I Hung Up on President Obama

Sure, it was only a “robocall” made to millions of voters this morning (just as I was having my first cup of coffee) but it was President Obama’s voice. No such call was made in 2008 and that it was deemed necessary this time around perhaps underscores the desperation that the Democratic Party has sunk to. A last ditch attempt to reach and hopefully convince the millions of us who crossed party lines in 2008 to vote for Obama to once again cast our lot with his party.

Sorry bud, you should have known that you had one chance to make it work and you blew it. And, oh, by the way, I also have received almost daily emails from you, Michelle, Joe Biden and various other sources in the party hierarchy. This morning I received one from you that included this line:
“Leandro, we've got to keep moving America forward -- but I need allies in the Senate and governing states to make it happen.”

Come now, Mr. President, you know that’s b.s. We gave you a 60 member majority in the senate in 2008 and what did you do with it? You ended up giving us a healthcare reform bill that will raise health insurance costs, not reduce it. If you believed in your heart of hearts that lowering of such costs can only come with a public option why did you so easily and casually abandon it? Now my neighbor, who did not vote for you and opposed your ideas from the very start, is laughing at me, for good cause, and on the health care issue I can no longer defend your program with much the same vigor as I did eighteen months ago.

Then of course you got the $700 billion stimulus bill passed and I told my neighbor then that we should start seeing unemployment numbers come down as the stimulus money begins to make its way into the economy. Boy was I wrong. Unemployment did not diminish, it increased. And all the gobbledygook you and your economists put out made no sense and had no impact. Sure it was Bush who got us to where we were but we elected you to reverse the Bush tide and fix the problem.

You said in 2008 that we need to stop Washington’s “business as usual” mode and that you would usher in “change”. Well, you didn’t. You entrusted the stimulus spending to the very entities that you said we needed to remake.It seems you were expecting a different result by doing exactly the same thing.

And of course there are many other things that puzzle ex-supporters like me.
You said that you would close Guantanamo, yet it is still open and functioning as it did when Bush was president. My question is did you really mean what you said or were you so naïve and so inexperienced that you really did not know what you were talking about in 2008?

Anyway, sorry for rudely hanging up on you this morning. I just had no stomach to hear your pleas to go to the election booth to vote for your friends. And I imagine, based on the polls, that much of the country feels as I do.

In fact we feel so helpless and so frustrated that it is possible that we might send a pro wrestling promoter in Connecticut to the senate and in Nevada we would probably elect a nut case who once advocated giving prisoners massages and who threatened to eliminate Social Security as well as Medicare. What harm could they do? We want to send a message. Any message. The message for you is: keep your word. You promised a new brand of leadership yet in the end you turned out to be no more than the politicians and lobbyist driven hordes you sought to demonize not less than two years ago.

And of course we know that the Republicans are no better and that they threw everything at you from the outset, and your own seeming ineptness made them the more effective. And all we are left with is this very bad taste in our mouths as we quietly utter, ah, “ a plague on both your houses”. Who can we turn to next? Exactly.