365 Days Is A Very Long Time

A year is a very long time in life, I feel for Barack Obama, I really do.  When he was conducting his campaign I worried about what the results of it would be.  The central platform of his winning was hope, which is a very, very dangerous thing to build upon. 

Hope is, after all, a very intangilble thing.  Emotions should be a part of politics.  The trouble with the election of Obama, is they became the whole.  His actual ideas are pretty good.  The original healthcare reform he proposed was something truly different, and put meat on the bones of all that hope.  His approach to Guantanamo, and to the War On Terror both smacked of a kind of sense not seen in the White House for a good while.

Then there are problems.  The only significant change was in the presidency.  The senators, governers, and the like haven't really changed all that much.  Obama wasn't elected with the kind of change in the political make-up that we'll see by May of this year in our own Government.  The consequence being that there have been compromises to the Healthcare bill making it something very different to the one he wanted, the numbers of troops in Afghanistan has risen and the intentions to leave at whatever time seem somewhat optimistic at best.

That's the trouble with hoping for too much.  You can often end up with less than very little.  I know this, I'm writing this from my friend's flat, earning about half the money I was a year ago, doing the kind of work I stopped doing about 8 years ago, just trying to get by.  A year ago I was planning a move to Croydon to be near to my work.  A good job which - although not exactly secure by any means - looked like giving me a springboard to something better.  How wrong I was.

I wonder what President Obama is thinking today, he's lost the absolute majority he had and any future policy decsions will require the kind of negotiations his team thought they had trounced after the elections back in 2007.  All that seems such a long time ago.  Such is the nature of hope.

No doubt he'll survive and find some kind of way to manouver his way through this.  He really doesn't strike you as the kind of person who can't.  It's that kind of quality he'll need to move forward.  Optimism is the key.  As for the American people, it's a different matter. 

I was talking to someone about this very subject last week.  In fact I've talked about it a lot recently.  The worst thing you can lose is your sense of hope.  Without it nothing in life is good, and nothing seems worth the effort.  It's a very dark place to find yourself.  Yet there must be a lot of people in America who are feeling that.  The city may have recovered from the recession - at least a little - but it's the greedy self serving incompetents who caused it who are still gambling away, still demanding a bonus, and still costing ordinary people their jobs, livelyhoods, and - worst of all - their hopes.  They arrogantly threaten all kinds of things if they don't get what they want like the greedy children they are.  That's the image that people in both America, and the UK see as the symbols of the time.

Yet, like my own situation, there is always a way forward, and a way out.  In Obama's case that is at the ballot box.  His mandate has been erroded at the heartland of Democratic politics with the loss of Edward Kennedy's old seat in Massachusetts.  That can be repeated everywhere, it's the consequence of building up people's hopes.  They raised the expectations even higher by adding their own making the result somewhat inevitable.  The measure of how good a president Barack Obama really is begins now.