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Hey. It's been a while since I posted anything here, just decided to come back today. I thought the place would have calmed down since the election, but I guess not. :)
I'd like to point something out that I've been thinking about lately, and it's been amplified since I came back here the other day and noticed a certain degree of, umm, impatience with how Obama is approaching issues like torture investigations.
Going back to the general campaign, I was always impressed with how Obama's team would approach issues like Rev. Wright or 'lipstick on a pig-gate' as they came up in the course of the campaign. I still recall how people would go into borderline panic if the campaign didn't respond immediately to a charge made by the opposition, and how the slow response was often interpreted as inexperience or lack of willingness to fight back.
We all see how that turned out. The guy who so many thought was doin' it wrong is now president.
Anyone who watched O during the campaign knows this is how he rolls:
1. Let an issue take hold in the public consciousness.
2. Let both friend and foe weigh in and get them on the record.
3. Allow public curiosity to be piqued and let the populace get familiar with the issue at hand.
4. Make the right call.
Again and again during the campaign - during the Reverend Wright episode, or the 'Celebrity' ad episode, or the days leading up to his Race Speech, so many people were ready to give up on the election because they thought Obama wasn't running his campaign the way that campaigns before his - most of them losing campaigns - did things.
I think Obama's training as a lawyer dictates the pace at which he works, and the timing of the decisions he makes. Would his announcement this morning that he's open to torture investigations been as effective a week ago or two weeks ago, or on the day after he took office? I think not, because the public (those of us here who make it our business to dig into these issues excluded) at that point did not have enough information to accurately judge what the announcement was all about and would have opened Obama up to charges of conducting a 'witch-hunt' or being 'excessively partisan' or 'settling old scores.'
I think that in addition to his training in legal matters, another thing is guiding his deliberate nature regarding so many of the weighty issues he has to contend with - I think Obama realizes that he's only going to get one shot at making a lot of these things right. Think back to the first Clinton administration and what happened with health care at that time - the Clinton team tried to do too much too quickly and didn't get it right. and they never got another chance to do it at all.
I half-facetiously used a couple of creaky old cliches for the title to this post, but I think they sum up what's happening here. Obama and his administration may not get to certain issues with the speed that many of us feel is necessary, but I'm pretty confident that all issues we have concerns about will get their day in the sun.
But I believe that one of the prime concerns in the minds of President obama and his administration is that they're only going to get to cut that board once, so their measurements had better be right.
Okay, enough rambling. Back to your internecine battles. Good to be back, thanks for reading.
- AS
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