Category | Op Ed

Where’s Waldo?!?

Published on August 18, 2009 by Austin James Green

Remember that fun book with the geeky looking guy hiding in different spots?  If memory serves me, the book had three different levels: easy, where Waldo was quite easy to spot; medium, where Waldo became a bit more difficult to find; and difficult, where finding Waldo was almost impossible. I always managed to find Waldo, no matter how long it took; Waldo could not hide from me. Now, many years later, I am no longer trying to find Waldo, rather I am now trying to find the Barack Obama from the campaign trail, but after eight months of searching, it has become increasingly difficult to find “change we can believe in.”

No one can deny that Barack Obama ran one of the smoothest and slickest campaigns in American history.  The president managed to dupe millions of Americans into believing that he could actually change the establishment and culture of corruption in D.C. He never deviated from the teleprompter; he was always on message, and the best part of his campaign is that he did not randomly suspend his campaign to “work” on legislation.

But now we are eight months into the Obama presidency and I am starting to wonder why President Obama hired the McCain campaign advisors?  OK, so I have no actual proof that the McCain advisors are running the Obama show, but with Obama’s sporadic behavior, it makes one wonder what in the world is going on in Washington, D.C. The best example of defining the Obama presidency thus far is to look at the cabinet appointments he has made and how he has handled members of his own party.

Early on, there was slight hope that President Obama would be someone who could fix tarnished relationships with old foes.

For starters, he picked Joe Biden as his vice president as well as Hillary Clinton for Secretary of State.  Both appointments were huge in the fact that all three of them were his rivals for the presidential nomination.  Things started going downhill from there.  With the choice of Timothy Geithner for Secretary of the Teasury and Leon Panneta for director of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), it left many people scratching their heads on this whole “change” concept.  In choosing Timothy Geithner, Obama chose someone who “forgot” to pay his taxes, but Obama trusts him enough to pull the nation out of recession.

As for Panetta, I am still wondering what experience he has to run the CIA.  We saw what a complete disaster Michael Brown made post-Hurricane Katrina and how terrible he and the Bush administration handled the aftermath; the last thing we need is another incompetent person running an office such as the CIA in the event of, God forbid, another terrorist attack.

As leader of his party, Obama’s performance has been mediocre at best and it leaves me wondering if he was this much of a dud as a community organizer.  If you look at how the Democrats have handled health care, you almost wonder who is the ringleader of the circus.

Obama doesn’t seem to have a clue about what is going on, the Blue Dog Democrats are trying to make things happen, the hardcore left is blaming the Republicans, and the American people are somehow un-American for going to town hall forums.

There is so much discourse within the Democratic Party that Americans are now more tired of politics than they were when George Bush was president.  The politics are all the same, just a few new faces in town.  The person elected to reform and give hope in Washington, can’t even do that within his own party.

So, where is Waldo?  I guess I should ask where is the Barack Obama from the campaign trail?  The person in office is not the man that Independent voters supported, the poll numbers are clear that Obama is losing their support.  This is not the man that so many of my liberal friends voted for, I’ve talked with them, they are just as frustrated as I am, and I didn’t even vote for him.  Eight months later and I am still searching for Barack Obama, the candidate who inspired millions of people to believe he could reshape how politics were done in America.  The candidate who promised “change” that we all, Republicans and Democrats alike, could believe in.  This may be one search where I do not find Waldo.