I'm Out of Touch With Public Opinion

A recent public opinion poll showed the nation divided down the middle about President Obama's performance regarding the recently signed health care reform legislation and the economy. But the respondents overwhelmingly approved of the President's actions entrenching us more deeply in Afghanistan.

Although I am myself ambivalent about the health care reform bill, I see Obama's actions to stimulate the economy not only as necessary, but also as a logical continuation of the previous Republican president's emergency actions during the final months of his administration. But George W. Bush's party, now in the clear minority and out of the presidency, has gone so far in opposition to anything that Obama wants that they even opposed en masse a bill providing tax credits for small businesses. Wait, that's nothing new. The GOP is the party that claims to back small business while their actions really tend to tow the line of major corporate interests.

And Afghanistan? Why are we vastly increasing the number of soldiers we're sending there when the rationale for being there in the first place was to fight the Al-Qaeda terrorists who hatched and carried out the plot to attack America on 9/11? The recent case of the Nigerian who unsuccessfully tried to blow up a plane as it was about to land in Detroit illustrates the amorphous, mobile nature of Al-Qaeda: the plot originated in Yemen, a country friendly to the U.S. in which Al-Qaeda is clandestinely operating. Apparently, the terrorist thugs running Al-Qaeda came to the correct strategic conclusion that, since the U.S. will attack a country whose government is friendly to Al-Qaeda, their best chance for survival and growth is then to tuck themselves away in hard-to-get-to locations deeply within countries supporting America. This has already been borne out in Pakistan. So if Al-Qaeda has the capacity to base itself worldwide inside friendly countries who nevertheless may not be interested in U.S. troops fighting on their soil, why then are we throwing so much into fighting the indigenous political/military/religious movement known as the Taliban in Afghanistan? I think they already got the message several years ago: don't be friendly to Al-Qaeda! Perhaps Obama thinks that a surge reminiscent of the Iraq surge in the Sunni regions of 2007-08 will succeed on the same level. I think, though, that the situations on the ground are completely different. As an American, I wish success for Obama, but I fear that his emphasis on fighting in Afghanistan is misguided and I disapprove of his conduct of the war.

Also affirming the conclusion I reached that I am out of touch with American public opinion is the fact that the pollster didn't even think that Obama's recent decision to flat-out abandon our NASA efforts at returning to the moon and plan a Mars trip merited a poll question. I strongly disapprove of Obama's handling of this issue, but I don't think most Americans could care less about it one way or another. And that is very disappointing. Then again, people in this country seemed bored with the Apollo moon program as early as 1970, after only a couple of resoundingly successful landings. Sad.