Why Obama got pasted in the debt debate... or do I have the audacity to still hope?

Here's what I wrote about Obama in 2008:

February 15, 2008

Next week's "Attorney at Large" column

Why I won’t Vote for Obama
By James Castagnera
One of many drawbacks of growing old is that everything reminds you of something else. Last weekend we rented “Invasion,” just out in DVD. Not a bad flick, but I wasted a lot of mental energy comparing the Nicole Kidman/Daniel Craig film to the 1956 Kevin McCarthy and 1978 Donald Sutherland renditions of the classic “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”
Barack Obama is an inspiring speaker. I like much of what I’m hearing: deny the top two-percent their 2010 renewal of the Bush tax breaks and use the revenue to bring better health care to the rest of us. Address global warming and our dependence upon foreign oil. Make America a world model again. One commentator on NPR this week likened the senator’s appeal to Jack Kennedy’s uncanny charisma.
That for me is precisely the problem. As I’ve said before in this space, JFK’s youthful inexperience darn near got us killed. His inept handling of the Bay of Pigs, followed by his bush-league performance in a first summit with Soviet Premiere Krushchev led directly to the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Kennedy team’s handling of the confrontation has become the stuff of legends, including a feature film. The reality is that we Americans were braced for a nuclear exchange, which we may have been avoided only by the skin of the Kennedy brothers’ pearly whites.
Jimmy Carter is another good example of what I am getting at. He is often called “the best ex-president we’ve ever had.” He, like Obama, was supposed to be a breath of fresh air, if not a wind of change. In four miserable years, his White House sent plan after plan to Capitol Hill, only to see each one cannibalized and crushed by an unfriendly Congress. The Man from the Georgia, the former peanut farmer seemed clueless about how to break the logjams. In his final days he suffered the humiliation of seeing his helicopters, sent into the desert to rescue the Iranian hostages in Tehran crash and burn, without ever reaching their destination.
In the 1960s radical Jerry Rubin, who in 1994 was run down and killed while jaywalking, turned a famous quotation on its head, pontificating, “Those who study history are doomed to repeat it.” Another saying of the era was “Don’t trust anybody over thirty.” Students closed down their universities, challenging their professors and demeaning their curricula. The Beatles assured us that all we needed was love, while Professor Timothy Leary counseled us to tune, turn on and drop out. LSD, he said, was equal to instant wisdom; no need to even add water,
Meanwhile, our labor unions were drastically declining, our manufacturing sector was moving south, then west, from our own non-union Southern states, on to Mexico, and then to Japan, China, and now India and Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, we educated millions of new lawyers, while neglecting engineering and the sciences. LSD and Marijuana gave way the crack cocaine as the drug of choice. Guns proliferated in American society, such that last week saw four shootings on college campuses, most recently a rampage at Northern Illinois University which left seven dead and twice that number wounded.
My bottom line: there’s no shortcut to wisdom. To become educated you have to study your butt off. To be a master statesman, you have to serve your apprenticeship and journeyman years. To be a safe and prosperous society, you have to make the sacrifices our global competition makes.
Wouldn’t it be lovely, if Senator Obama could lie down and sleep beside a big green pod and wake up with all the wisdom and experience of someone who has served more than a single term in the U.S. Senate? It doesn’t work that way, folks. That’s why, admirable though he seems to be, he will not enjoy this old commentator’s vote.
[Jim Castagnera is the Associate Provost/Associate Counsel at Rider University. A collection of his “Attorney at Large” columns is available at www.lulu.com.]

***********************************************************************************************
And here's what Michael Tomasky says about him in the current issue of Newsweek (pp. 9-10):

"Obama has beliefs about democratic governance and about himself as president, that dictate his behavior in battles like the debt-ceiling brawl. These beliefs were a big part of what made him so inspirational to so many people before he won the 2008 election, but they have served him --- and his voters, and the country --- poorly since he too office....
"A return to that kind of civic culture is what Obama hoped to bring about --- all that talk about transforming politics. And that vision was key to his appeal during, and before, the campaign....
"Well. This many years later, it's pretty clear that Barack Obama isn't going to transcend liberal America and conservative America. Why? One reason is historical. Civil republicanism seldom has worked in practice....
"The other reasons have to do with Obama himself. To begin with,... Obama misapprehends history....
"So now what? He has ti change. I winder if he's even capable of it....
"Obama needs to quit trying to transform politics and focus on winning fights on behalf of a careworn middle class. Otherwise, politics are going to transform him into a nicely intentioned one-term president."
**********************************************************************************************
I could not have said it any better myself. Did I call it in '08, or what? Sad truth is, I wound up voting for the guy. I was hot for McCain until he insulted all of us by picking you-know-who as his running mate... and without ever vetting her, as Mark Halperin points out in "Game Change."

**********************************************************************************************
That cynical, stupid, reckless, feckless move left me nowhere to go but to Obama. Sad fact is that the GOP race is shaping up to produce yet another brainless candidate, this time perhaps in the front slot. So, speaking for all of the careworn middle class, here's hoping Obama gets up, wipes the blood off his battered nose, and man's up to wind the next rounds.
That's all I can hope.