do think you’re right that more action and less inaction/excuse making is needed. It seems that Obama is the subject of years of frustration with the Bush administration and so a little of it is unwarranted I think. However, part of it is warranted. I don’t necessarily think that Obama shouldn’t be cut any slack though, because he is a new president, and everything can’t be expected to change in one year. Our government is slow. He did promise rapid change however and part of his responsibility as president is accepting the problems of our country and then dealing with them. He knew what he was coming into and so did the American people.
When I see your part about the deficit however, I think that Obama didn’t really have a choice. He had to do something and spending money apparently was the best choice.
I noticed this trend as well Matt, but what I also noticed especially in the Greenstien readings is that no president goes without some failure. Even presidents who are seen as the greats struggled in some way. It seems funny to blame the former president for all the trouble in the current situation, when it seems inevitable that the person scape goating will also mess up in some ways. This problem just exemplifies that we are all human and have a hard time admitting when we are wrong. It is so much easier to blame the other guy when you are in the hot seat. I’m not sure I thinks it’s a cycle that may never change.