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The Imagination-Based Presidency

The Imagination-Based Presidency

Recently, one of my uncles died of lung cancer. I didn't see him too often, but still, when someone in your family dies, it’s appropriate to take a moment to reflect on that person’s life. My uncle was 69-years-old, a Vietnam veteran, a writer, and by all accounts, a very smart guy. His obituary ended with this:

He was a panentheistic Buddhist by faith. Memorial contributions may be made to Presidential Election for Obama-Biden

This prompted me to wonder: (1) What the hell is apanentheistic Buddhist? and (2) What the hell Obama has done to make his reelection the last wish of a dying man?

So, after Googling panentheistic Buddhism (I’ll save you the trouble: being a pantheistic Buddhist is like being a Jedi, but without a light saber), I Googled “Obama accomplishments.”

One of the first sites I found provided a nifty slide show of Obama’s “accomplishments.” For example:

Issued executive order to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay

Whoops. I guess that site hasn’t been updated since that 2009 executive order, which was about as effective as my attempts to get my cat to fetch the newspaper. Turns out that cats don’t like to fetch things, and there’s no Guauntanamus Terminus spell to magically make a prison full of terrorism suspects disappear. Who knew?

Another vaunted “accomplishment” is the withdrawal of troops from Iraq – which at least has the virtue of having actually happened. The only problem is that Obama was legally obligated by the Bush administration’s agreement with the government of Iraq to withdraw our troops, relegating Obama’s role to that of logistical overseer, if not uninvolved observer.

Most of the other “accomplishments” I see attributed to Obama have to do with spending gigantic sums of money, for example on the so-called “Stimulus Package.” It doesn’t seem to matter that the stimulus package was a failure by the administration’s own standards, or that it wasn’t Obama’s money that was spent, or that the money had to be borrowed from future generations of Americans. The important thing is that the stimulus “averted another great depression” – which we know because another Great Depression didn’t happen, and therefore must have been averted. Q.E.D.

Others point to the fact that Obama is the “first president to come out in support of gay marriage.” Now gay marriage is a contentious issue, but let’s assume for the sake of argument that gays being able to marry is a good thing. The fact is that Obama came out in support of gay marriage after the tide of public opinion had turned in favor of it (at least among those who might conceivably vote for Obama), and that as recently as 2008, then-candidate Obama described marriage as being “between a man and a woman.” The President now explains that his view on this issue has been “evolving” and that “it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same sex couples should be able to get married.” He then rushed to clarify that states should be able to decide the issue on their own. In other words, he changed his position as minutely as he possibly could while still being able to claim that he is on the “right” side of the issue (as determined by the preponderance of public opinion), and his statement has had absolutely no effect on any public policy anywhere. Has American society really stagnated to the point where just holding an opinion – even a half-hearted and politically convenient opinion – can be chalked up as an accomplishment?

Has there ever been a president whose supposed accomplishments so heavily tax the imaginations of his constituents? When Kennedy put a man on the Moon, we had photographic proof that it happened. When the Berlin Wall fell, you could hold a chunk of history in your hand – evidence that Reagan had been right all along about the superiority of democratic capitalism over Communism. Clinton could point to the amazing economic expansion that went on through the 90s.

But with Barack Obama, we are told to imagine what might have happened had he not been president, or to imagine the future benefits of current policies, or to imagine policies that might be implemented on the basis of good intentions. We are told that it’s important that we’ve finally elected an African-American President – which may well be true, but that’s something that the American people did, not something Barack Obama did. Or does one’s skin color now count as an “accomplishment” as well?

Perhaps the most illusory “accomplishment” of the Obama administration is the Affordable Care Act, which purports to grant health care to millions of uninsured Americans. Sadly, just as there is no Guantanamus Terminus spell, neither is there a Medicus Careforallofus spell. If you want to provide healthcare to more people, you’ve got to hire more doctors and buy more drugs and medical equipment. What Obamacare did was to build a bigger waiting room.

Is there any single achievement that the majority of Americans would classify as such, and which would not have happened if Obama were not president? Killing Osama bin Laden, I hear you say. Yes, I suppose that Seal Team Six was busy picking daisies under the Bush Administration, and it took the leadership of a one-term senator with no military experience to remind them that there were terrorist masterminds out there to be deal with. Still, if we’re evaluating purely on results, then we have to give Obama credit for taking out bin Laden. Ironically, though, bin Laden probably would not have been located if it weren’t for information provided by waterboarded suspects – the discontinuation of which practice is also given as one of the Obama administration’s “accomplishments.” So: policies that work, even though abhorrent, are accomplishments; and policies that are well-intentioned, even though they don’t work, are also accomplishments. Ditto for good intentions that don’t result in any policy at all.

I suspect that my uncle’s request was as much a final jab against his (mostly conservative) brothers and sisters as a sincere desire to see Obama reelected. According to my mother, he always had a wicked sense of humor. In that same sprit then, and out of respect to my panentheistic uncle, I fully intend to write a check to the Obama reelection campaign, when it becomes expedient. In Monopoly money. That I borrow from China.

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