CNN “fact-checks” SNL’s Obama skit and hilarious #CNNFactCheck hashtag emerges
In yesterday’s Situation Room, the nincompoops over at CNN felt compelled to fact-check the hilarious SNL skit where the President’s achievements so far are listed: none. I don’t quite remember CNN doing the same for the numerous skits directed at Bush or Palin. Not to mention, the so-called fact-checking turns out to be pretty lame. According to their fact-checkers, we’re doing a-OK in Afghanistan and Obama never promised to be out of Iraq by now so shut it. Oh and Obamacare is well and alive since it’s stalled in Congress. What?
I thought the SNL skit was pretty accurate. I’m still waiting for results on a lot of promises Obama has made. He hasn’t broken many of them, but most are still in the works or have not been addressed yet.
My problem is not that I don’t support Obama, I just don’t think Obama is supporting the people who voted for him. He is being too soft, and trying too hard to find common ground with the right wing. This has led to a good deal of inaction.
Obama needs to use his majority power in congress, lead with conviction, and do what the majority of voters elected him to do.
Unfortunately it seems as though this administration over-analyzes how each & every policy decision they make will be judged by a majority of voters & then in turn affect the 2010 & 2012 elections.
They need to stop campaigning & start governing.
The idea that a President with a Congressional majority passes his agenda unimpeded has no basis in historical fact. The only things that allow him to do this are national crises: the great depression, JFK dying, 9/11, etc. Outside of these fairly narrow periods, the President has to engage in the same kind of politicking he would have to do no matter what the majorities are. Even if your political knowledge only extends back to the Dubya administration (no offense, but one does get that vibe a lot), you might recall Bush’s majorities not getting him either immigration reform or social security reform, the former because it clashed with his party’s ideological precepts and the latter because it was widely unpopular. Congress is its own body with its own interests, as it is Constitutionally supposed to be. We expect them to deliberate and not just rubber-stamp what the President proposes. If they pass things too quickly, they get roundly criticized for not reading the bills and get dragged over the coals if the policy runs into any problems. If you want a system where the executive gets to pass things quickly, there is one, and it’s called a monarchy. I don’t know where anyone would have gotten the ludicrous idea that Congress does things quickly.
As for the idea that Obama needs to “do what the majority of voters elected him to do,” there’s no evidence that the majority of voters elected him to do anything other than be President. Some voted for him not to be George Bush, some voted for him to end the war, some voted for him to pass health care reform, some voted for him because he seemed like a decent guy. But voters do tend to send their Congressional rep to Washington with a fairly clear mandate, and unfortunately, that mandate might not be what big city lib’ruls want it to be. It cannot be said enough: Democrats won in 2008 because “Democrat” came to mean more than just “progressive.” It came to mean some of the things it used to mean, back when Democrats won elections—populist, pro-labor, Kenysian—and some things it had never really meant before, like fiscally responsible. So the Democrats’ Congressional majority is made up of a bunch of people with a very different, and locally determined, idea of what “Democrat” means.
The challenge Obama is clearly facing here is bringing together what all those things mean—and not really including Republicans, which seems to not be a strategy anymore outside of some Congressional dems that are looking for cover for their more moderate or even borderline right-wing views. People voted for Obama because they thought he would make everything right forever—that’s why you voted for Obama, isn’t it?—and while that’s fine, we can’t ignore the fact that people had very different ideas of what “right” means. For some, it meant single-payer healthcare reform. For others, it meant keeping spending down. For some, it meant ending the war. For others, it meant continuing the war. Some of these may not jive with his stated platform, but the wee little problem with our oh-so-hip cynicism about politicians’ promises is that it lets us instead pretend that they’re promising whatever we think they’re promising. The 2008 presidential election was the kind of illusion that only democracies can muster: the illusion that we all agree on something. And while that illusion is awfully useful for nations, it can make things awfully difficult for the people that have to run them.
