It began as a wildly improbable dream. A black man, born of a Kenyan father and a Kansas mother, raised in some far off country called Indonesia. We listened to the rhetoric when he told us...."there's not a liberal America and a Conservative America, there's the United States of America".
We danced to Stevie Wonder at the convention...it was "signed, sealed and delivered". We shouted out, "Yes WE Did" on that late November evening as the results came in.
And on a cold January day, we sat back and waited with anticipation for the change we knew was coming.
But as John Kenneth Galbraith once said, "Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable."
Now we sit and wonder what happened. Was the mythical prince we saw in our minds during the campaign merely a vision of fantasy? Did we expect too much?
The truth is that President Barack Obama has accomplished a great deal over the past 11 months. We avoided a complete financial meltdown. We signed the Lilly Ledbetter Act. We are working to close Guantanamo. We added 4 million uninsured children to SCHIP. We are funding embryonic stem cell research again. Power plants now have new regulations to protect our environment. The Mathew Shepherd Hate Crimes Act has been signed. We now budget for the VA a year in advance, thereby helping our returning soldiers. We have begun legislation on bank reform, environmental policies, and numerous other really important issues. A lot has been done. And it's been done with many key positions in the administration held up by Republicans during confirmation.
The problem is that we have to work within the framework provided by our constitution...and it's designed to be a slow process. One that seldom makes anyone completely happy with the resulting laws. And it doesn't help that we as a nation tend to give the impression of being perpetual children who sit in the backseat crying out, "Are we there yet?" before the car has left the driveway. The cries become a wail as we turn the corner and are even worse when we pass the city limits. Simple answer, "NO, WE'RE NOT THERE....YET"
There is much that President Obama has not done. There are many promises that are unfullfilled. But we don't seem to have listened to many of the things he said about how you get the things you want.
Before becoming president, Obama liked to say, "I know you want to go to the moon, but we only have enough gas to go this far" And that's a "life truth" that is hard to get around.
You see, a President can't just sign a decree and make a law. It's simple really....we don't elect kings in America. The President has to work with a legislative body composed of 535 individuals, all with individual wants and desires, all with varying levels of morality but all with an equal say in the way that our laws are created. It's a sloppy way of doing business, a monarchy would be more efficient. Think of it as "herding cats".
We can cry about what we can't get or we can continue to push for our goals. But we need to remember that it took eight years to get into this mess and it won't go away in the first couple of years of an Obama presidency. Many of the same Congressmen and Senators that led us into this disaster are still in office and still making mistakes (either accidentally or with malicious intention.) But regardless of why they do so, the fact remains that they are there. Nobody ever said that it would be easy.
Perhaps we should have tried harder to remember the words of President Obama on the night of Super Tuesday:
We can do this. It will not be easy. It will require struggle and sacrifice. There will setbacks and we will make mistakes. And that is why we need all the help we can get. So tonight I want to speak directly to all those Americans who have yet to join this movement but still hunger for change - we need you. We need you to stand with us, and work with us, and help us prove that together, ordinary people can still do extraordinary things.
Now is the time to continue to voice our concerns but let us be wary of how quick we are to condemn and burn bridges. The internet may have sped communications and news into an "instant" age...but the Senate remains the same.