A Letter To The President

Hi Barack,
You don’t mind if I call you Barack, do you? In the recent healthcare summit, you referred to all the Senators by their first names so I thought it would be appropriate here, considering that a little over a year ago, you were just a simple Senator yourself.

Barack, you keep reminding everyone that you won the election. The fact that you won the election should be demonstrated by your deeds and actions. We know you’re the President. We get that already. Whether a President, a corporate exec, or the manager of a baseball team, a good leader doesn’t need to remind people of what his position is. If your leadership was profound and strong, you wouldn’t need to constantly, and quite frankly a bit obnoxiously, bring up that you are the president. I can’t imagine Vince Lombardi reminding the Green Bay Packers that he was their coach. That group of football players knew who their coach was and they respected him for who he was as a person, not for the position he held.

Saying that you are the president doesn’t give you the respect that goes with the position. That has to be earned. The election was only the interview. Now you’ve got to start working and I have a number of concerns. Let’s start with your answer to Senator McCain in the healthcare summit. Again, you pointed out for the umpteenth time that the election was over. Senator McCain pointed out that you misrepresented yourself on your ‘job application’. You said you’d put the health care debates on C-Span. You said this eight times and not as mere passing references. You went into great detail about how you were going to do this and haven’t explained why you didn’t. When a job applicant says he can or will do a task and then either doesn’t do it or is incapable of doing it, I find it a reason for dismissal, unless I can get a reasonable explanation. A reasonable explanation is not for the job applicant to tell me; “You hired me, I’m the new Analyst. I got the job”. “Wrong” I would tell him, “you HAD the job.”

Barack, I’ve heard you and your representatives say that your election was a mandate on the policies that you are proposing. If you were so proud and confident that your policies were what the people wanted, then why weren’t you up front with the people BEFORE you got elected? For example, if you said that you would propose additional spending that would put the projected deficit at 20 times that which you inherited from Bush; do you think you would have gotten elected? If you said that you planned on bringing terrorists to trial in civilian courts, do you think you would have gotten elected? If you brought out the 2,700 page monstrosity of health care “reform” before the election do you think you would have gotten elected? Incidentally, just as an aside, you could do some good work for the environment if you’d stop printing all these health care plans! If you won’t consider the will of the people, please consider the trees! If you told the people before the election that you would take over banks and car companies do you think you would have gotten elected? If you told people that you would traipse around the world apologizing for the things that most of us think make our country great, do you think you would have gotten elected?

My point in bringing these things up Barack, is that if you’re going to point out that your election gives you carte blanche to do whatever you want, then I think it’s important to point out back to you that your election was NOT a mandate to do the things you are trying to do. People did not vote for you to do these things. You didn’t campaign on doing these things so how can you now say that you have a mandate to do these things?

You drive me crazy Barack. The thing that bothers me most is that I don’t feel that you have a lot of respect for the American people. Yes you won the election with 52% of the votes but many of those were votes you wouldn’t have gotten if people actually knew what they were getting. What makes this worse, though, is that you have the chutzpa to talk about the 52% of these votes as some kind of mandate but are willing to outright dismiss polls which show that 60% to 70% of the American people are against your healthcare proposal. Those people are, apparently, too stupid to understand your brilliant plan. So when 52% of the people vote for you, based on misleading information, that is a mandate but when 60% or 70% of the people vote against your plan, that is a matter of them not understanding your plan?

Look Barack, you and I both know what’s going on here. The last thing you want is for people to “understand” your plan for healthcare. That’s why you tried to push it through in August before anyone even had a chance to read the 2,000+ page monstrosity. You said that it had to be passed right away or there would be dire consequences. Well, it’s seven months later and there aren’t any dire consequences. In fact, the health care in the United States, with all its faults, is still the best in the world. There are far more important things to concern ourselves with. This is your priority, it is not the priority of the country but that doesn’t seem to concern you.

In fact, Barack, when you say that you haven’t “explained” or “communicated” your plan well enough, what you are really saying is that you haven’t been able to misrepresent your plan well enough. The excessive costs of the plan, the health care rationing, putting choices in the hands of government rather than in the hands of individuals and doctors, the back room shady deals; all of this is an embarrassment to your administration but you want to try to paint the people who see your plan for the catastrophe that it is as being too dumb to understand it. I know that this is a tactic of one of your heroes, Saul Alinsky. Your idea is to make the radical seem main stream and to criticize and attack those who are against it as the radicals.

It’s not working Barack. Your purported eloquence has been overshadowed by your actual arrogance. Your speeches are, quite frankly, boring. The only people still excited by your rhetoric are Chris Matthews and the six people that watch his show. What really ticks me off is when you, Reid, and Pelosi talk about getting this done for the American people when it is the American people who keep telling you that they don’t WANT this!

I guess you’re going to try to push this through no matter what. I know you’re not stupid Barack. You’ve become boring and predictable, but you’re not stupid. You have an agenda which is obvious by the crowd you’ve always hung out with. You’ve put your agenda above what the people want and above the good of the country. You try to present yourself as someone who will listen to the other side but at your health care summit, you cut people off the moment that they brought up points that conflicted any of your own.

Barack, you can’t cut off the voice of the American people the way you tried to cut off the voice of people against your health care plan at that summit. You are not the King of the United States, although you may think you are. You are the top representative of the American people and you must answer to the American people, not the other way around. The people have seen you for what you are Barack, and they don’t like what they are seeing. I’m insulted to have a president who thinks so little of the American people that he is willing to so completely disregard their will.

So in closing Barack, I know you are not going to change. You are driven by your agenda as you always have been, but as you said yourself; “That’s what elections are for”. I just hope that by the time we throw you, Reid, and Pelosi out of office, that you haven’t created a hole that is too deep to climb out of.