I’d like to say our politics is at something of a crossroad,
but we’re well past that now.
Let’s look . . . briefly . . . Donald Trump was fairly elected
president of these United States, soundly defeating Hilary Clinton last
November. That Clinton won the popular by some 3 million would be irrelevant
except for the fact that it complicates Trump’s storyline about his “huge” win.
A wise president might see the electoral vs popular vote issue and work to
bring the two sides together.
In perfect harmony, as it was.
Oh well.
That’s just not in Trump. He’s behaving like 90 percent of
the nation voted for him and can’t understand why things are so difficult in
politics. The Republican congress, too, has something of a personality
disorder, trying to ramrod through its agenda (much of it unclear for a policy
standpoint) without any effort to bring Democrats into the fray.
Sound familiar?
It should. For 8 years, Republicans did nothing more than
obstruct Obama at every turn. They came out of the gate with that, declaring
their one goal was to prevent Obama from getting re-elected. So much for that.
But the fact remains that the roadblock approach really didn’t do much other
than stall and slow down a ship that should have been moving forward a bit
faster, despite a brutal recession. Much of the anti-Obama rhetoric was racist,
including Trump’s multi-year “birther” push he championed at every opportunity,
all the while telling us he had a crack team of private investigators looking
into the matter.
Thanks in part to George W. Bush opening the government
financial doors, and Obama’s economic policies, we managed to pull out for the
recession and the stock market started its historic rise. We’re still enjoying
that ride . . . even though it’s not floating the whole boat. Much of the population
is struggling financial, compensation has stagnated, millions of jobs are not
coming back to the U.S., and our health care system is an unraveling mess that
politicians are proving incapable of resolving.
All that’s over-simplified, of course, but instead of being
at a crossroads, where we go this way or that, we’re left screaming and yelling
at each other. I hate Hillary or I hate Trump, or immigrants are all bad,
Obamacare sucks, or whatever the rants are today . . .
Nearly a year in, Trump may be the worst president we’ve
ever elected. For my Trump-supporting friends holding out he can become that
president they wanted, I offer a fresh pot of coffee and a shoulder to cry on.
Most of them hated Obama, detested Clinton and voted for the completely inexperienced
and often policy ignorant Trump. They hoped his promise of “shaking up”
Washington would come true and we’d be on a path to nirvana.
Not happening. We have a Tweeter-in-Chief who flip-flops on
issues, rants against his critics, trivializes his “enemies,” and is clearly
still obsessed with Clinton. Let’s not, at least for now, get into his
policies, failures and divisive actions.
Let’s enjoy a moment of silence for the death of politics as
we’ve known it, and hope . . . at least hope . . . that our elected officials
will be able to find a path somewhere in the middle that doesn’t discriminate
against large groups of people, marginalize those less fortunate than us, harm
women and children or damage senior.
We’ll see . . . Personally, I see no sign of a light at the
end of a very long and dark tunnel.
