Obushama

In spite of the vicious, hateful, and highly personal attack campaign being carried out against President Obama by the far right, he has continued to surprise (and sometimes dismay) his supporters by the high degree of continuity he has shown with the previous Republican Bush administration. Sometimes this continuity has led to a curious situation in which Bush supporters have attacked Obama for carrying out policies originally enacted under Bush.

The economic bailout did not begin under Obama, but rather under Bush as a clear-headed, pragmatic response to a severely tanking economy. The abrupt change in our government's attitude about restraint with banks and corporations occurred not with the transfer of power from Bush to Obama, but rather in September 2008 under Bush. Now would George W. Bush have pushed for a stimulus bill and government management of General Motors as has Barack Obama? Probably not, but then again who would have predicted his actions back in September? And much to the former president's credit (and unlike others of his administration), he has avoided publicly second-guessing our current president. In other words, a class act.

Although President Obama is merely carrying out policies in Iraq decided on in the previous administration, he is nonetheless being criticized for the Americans turning police power to the Iraqis (in Iraq, their OWN country, outrage of all outrages). In Afghanistan, Obama is worrying the left, not the right, with his escalation of our intervention in their civil strife there. And who is his Secretary of Defense? None other than Bush's Secretary of Defense: General Robert Gates.

With all of this continuity from Bush to Obama, the current furor over health care reform must be quite a relief to those who want to paint our current president as an extreme leftist, even a socialist. But even though Obama expresses a desire to reform the health insurance system in America, he has always been relatively weak in his enthusiasm (compared to other Democrats, especially his 2008 presidential campaign opponent Hillary Clinton) and (in my opinion) has shown far too much flexibility with those who would alter any legislation to the point where it would end up serving the interests of the health insurance industry more than the American public. So even here, when all is said and done, we may find Obama and Bush closer than they are currently being painted.

I think that those on the political left who are disappointed and increasingly worried about Obama's perceived drift rightward are more in line with reality than are his conservative opponents who only seem to be interested in "Chicken Little" reactions to everything he says or does. And as a final comment regarding the similarities between Obama and Bush, consider the following.

A president is in his very first year of office. It is the second Tuesday in September. And, either for the purpose of political self-promotion (say his detractors) or to encourage young people to learn (say his supporters) that president makes a well-publicized visit to a public school. Now which president I am talking about? I think you know the answer: both! Obushama!