Obama no saviour

In America, choosing between Republicans and Democrats is – what I like to term – a choice between hell and purgatory.

On one hand you have a party whose insanity and heinousness knows no bounds and lacks basic human decency, and on the other you have a party so weak it caves to the opposition even with huge majorities in both houses.

Nevertheless, the majority of people – myself included – believed that Obama was different, that he wasn’t weak or corrupt and would bring real reform.

We all believed that Obama would actually fight for the sick with no health care and the unemployed worker.

While I still think there is some cause for hope, at the moment it is looking like both the general population and I were wrong.

If you had asked me eight years ago if having a comatose president who would do nothing was better than the unmitigated disaster that was George Bush, I would have said yes.

However, in this case, perhaps another four years of Bush would have been better for America than Obama.

What I mean is that Obama, while smart enough to stabilize America, is exceedingly unlikely to enact real change.

Americans are left to wait another eight years while their country’s underlying problems grow worse.

Had McCain won, his presidency would have been such a disaster that the Democrats would have had to make real changes or risk losing to a third party.

Obama, though, has only to stabilize Bush’s mess and call it change, practically guaranteeing himself a two-term presidency.

However, if he leaves eight years from now and no significant change has occurred, then every bad decision Bush made will have eight more years to fester; that will not be a hopeful picture.

The largest of these failed reforms is the financial bailout. The collapse itself is entirely the fault of Bush’s gross negligence and irrational deregulation.

Yet it was Obama who crafted the bailout package that cost, by some estimates, $23 trillion and imposed no real regulatory change.

To any normal person, the fact that the Wall Street bankers devastated the world’s economy would be cause for punitive regulations to prevent this from happening again.

On this issue, Obama has pulled a Bush, giving away unfathomable amounts of money with no positive result.

While this may be part of some grand scheme, the reality that Obama gave the money away without tying it to regulations is pretty bleak.

The best example of Obama’s lackluster reform is the health care issue.

Without any fight whatsoever, Obama has given up on robust public health insurance that would have competed with the current private system.

Instead, a laughable system of co-opts will be promoted which will be completely ineffective in bringing down costs for the average American.

No doubt these will not be the only areas of inaction in the Obama presidency; there are already warning signs with regards to the environment and the restoration of the rule of law.

If Obama fails to provide real reform to Americans then there will be no other option than to turn to third parties, as the failure of the so-called “change” candidate will kill the last shreds of accountability in the corrupt two-party system.

One can hope that mounting public pressure will force him to do the right thing.

For the moment it appears that Obama is just another Democrat, albeit one who gives really good speeches.