Walking through campus the night President Obama was elected, I could hear and feel electricity unlike anything my generation had experienced before.
Students were shouting in excitement, chanting, “yes we can!” and just thoroughly filled with a sense that we had done something; we had gotten President Obama elected. I know I did.
It’s no secret Obama used social media and the Internet to get countless young voters on his side. He was the first Presidential candidate to do so, and I appreciated that.
I felt Obama had tapped into a reservoir of ideals that mattered to a younger generation of America.
Obama promised transparency, he promised a new type of government, a government that would work together to achieve the impossible dreams only young people can believe in.
Three years later, you can barely recognize Obama.
Not only the grey hairs and newly formed wrinkle any person would get if they were trying to please 312 million people, but politically as well.
The war in Afghanistan hasn’t been any less violent, and with the recent assassination of former Afghani president Burhanuddin Rabbani, it looks like the country could be headed into civil war.
The Bush tax cuts still exist, the Patriot Act in all of its water-boarding glory is still floating about and law-making still resembles sausage making more than anything else.
If anything, D.C. has gotten more divided since Obama showed up.
Obama needs to stop saying the government is causing all these problems, because he is part of the government.
No, this isn’t a dictatorship where one man controls the government. Thousands of people work for the government, and if each person in the government continues to roll their eyes and say “it’s the government’s fault,” nothing will change.
What Obama is doing, more than anything, is setting a bad example for the government. If he was so steadfast in his want for change, he wouldn’t have butchered his health care reform act into a bastardized law no one feels comfortable with.
If Obama wanted change he would have said from the first moment he stepped into the Oval Office that there is very little a president can do to fix the economy. He would have said the economy is a self-propelling entity that no one man, or law, can fix.
Like any politician, though, Obama had to start facing the truth that he has to run for re-election. He can’t produce long-term plans that would actually help fix the country. No, he has to put band-aids on the country so it looks presentable during the upcoming campaign.
Maybe my hopes were too high for one measly politician. When I cast my vote for him, I was a freshman here at Bradley with only one political science class under my belt and had sky-high hopes for the new president.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
