A new day dawns, it does indeed …

[aadler]

 
Welcome, Mister President.

You arrived in this office on a message of hope and change. The change has come. These are my hopes:

I hope you’re even one-tenth as special as your most enraptured supporters appear to believe.

I hope you’re every bit as idealistic as you’ve presented yourself as being, and at the same time cynically calculating as to which campaign promises you intend to keep (and how), because winning a campaign and running a country are entirely different tasks, not to be carried out in the same way.

I hope there is solid substance underlying the magnificent style, resulting in years of impressive performance to (finally) fulfill all that perceived potential.

I hope that, having won largely on the basis of race — while presenting yourself as post-racial — you can actually move this country beyond the dogmatic straitjacket of racial politics.

I hope you can inspire both parties, but especially your own, to more idealism and less ideological posturing.

I hope you will actively resist the desires of some on your side of the aisle to attempt the ex post facto criminalization of policy differences. This is a sword that cuts both ways, and would do incalculable harm to the nation for decades to come, regardless of which side happens to be in power.

I hope the man who turned the national imagination toward the future will avoid falling back on those past nostrums (particularly socialism and New-Deal-style big-government interventionism) that not only aren’t new but were consistent failures in their own heyday.

I hope “the smartest guy in every room he’s ever occupied” will have the wisdom to surround himself by people who know more than he does, and listen carefully to them before making his decisions.

Above all, I hope the next four years — or more — will be a time of actual growth in this country, rather than something that simply has to be survived.

[Advance warning: any comments expounding on the evils and contemptibility of the departed Bush administration will be deleted without reply.]

Comments

[aadler]

At least one opinion writer has noted that the most prominent public person busily re-evaluating the Bush presidency is President Obama himself. Now that he has the responsibility of dealing with the different aspects of the War on Terror (which Bush named but Al-Qaeda launched), he is observing thoughtfully that several things — Guantanamo, and warrantless electronic surveillance of foreign individuals of suspect habits and acquaintances, and the American presence in Iraq — are more complex and ambiguous than was depicted in campaign rhetoric.

Be assured, I agree with you. I don’t doubt that there will be a substantial contingent who will continue to regard Bush as irredeemably evil for policies that Obama, after careful consideration, will continue to apply because he has decided that they are necessary and appropriate … yet these same people will give the new President a pass on these same things because he is 1) so wonderfully himself and 2) not the malignant moronic hatemonger Bush.

I heard the basic sentiment expressed often in Iraq (by Iraqis): “You know he’s a bad person because he does bad things. You know the things he does are bad because he’s a bad person. If I do the same things, they’re not bad because I’m not bad.” At the time I was somewhat disillusioned by the shallowness and self-servingness — and, yes, the obvious innocent sincerity — of this attitude. It does not make me optimistic to see the same thing operating in more ‘advanced’ people in America.