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But for a man who worked as a community organizer
?Obama likes to pronounce that the battle is over. ("I won.") But for a man who worked as a community organizer, he has been strangely resourceless in taking his case to the public. In his first term,Miu Miu Purses, he did that sporadically (often on talk shows and at town-hall meetings), before he had a specific case to recommend,Miu Miu Online, and he went back after the opposition had rallied against him. The conditions that made for this impotence in 2009 remain in place for 2013. His 2012 victory speech began with the familiar grandiosity: "Tonight, more than 200 years after a former colony...". But people are asking President Obama (at whose doorstep aeons may pause and galaxies wonder) to stop now,Miu Miu Handbags, and look around, and plant himself in today. Look at the continent that burned last summer and flooded this fall,Miu Miu Purses, and say plainly what you mean to do. Obama, in the victory speech, went on to declare that we are not red states and blue states. He has been saying that since 2004, but the declaration is false; it is a forlorn prayer disguised as a statement of fact; and though the discretion of a moderate leader doesn't require him to admit the truth, his need to repeat the formula suggests that more magical thinking may be in store.
Magical thinking that obstructs persuasion and the steady pursuit of policy has come in two kinds. There is the neighborhood kind,Miu Miu Online. Obama on November 3, 2007 told a crowd of supporters in Spartanburg, South Carolina: "Understand this: if American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain when I'm in the White House, I'll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself, I'll walk on that picket line with you as President of the United States of America." This was an absurd picture. No president could do what Obama asked his listeners to believe he was going to do. The other kind of magical thinking is planetary. On June 3,Miu Miu Purses, 2008, when he had clinched that year's Democratic nomination,Miu Miu Handbags, Obama said that some day people would look back and say "this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal." Take the words of humble fellowship on walking the picket line,Miu Miu Online, and the words of shouldering the burden as the shepherd of the universe, and compare Obama's actual contribution to care for the environment and his conduct during the Wisconsin protests against union-busting legislation put in by Governor Scott Walker. He did not even pause to say hello on a visit to a neighboring state. |
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