The Obama Presidency, Month One

I was in elementary school when Bill Clinton was first elected. I remember putting crayon to cardboard and producing a "Go Clinton!" campaign sign to hang in the hallway outside my classroom on election day. I remember my conservative, Republican parents were astonished when they saw it. The thing is, I had chosen Mr. Clinton at random. I don't remember being pushed one way or the other by my teachers or peers, but I don't remember receiving any information upon which to base my decision. It was just, "pick one, color something, I'm going out for a smoke."

I learned an important lesson that day, though. It doesn't really matter who the president is, but people take that shit seriously anyway.

Now, one month into the most anticipated presidency of my lifetime, both the country and the office are quite different than they were back when I doodled that sign. We were riding high back then. We were fresh off a brief, successful war (successful as long as you weren't a rebellious Iraqi, that is), the economy was on the verge of exploding (a lot of people who didn't deserve it at all were about to get very rich), and as it turns out, we had so little to worry about that it was of the utmost importance to determine what the president did and did not do with his penis.

Barack Obama was elected in the midst of two (or three, or a thousand, depends on how you look at it) endless wars, a financial meltdown nobody really understands (I like to say the invisible hand got a little fresh with the wrong dame), and is inheriting the office from an administration which covertly abused the powers they could not publicly expand and everyone just went along with it.

I think it's safe to say our new president has to live up to some pretty serious expectations.

One of his first actions was to begin the process of fulfilling his promise to close the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. Brilliantly savvy. He gets to have his cake and eat it a la mode here. It's not like fixing social security, reforming campaign fund raising, or increasing transparency in government. It's a simple matter, comparatively. He pleases the peace-loving folks who put him into office in the first place, but he really only pisses off the fringe psychopaths who openly condone electrocuting the genitals of anyone without a Dale Earnhardt mesh cap. It's a positive politically, but it also may help to clean up America's reputation with the rest of the world.

The other advantage to such a move is that it will help to obscure the fact that President Obama is not likely to instigate or assist a serious investigation on the actions of the previous administration, much less put them on trial and lock their asses up like he should. I want to note that do not say this out of a sense of revenge. Sure, they should be punished for abuse of power, lying in order to build a case for war, politicizing the justice department, you get the idea. It's a long list and I am no legal scholar. The problem is that these actions have to be punished or we will see them happen again.

I know many of you have the utmost faith in the new president, and to be honest, I think he may be as honorable a politician as I have ever seen. He will, however, only be the president for eight years, maximum. What happens if he makes a bad penis-related decision and it's all over the news and he fails to win in four years? What if he's replaced by a shape-shifting alien? What if he's an evil android bent on enslaving all biological life?

"I am more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards," is what he said during a press conference earlier this month. I fear he may attempt to avoid this admittedly messy affair, even though it is crucial that someone holds his predecessor accountable. To be fair, congress would be doing much of the work here, but the whole ordeal would be carried out on the president's watch. Rush Limbaugh will get to blame the witch hunt on him (he'll probably make a few Joe McCarthy references completely without irony). The president will lose momentum. Too bad. He needs to do his job.

I think that, as a nation, we have this image of the president as the captain of a ship, there are obviously other people--senators, judges, ultimately the voters who elect these people--who make the ship work, but the president sets the course and brings everything together. This is not the president's true role in this analogy.

The president is the sponge used to swab the deck.

Avoiding for simplicity's sake the questions of when and how this came to be, it seems pretty clear that there are deep, systemic problems with our country, our culture, with the way of life of the vast majority of humanity, really. It has been this way for some time.

The problem is that most of us do not benefit from this system, and those few of us who do only do so in order that we may be of better service to those scant few on top who live so lavishly that they are practically no longer human at this point. The system is set up to keep them where they are and mollify the rest of us. It doesn't always work that way, though. The business of sailing this ship is a messy one. People get hurt, they lose everything, communities are bankrupted, industries fail and markets collapse sometimes when someone gets too greedy or too sloppy and we can see it plainly. We can see what the system really is and what it generates.

And then the president steps in. The president must, in some way or another, own these messes. He must absorb them because he works for the system. He is in power for only a short time and he takes responsibility for these problems because someone has to carry the blame. Otherwise we might blame the system itself.

President Obama is going to have to be pretty absorbent to do this job. We're in a bigger mess now than we have been in quite some time. The entire banking/credit institution upon which the grand inequity of our time is based is failing. The system demands that it be saved, and Barack Obama is going to have to sell that to us.

He'll do it, too. It will take unprecedented quantities of stopgaps, theatrics, and make-work, but he's charismatic enough to pull it off. What his predecessor could not contain with anger, fear, and xenophobia he will sop up with a fresh attitude, hope, and a can-do, pull-together spirit. He will not, however, betray the system.

I do actually think he's sincere. I do think he wants to help. It's this sincerity that will make him so good at his job. He's no more free of the zeitgeist than you or I, a president can't change anything. They belong to the system, the network of donors and owners who put them in office.

I hope I'm wrong. I hope he does identify the systemic problems we face and is willing to deconstruct things enough to get at them. At this rate, though, he's not going to have much time to do so before he has to begin his reelection campaign.