Reply #17: While I tend to agree on the problem

[quaker bill]

I think Green throws too much off on the Office of the President for all of this. One of the larger disservices Reagan delivered to this country is the notion that Presidents are elected and then serve as vehicles of wish fulfillment for the country at large.

In this regard Presidents have come to be seen as near mystical figures that cause all this "stuff", that Green recounts fairly well, to happen.

Presidents are in fact more an expression of the society than the leadership of it, even GW Bush, in fact he is the most poignant example. Yes he did lie us into a war, but polling at the time was clear that 85 percent of the American public wanted to believe it (the tale was so weak that you needed to want to believe it to do so). More than 50 percent still wanted to believe it even after no WMD were found, and re-elected him in 2004.

The people wanted to believe that they could have everything they wanted, good wars, good schools, good roads, good times for all, and not have to pay taxes for any of it. All they had to do was shrink government and get rid of "waste, fraud, and abuse". That it was utter fantasy is proved by the decline in public services and increase in deficits anywhere enough republicans gained elected office to put the policy in place. Balooning deficits start at Cities and runs through Counties, States, and all the way to the Federal level anywhere these guys touched.

What brought a halt to the wish fulfillment drive with GW Bush was the hour upon hour of devastation and utter incompetence beamed into our living rooms in the aftermath of Katrina. From that point forward, he could no longer be a vehicle for this drive. It was that moment that shifted this near psychotic drive onto the Democratic party. This in time resulted in the election of Barack Obama.

My critique of Green is that he furthers this notion, by making Obama out to be the next wish fulfillment vehicle, and then claims we should all be somehow disappointed that all the wishes have not materialized already. There is nothing about the project Mr. Green and I would generally agree on, the end of wars, attacking global warming, restoring fiscal accountability to future generations, true access to healthcare for all, and ever so much more, that is anything less than a monumental task. The notion that Obama could somehow snap his fingers and make decades of truly bad governance disappear in 10 months (and that we should be disappionted that he hasn't) has lovely emotional appeal, but lacks the ingtergity and intellectual seriousness called for by the task at hand.