Hoping For Change

About five and a half years ago, I was watching the 2004 Democratic National Convention and trying to decide which country to move to if John Kerry won the election. It wasn't that I thought he'd be a completely awful president, it was just that, the president gets to be on TV a lot and I always had the urge to slit my wrists whenever John Kerry started talking. It was really more of a safety issue.

Anyway, I was watching and up for the keynote speech comes this young candidate for Peter Fitzgerald's Illinois Senate seat. He already had that election in the bag. His opponent, Jack Ryan, had completely self-destructed (something about 7 of 9 from Star Trek Voyager and sex clubs, sometimes it's better to just forget things). Also, we'd later find out that his new Republican opponent would be Alan Keyes. Seriously. Apparently, this was the Republicans' first try at their "Hey, we know a black guy too" strategy for taking on Obama. If you've seen Michael Steele lately, you can see they're still working out the kinks. My point is, he was basically Senator Elect Obama at that point. And by the middle of Senator Elect Obama's speech, I was thinking what most people watching were probably thinking, "this guy can be the first black president".

Almost three years later, I saw footage of the same guy, who had become Senator Obama, announcing his candidacy for the presidency outside of the old Illinois state capitol. It seemed 8 or 12 years early, presumptuous, even arrogant, I loved everything about it. He talked, among other things, about a "future of endless possibility stretching before us." I thought, "I really like this guy, I'm in". I also thought "anyone but Hillary Clinton, I'm double in".

By the way, has any politician ever gotten more mileage out of not being other people than Barack Obama. That's not a knock on the President, he had the skills to play the hand he was dealt. John Edwards and Bill Richardson were also not Hillary Clinton, how'd that turn out? Al Gore and John Kerry were definitely not George W. Bush, it didn't seem to do them, or anyone, any good.

After almost two years of hope-mongering, Senator Obama won a resounding victory and was to be the next President of the United States, and I was pretty psyched. Almost a year after that, I'm not too psyched anymore, I'm actually becoming a bit disappointed, and I'm not the only one. My first question today is this, a lot of us who supported the President are a little disappointed, but should we be?

Disappointment is, in general, the marker that indicates the gap between expectations and reality. President Obama came into office with sky high expectations. You could point to a great number of events in the two year presidential campaign and say "that's when Obama won, that's when it was over", including the moment when the McCain campaign became, as George W. Bush put it, a "five spiral crash". (I had to mention this because I couldn't agree more and I don't think I could fashion a better description, and that makes me wonder if something terrible is about to happen to me, and possibly the world, and I think it's only fair to warn you).

For me, I believe the President won pretty early. Political campaigns are, more than anything else, a fight over what we're going argue about. As in, if the campaign is about national security, guy A wins, if the campaign is about health care, guy B wins. Good politicians already know where they're strong and where they're weak, winning is about focusing the campaign where you know you're strong. I think the President won when he successfully made the campaign about hope and change. The President framed the argument, soon Hillary Clinton was talking about being "ready for change, ready to lead" and later, John McCain, a man who started in the House of Representatives in 1983, was saying things like "the do nothing crowd in Washington is in for a change". In hindsight, it seems pretty obvious how that story was going to end, doesn't it?

The problem? Hope is a lot like faith. Once you put some hope in people, they start to believe, not just in your ideas, but in you. This is what happened to the President. Some voters, voters who care deeply about one particular issue, started believing in Barack Obama, hoping that he would do the one thing they most wanted to see happen, hoping that he'd change that one big problem they cared most about, even if he never really said he would. People stopped being unbiased observers of the Obama campaign and started hearing what they wanted to hear, and rationalizing what they didn't.

Presidential campaigns are long, really really long. Candidates get put in front of hundreds of different audiences, all wanting to hear different things. To understand what a candidate will actually do in office, you really have to watch the whole campaign, get a sense for the general tone of the campaign on any given issue, don't focus on any single quote or speech. Hope makes it hard for people to do that, and leads to disappointment. Here are a few examples.

Gay rights activists are pretty disappointed with the President. A lot of people hoped this president would be a real champion for GLBT rights. And, at times, in front of certain audiences, he made it sound like he would be. But, looking at the campaign as a whole, here are the two things I took away. First, the President was always a lot more comfortable saying he didn't agree with "don't ask, don't tell" than he was with saying he'd repeal it. That doesn't exactly sound like someone who's ready to boldly take on the establishment. Second, the President never missed an opportunity to pander to so-called values voters by saying he doesn't believe in gay marriage (I always laugh when I hear someone say this, it makes gay marriage sound like Tinkerbell, if enough of us just believe in it and clap our hands, maybe it'll come to life). How hard will someone fight for your rights when he's elected if he makes it clear that he doesn't see you as equals?

I know that last thing sounded harsh, but I'm pretty sure I'm right about it. If the President thinks he can get married, and he thinks I can get married, but he doesn't think you can get married, that doesn't really sound like equality to me. So gay rights activists are disappointed, should they be?

Here's another example. This is part of a quote, "the war must be ended...it must be ended honorably, consistent with America's limited aims...". Would you believe me if I told you I pulled that from an Obama campaign speech about Iraq? Probably, right? That quote is from Richard Nixon, about the Vietnam War, in 1968. I'm not comparing Obama to Nixon, I honestly believe the President would end both current wars if he could. I'm saying, it's easy to talk about ending a war during a campaign, most people are generally anti-death and anti-explosions, but the politics of ending a military operation that simply can't end well are a pretty heavy lift for a president, and this is something we kind of already knew.

Listen, I think the U.S. military will pull off whatever missions they're given in Iraq and Afghanistan, they're that good, but it'll never be the kind of ending people get excited about, like when we learned about World War 2 in school, everyone surrenders and America takes a victory lap, Iraq just isn't that kind of operation (at least not anymore, the Iraqis already surrendered, and hung the guy who used to be in charge), neither is Afghanistan.

On top of that, candidate Obama was always pretty clear that he'd be willing to do whatever it took to win in Afghanistan. So, now we've still got plenty of troops in Iraq, and we're getting ready to send more to Afghanistan. Anti-war activists are disappointed, should they be?

One more. The President talked a lot about health care, in the primaries and the general election. He argued he had a better plan than Hillary, I liked that he wasn't for an individual mandate, which he now appears to be all for. I understand why, but I still don't like it. Then he argued he had a better plan than John McCain, which wasn't hard. Like most of John McCain's plans, I still don't really know what it was, except that it started with "my friends..." and ended with him looking at Sarah Palin with a certain level of contempt.

Candidate Obama actually made some pretty explicit promises about health care, if health care is a main issue for you, it was really easy to believe an Obama victory meant big time health care reform. But there's one big problem, we're seeing it now, but we knew about it last year. Congress writes the laws, the president lobbies like everyone else and then signs them. The President made a promise he couldn't keep on his own. I think he wanted to keep it, and maybe he thought he could shame Congress into doing the right thing (HA!), but he probably should have known better, and we probably should have too. It looks like whatever health care bill comes out of Congress, it will be something that gives health insurance companies lots of new customers without really doing much else. So people who wanted serious health care reform are disappointed, should they be?

I could go on like this, apply it to a dozen other issues, but I think I made my point.

So why be disappointed so early? The President has four years, maybe eight. Technically, this is true, and if he does win a second term, it could get really interesting. But consider that next November, the entire House of Representatives and 35 Senators (we'll actually have 36 Senate races, but one won't have an incumbent) are up for re-election, and those campaigns will be underway by the summer. As soon as the midterms are over, it'll be time for the President to start running again. The window for the President to do big things, things that might be a little controversial, things that make Senators and Congressmen earn their salaries, things you can't do with an election looming, is closing more quickly than you think.

Should we all lose hope now and give up? No. President Obama is the smartest guy in the room, his campaign was always one step ahead of everyone else, he's a good politician, he's got a lot of smart people around him and I still believe he wants to do a lot of good with his presidency, or at least try to. This time next year, I could be lauding the President for how much he got done since I wrote this, and complaining about the things he did that I didn't agree with. We'll see. For now, I'll wrap up with my second question.

Should you stop hoping for change? Not necessarily, but if you don't want to be disappointed, maybe it's time to change what you're hoping for.