Obama Doubt

Are you a sufferer? I’m not talking about “I Told You So” – an entirely different disorder. Did you vote for Obama and now question your choice?

It’s true that the President has made some serious errors in judgment. Health care reform is a good idea, but it’s a meal he should have served in courses. Closing Gitmo sounded good, but is it going to come back to bite us – indeed, has it bitten us already? You can add your own items to the list. And there’s the overarching question: Is he doing what he was elected to do?

I’m a Republican, and many of the things John McCain was saying in 2008 and continues to say today make sense – so much sense that Mr. Obama himself is saying some of them. I would have voted for McCain, were it not for the Big One in the errors-in-judgment department: Sarah Palin.

As far as I’m concerned, the selection of Palin as the VP candidate -- a potential spare President – represented a security risk of the first magnitude. Could anyone seriously conceive of a person with that level of ignorance about the world sitting in the Oval Office? McCain either actively supported this choice or went along with the campaign staffers who came up with it – some of whom are now admitting their mistake. That was a fatal error for me, and I voted Democrat.

Obama’s clearly in a lot of trouble. He may indeed be a one-termer. Is he damaged goods for the rest of that term? As I said in yesterday’s post, it’s only the end of the first quarter of this game, and attention spans are no longer what they used to be – and they were never long to begin with. Many of the presidents whom a majority revere today – FDR, JFK, Reagan and Lincoln, for example – had widely varying degrees of popularity during their tenure. And few were elected with the enormously favorable margins that Richard Nixon enjoyed to begin his second term.

So yes, I’m suffering from Obama Doubt. At the moment, it’s not terminal -- but check back with me later.