©2009, UrbisMedia
I saw Obama actually give George Bush a hug a couple of times, once after his speech, and again just before Bush got on the presidential chopper to leave the White House as ingloriously as Richard Nixon left it. Bush looked little, finished, somewhat befuddled, having completed his last, and biggest, screw-up, in a lifetime of screw-ups.
Well, how would you feel, after looking out on a throng of people—the biggest ever to swell the sacred precincts of Washington—knowing there is likely not one person out there who would pee on you if you were on fire. And then to be rhetorically “bitch slapped” by the new guy that they all saw, the black, the white and the tinted, as they the “Great Black Hope.” There was great amazement that Barack Obama walked out of the Capitol Building to take the oath of office (screwed up by a Bush appointed, Chief Justice John Roberts), but there was no sense that he didn’t belong there, that he was not the man of moment to pick up the pieces of America. This was not the black janitor, but the bright and eloquent leader who seemed right for a job that needed someone who had the audacity to believe that a person of color had as much right to that office as any man (or woman). The world sensed that, and it was watching with amazement that America could set itself back on course.
The word “transformative” and its cognates had been summoned repeatedly to describe this event. This had not been a choice between a professional POW stuck mentally in his lost war and a nice guy with whom you might want to play a pick up game of half-court basketball; this was a choice, it seemed, between old ways and new ways, the old order and a new, if yet undefined, order, between decline and renewal. Bush’s ways, conservative Republican ways, had shown themselves, finally, after decades, to be the path to irrelevance, divisiveness and decline. It took the dead in Iraq and the dispossessed in the streets of America to prove that. It took and arrogant pre-emptive foreign policy and a greed-oriented domestic economy to nail down the foolishness of the response to 911 and the insensitivity to the devastation of Katrina. It took Terri Shiavo and Abu Ghraib to expose the depth of hypocrisy and brutality that religious and neo-con values could deliver. If America could have found its collective voice it would have been a cry for help. Now help seemed it might be on the way.
Resident PBS Republican Twerp David Brookes said Obama’s speech was a “good speech, but not a great speech,” (as if Brookes would know a great speech if it was a sharp rock and he was sitting on it). Whatever. But is was great the way Obama’s speech took apart, by allusion and indirection, the Bush, neo-con, and right wing legacy—that it was time to “put away childish things” ‘(like “mission accomplished and “bring ‘em on” and goofy crap like “faith-based” this and that); that we would return to a respect for “science” (and accept the facts of global warming, evolution, and on with stem-cell research and maybe help some people get well); that we must offer our enemies a hand peace if they will “unclench” their fists (rather than putting them is the “axis of evil”). Obama even dumped on old Republican icon Ronnie boy, “the Gypper,” saying in several different ways, not only that government was not “the problem,” but part of the solution, and that, in addition, the people were going to have to take some responsibility and role in solving our problems (maybe this means paying some taxes for better services, and stop going to the casino and buying SUVs and other consumer crap); that the Obama administration would foster development of a range of alternative energies to free us from dependence on the Bush Saudi pals and the likes of Enron. Did dim bulb George get any of this?
Did he get it when Obama alluded to the need for big plans and big expenditures to meet the huge problems and the looming exigencies that Bush created or left unattended? Bush would never understand the structural shifts that have taken place nationally and globally—right under his feet!—that will require a government with vision and boldness, not lobbyists and cronies, to fashion policies to meet their challenges.
It seems clear that Obama is a man who wants to govern with as much consensus as possible. He rejects the divisive-decider model that Bush arrogated to himself, where, if you aren’t with him, you are the enemy.
History operates by its own rules, or none. America made a big mistake allowing a guy whose claim for its highest office was that he might be more fun to “have a beer with” than Al Gore to get close enough to be appointed president by his father’s judicial appointees. This resulted in the 21st Century in America getting off to a terrible start, a return to the previous century’s right-wing, cold war mentalities that had only been put on hold by the Clinton years. The country didn’t get it when it gave Bush high approval ratings for standing with a bull horn on the ruins of 911 three days after the WTC came down—that this was his style, when he flew over New Orleans three days after that catastrophe. The people and their wimpy Democrat representatives allowed lies and deceptions, billions of dollars in waste, ineptitude, the shredding of the Constitution, the corruption of the Department of Justice, and the trashing of America’s economy and international reputation, to proceed virtually unchallenged.
Both George Bush and Dick Cheney have made much of the case that “history” will likely judge their policies more favorably than the polls have these last years. But history may just judge them as worse than they currently appear. It would be well if history had an assist from investigations, disclosures and testimonies—even indictments—so that some badly needed “truth and reconciliation” is not surrendered to the need to attend to the future.
Since they raised the subject, did history dictate that America needed to be brought so low, so far from its principles and values, that a relatively in-experienced, but charismatic, junior senator from Illinois, might seem like its “audacious” hope? Did it take George W. Bush to make the prospects of Barack H. Obama? Amazing, both American and the World, knowing the difficulties of the desolation of the Bush policies that face both, seemed buoyed (and ebullient), even confident, in the man on whose shoulders this would fall. Amazingly, Barack H. Obama seemed like the guy who belonged there, the guy who we need to be in that Oval Office, and George Bush and his ways seemed inappropriate and, appropriately, discarded. Getting to that point was the only thing Bush did right. Would you hug George W. Bush for that?
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© 2009, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 1.21.2009)