Dude, Where’s My Change?

November 5, 2008. Standing on a broad stage in Chicago, surrounded by roaring crowds, president-elect Barack Obama announces: “Change has come to America!”

Sixteen months later, here we are, with growing malaise and sinking approval ratings. Dude, where’s my change?

Obama arrived as a modern-day messiah come to set his people free, leading Hillary Clinton to quip cynically that with his election, “The skies will open, the light will come down . . . and the world will be perfect.”

Obama’s new America sounded perfect indeed. He promised health care reform, economic revitalization, victory abroad, a whole plethora of tax cuts and credits to the ailing middle and lower classes. Thus far only one of those pledges has been fulfilled, and that one to grumbling and disappointment on all sides.

Thus far, President Obama has shown himself tragically unqualified for his post. Only by dangling prodigious pork before the eyes of embattled senators can he mobilize his impressive majority (witness the latter-day Louisiana and Nebraska compromises). Maybe he is just not inspiring the folks who once cheered his name.

Far from being change liberals can believe in, the Obama administration has doggedly flirted with moderate Democrats and enraged progressives by escalating in Afghanistan, fumbling one thing after another. The irony of the Nobel Peace laureate requisitioning $106 billion in war funding must be hard for true blue folks to contemplate.

Success during a president’s first year is considered crucial to the success of his entire administration. Franklin Delano Roosevelt ushered into law much of the New Deal during his first one hundred days! Ronald Reagan, during his initial twelve months, pushed through the largest reductions in taxes and spending in American history. George W. Bush managed $1.35 trillion in cuts, a bipartisan effort that captured the votes of twelve Democratic senators in the shadow of a hotly contested election.

Obama admittedly oversaw stimuli and bailouts, but those had been going on under George W. Bush, too. His other key initiatives are struggling to stay afloat, with healthcare just eeking through, and only after major elements (the public option, for one) getting dumped.

This is not the fault of Republican obstructionism so much as Democratic disunity. Obama is, amazingly, incapable of wooing and directing his own partisans.

The president’s one accomplishment is spending our money like no other executive in history, having engineered nearly a trillion in stimulus and bailouts, projects whose values are highly suspect. This splurge, added to the existing debt and other reckless non-discretionary spending, brings us another step closer to fiscal disaster.

There is a glimmer of hope. People are beginning to see through Obama’s smoke and mirror act. His poll numbers are dwindling so rapidly that, barring a major turn around, any Republican candidate—”even Gumby,” snarked the Christian Science Monitor— will prove a challenge for Barack Obama in 2012. A sweep of the 2010 congressional races by the GOP might seal Obama’s fate as a one-term president.

In order to pass the recent health care bill – a bill whose scope was pared down to a fraction of its prior ambitions – Obama had to engage in the most drastic, bullyish political machinations in recent history. The inevitable price for such cajolery and bribery will be paid by the Democratic party in full in November 2010.

From coast to coast, Americans are ill at the prospect of more binge spending, more government build-up, more condescension and doublespeak. Obama has over-promised and under-delivered.

It is time already for change.