The Obama Problem

I was a Republican from 1993 until 2012. The biggest reason I left was because the party adopted science denialism as part of its agenda. Since that same approach failed for the defunct Soviet Union, I won't caucus with anyone who thinks that repeating one of Stalinism's big mistakes would be good for America.

There's another thing about today's GOP that really annoys me, and that's the way they've demonized Obama. At this point, any Republican reading this will probably instantly decide that I'm a big Obama fan, maybe even an Obama "worshiper". They would be wrong, because they've fallen for the stupid notion that there are only two ways to view Obama, as a destroyer or Messiah.

Here's why I call that notion stupid.

If you want to solve a problem, any problem, you first have to understand what the problem is. Once you understand what the problem is, you can find the cause, and if you're good, you can find a solution.

If you start making up problems, or if you start having paranoid fantasies about someone causing the problem so they can get you, you've jumped clean off the path of wisdom and into the briar patch of stupidity. For example, if your ship is sinking, you have to find out where the water is coming in, and you have to find a way to stop it. If you start complaining that the galley isn't big enough or accusing your shipmates of wanting to sink the ship, you aren't helping to fix the problem. In fact, you're probably going to make it worse.

That's exactly what the GOP has done with Obama. Instead of judging his presidency rationally, they've made up all sorts of imaginary problems and paranoid fantasies. That's why they failed to solve the Obama problem. They don't even know what the problem is.

A lot of this is a result of today's Republicanism being driven by the entertainment media in the form of talk radio. That's where a lot of the paranoid fantasies come from, like the fear that Obama "wants" to destroy America. Even if you're stupid enough to believe that he has some secret plan to destroy America, you'd have to admit that he hasn't made any progress toward that goal.

The thing that came closest to "destroying" America was the financial meltdown in 2008, and that wasn't Obama's doing. If you want to start imagining a plot against America, that's an obvious place to start. Was that meltdown deliberately engineered, and if so, who did it? The answer is not Obama.

Then there are the fake problems the GOP has created to attack Obama. The accusation of him being born in Kenya. The accusation that he's a Muslim. The accusation that he's a socialist. The only "evidence" presented to support these accusations is the same kind of lame evidence that the paranoid conspiracy market always offers. A few cherry-picked factoids and a lot of imagination. You have to be pretty stupid to be swayed by such evidence.

What this all boils down to is that it's virtually impossible to have a rational discussion with today's Republicans about Obama's record, because they aren't basing their objections on the actual record. They're cherry-picking and imagining and letting talk radio fill their heads with scary stories.

In my view, Obama has been a pretty typical American president of the Democrat variety. He's fixed a few of our problems, like killing Osama bin Laden. He hasn't fixed other problems, like the war on drugs. He hasn't "destroyed" America or made it a socialist state, but he hasn't done enough to stop government abuses like NSA spying. He hasn't been as transparent or honest as he promised, but since that's true for every president I've seen in my lifetime, it can be described as an Obama-specific problem. He hasn't been a strong supporter of the Second Amendment, but he is nowhere near as actively anti-gun as Bill Clinton was.

That's Obama, a mixed bag of results, just like all the other presidents.

Could we have had a better president? Probably, and that's the problem with Obama. I don't think he's the best that we can do as a nation. But instead of properly understanding and fixing that problem by offering a better alternative, the GOP settled on a platform of never-ending demonization, and that's no solution at all.

The same thing is happening again. With Hillary Clinton looking she'll be the Democrats' nominee for president in 2016, is the GOP properly identifying the problem? More importantly, are they offering a workable solution? Are they going to stick with the proven failure of a "vote for us because the other guy is horrid" approach?

Or are they going to stop failing and start offering honest, rational solutions?