Thanks to my impeccable connections and significant social status (OK, because I know Morris O’Kelly, who works for him), I was invited to re-appear on the Tavis Smiley radio program this past weekend, to discuss the first 100 days of the Obama administration. Here is the audio from that segment:

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I didn’t get to say all I had on my mind; hell, I was lucky to remember half of what I intended to say, and they had to cut some of that for the sake of brevity. Brevity is not my strength…

Basically, as those who followed many of my earlier posts are aware, I am skeptical that President Obama can make a significant difference in the arc of human history, and I am highly skeptical that he can win a second term. ‘Tis true that the Republicans do not currently have their act together, but they remain a formidable force, as evidenced by Arlen Specter’s realization that he, a three term Senate incumbent, could not win the Republican primary next year, and so he switched to the Democratic party. We’ll see how much of a Democrat he turns out to be.

And for certain, the Republican party will not stay down indefinitely. They will find their voice and they will find compelling figures to speak in that voice, but more than anything else, they will wait for their chance to pounce when events do not turn out the way President Obama wants them to.

In the Tavis Smiley interview I commented that the U.S. government is the only thing standing between U.S. Auto and bankruptcy, which is a clear attempt to interfere with the marketplace, which has for years been steadily choosing more and more foreign made autos, which are uniformly better made and in many cases, cheaper; i.e., a better value than American made autos.

Why? Well, U.S. Auto became complacent, for sure, but the real underlying reason is that the cost of making an auto in the U.S. is much higher than it is in other countries, primarily because of the health care and pension burdens borne by U.S. Auto.

It is quite correct to point out that the union movement won those benefits, at a time when the industry was flush with cash. These obligations prevent these companies from becoming more “lean and mean” when economic circumstances change, and herein lies the conundrum: these benefits were won fair and square, and standards of living for hundreds of thousands of workers are based on those benefits. Should workers be forced to give them up? Funny you should ask: even as President Obama drags these companies through the wringer, he insists that pension and health care benefits will be preserved, especially for retirees.

In other words, the structural reforms needed to allow these companies to compete on a level playing field are not only not coming, they are being specifically ruled out.

Now, don’t read this as me saying that the unions should be blown up. My feelings run strongly in the direction of protecting workers and their hard won standards of living. No, this is to point out the incredible difficulty President Obama faces as he tries to interfere with the market. This is to point out that there are degrees of complexity beyond the grasp of any man or woman who attempts to unravel them. This is to point out that this is an entrenched problem with no clear solutions.

As I pointed out to Tavis, the only thing we know for sure is that President Obama is using the peoples’ money to keep these companies afloat, and it is not clear how we get that money back.

I also commented on the war in Afghanistan, a war which President Obama has committed to fight for at least another five years, a war which he intends to intensify in the near future. What I don’t understand is why. Does President Obama believe we can win in Afghnanistan? We had the Taliban completely on the run several years ago, and now they are perhaps stronger than ever and are making dangerous inroads in neighboring Pakistan. The actual enemy, Al Quaeda, has clearly been severely weakened and marginalized; they were never more than a scraggly bunch of haters in the first place, with one spectacular success to their name: 9/11. That single victory had enormous repercussions, especially with regard to American prestige. President Bush chose to take the bait and treat this band of terrorists as a state-level enemy, and now American might has been committed, for five years and counting, to tracking them down in the mountains of southern Asia, as if it would be possible to find and kill them all, as if there would be a point at which we could declare “victory”.

I thought we had elected Obama to bring fresh ideas in this regard, to perhaps counsel us that it is time to treat these terrorists as criminals and bring them before courts of law; to disrupt their ability to conduct finance and to travel; to work with other nations to see to it that the organization can no longer control a population through force and terror. In other words, to treat them like the gnats that they are.

Evidently not.

So, 100 days in, and doesn’t it seem as though President Obama is on TV every other day?, the jury is most definitely still out, as I said to Tavis. Perhaps in a year we will know if President Obama truly does have new, bold ideas, and if so, how those ideas are playing out.

As of today, his ideas seem not so bold and not so likely to succeed and, if truth be told, not so different than a President McCain or a President Mrs. Clinton might have come up with.

I, for one, am still waiting for evidence of the great new leader we were promised.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 4th, 2009 at 10:08 pm and is filed under Obama Watch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.