Obama’s Failures On Parade

As part of the mainstream media’s biased-to-the-left (bite me) coverage of Obama’s first year, the Washington Post ran an article detailing the fate of the three citizens Obama singled out for attention at last year’s pre-state of the union first speech to congress. These three individuals have not, in fact, faired so well this year, and the implication is that somehow this shows that Obama’s administration has not been a success. (The title of the piece is “Some Obama Goals for Administration Have Still Not Been Met” or “One Year Later, Obama’s Plan Challenged.”

Each of these cases is more instructive than the writer intended, but the message is not that Obama’s plan has been challenged. Instead the message, in the words of Ty'Sheoma Bethea, the then 8^th grade student Obama acknowledged last year. Now 15-years-old Bethea said, “Change takes awhile.” And it will take continued pressure and support from liberals and progressives.

Bethea’s case is, in many ways, the oddest in this mix. Coming from a poor single-parent household, Bethea attended a Dillon S.C. jr. high school housed in buildings that by all accounts were good candidates for being condemned.

This is the sort of school the President Obama would like to see upgraded, and in the first few months after Bethea’s appearance during Obama’s speech, it looked like that was going to happen. A Chicago company donated $250,000 worth of new school furniture, and school officials eyed plans for a “$55 million proposal called the 21st Century Promise.”

Then in stepped S.C. Governor Mark (hit the old Appalachian trail) Sanford, who refused (The article says “hesitated.” If he “hesitated” it was one long hesitation.) to use stimulus money to build new schools—why worry about having good schools for your students when there are political points to be made. Unable to secure private loans in this uncertain economy, the school project died on the vine.

From there, of course, everything went down hill. Instead of building a new school, the Dillon school district is facing laying off administrators and teacher to accommodate state budget cuts. Bethea’s mother lost her job in Dillon and the family was forced to move to Atlanta where Bethea now goes to school.

How is this Obama’s fault? Donations came in and the money was there in the stimulus. This story could have been very much different if Governor Sanford had not let political considerations to come before the good of his state. I suppose Obama could have had Air Force one bomb the South Carolina State House and given what we now know of Sanford and his Lt. Governor—who wants let the poor starve so they won’t breed—that might not have been a bad idea.

This story, in fact, illustrates the one problem Obama did not anticipate—Republican elected officials who are willing to sacrifice the good of their constituents to make political statements.

The next story is that of Bob Dixon, Mayor of Greensburg Kansas, a small town 109 miles west of Wichita on US 54, that was 95% destroyed by a tornado May4, 2007. Mayor Dixon loves his small town and has overseen its rebuilding as a modern, wind-powered, sustainable energy showcase of a city. This rebuilding was in process when Mayor Dixon was praised by Obama and is largely finished now. (The financing came through along with state and federal emergency rebuilding funds.)

The problem is, the city is not the same as it was. The area’s agricultural base was also destroyed by the tornado, and new jobs have not been found to attract new residents. The town’s population was a whopping1500 has lost almost half its residents (down to 800). Again, I have to ask, how is this Obama’s fault?

 Obama did not situate the town in the middle of Bumfuck Nowhere.

I don’t mean to denigrate the town or its residents. The idea of using the redevelopment funds to build a truly 21^st century town was great, but maybe bringing in new job creating businesses should have been the first order of business. “If you build it they will come,” may have worked in a Field of Dreams, but if you locate Greensburg on a map of Kansas, it is hard to imagine what would attract people there. This is why no one is suggesting building a new Disneyland in Broken Bow Nebraska (which has more than double the population Greensburg did before the tornado).

The third individual Obama singled out last year was Leonard Abess, a bank president who in splitting his $60 million retirement bonus among 471 bank employees, both current and former, stood a symbol for the kind of selflessness Obama finds admirable. And in the year that has followed Mr. Abess has not gone broke, lost his health care or had his mother repossessed.

Instead, as a result of his notoriety, Mr. Abess has come to be acquainted with despair in America. He has received a ton of mail from people who have had normal, everyday tragedies befall them. They were laid off, or had no retirement, or . . . you can imagine the hard-luck stories. You have probably lived one yourself.

Then Mr. Abess got letters from the people he gave money to, thanking him and telling him how they had used the money. They wrote that they “couldn't pay bills, couldn't keep a house, couldn't afford a car." This litany of despair depressed Mr. Abess so much that he began to avoid economic news. This country’s continuing problems depressed him.

Mr. Abess is doubtless a very nice man, but one has to wonder what kind of blinders he has worn not to notice the despair among the working class in this country for years. The moral I suppose is when Abess stares into the abyss the abyss is apt to stare back into him. How is this Obama’s problem?

Having optimism, which Obama pushed, is not the same as not recognizing the existence of crushing poverty.