It is one thing for our President to be a refreshing breath of fresh air with polish and intellect, but quite another when he acts like a professor who pontificates, asserts, yet does not explain.
The nation’s love affair with Barack Obama is preferable to the alternative; however, the result is that when the President speaks, no one seems to questions his grand and flowing statements.
For example, in his June 13th Saturday morning radio address about health care reform, he uttered the quotable “I know some question whether we can afford to act this year. But the unmistakable truth is that it would be irresponsible to not act. We can’t keep shifting a growing burden to future generations.”
Nowhere in his 753-word radio address did he ‘explain’ why it would be irresponsible not to act. Mr. Obama enjoys this phenomenal power -– short-lived, we will see -– where he can enumerate and expound without explanation yet still be accepted and embraced. His honeymoon endures but will not continue unabated. At some point, the country will ask how can he propose to change radically most of our social and political institutions simultaneously? How much is too much?
Frankly, his current agenda is so overloaded that it will not get off the ground. Conservatives who fret need not. Trust me. The federal bureaucracy is simply unable to handle all these changes. I worked for that bureaucracy for nearly 35 years and while there are many highly-talented people serving this country, any large organization harbors enough people who are not adequately motivated or capable and hinder significant progress, especially when changes are massive, numerous, and without precedent.
The country will sense this if Obama keeps pushing as he is and may well learn it well before the 2012 presidential election, perhaps even by the 2010 congressional elections. Once the country digests the deficit he is placing upon future generations, which he seems to think should be avoided (see his above June 13th remark), it will understand that his appetite for change far exceeds what our digestive system can handle.
But few seem question or analyze his proposals -– and I am not talking about partisan attacks. Where are the clinical, academic assessments about the viability of the nature and substance of his initiatives? Right now, they are virtually non-existent.
Let us indulge in a thought experiment. Imagine our health care system, acknowledged to comprise about one-sixth of our economy. Imagine the difficulty our nation has encountered is reining in years of annual double-digit annual cost increases while overall national inflation rates hover around only two to three percent.
Now imagine our wonderful inability thus far to grapple with this financially-debilitating beast. Whether you like your doctor or insurance coverage or not, you are likely not pleased with the huge cost increases that are thinning your wallet.
So, imagine this. If our country has been unable to muster the political and intellectual will to analyze and correct horrendous and seemingly dubious spikes in health expenses within our well-known and understood 40+-year old paradigm, how well do you imagine we will plan, design, test, implement, monitor, and correct a radically new delivery option available to an additional 40+ million folks? The limits of my imagination do not stretch that far.
I have only been talking about our health care system. What about the stupendous changes our President has in mind for education, the green economy, operating car companies, grabbing a larger role in running our economy, regulatory processes, etc?
For all the press about President Obama’s nonpareil mental abilities, no human is that smart. Besides, he is failing to see the obvious forest from the trees. Our people are industrious, intelligent, and innovative. Yet, there are limits to the distances humans can cover in a finite time period.
President Obama is over-reaching and soon the country will recognize it when his puzzle pieces fail to fall into place. And, worse for him, George W. Bush will be nowhere in sight to be the fall guy.
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Fred W. Apelquist, III
Approximately 665 words.
© June 23, 2009
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