Losing Hope in Obama
We previously aired emails from readers who voted against Obama but ultimately sided with him in office. Many other readers, however, supported him at the polls but ultimately turned their backs on his presidency. For Blake, that moment came very early in the first administration:
I proudly voted for Obama in 2008, not because I believed his soaring rhetoric, but because of the significance of electing a black man to be president. I was in tears on election night when he won and remember the jubilation of the bar crowd quite fondly.
My mind changed within a couple of weeks after his Cabinet appointments began. His appointment of Hillary Clinton to Secretary of State—after months of attacking her lack of foreign policy judgement as a major flaw in her candidacy—smacked of political opportunism. He himself had convinced me that she was unqualified for such a position, thus the appointment could only have been to curry favor with her camp (i.e., not for the benefit of the country). It was a clear indicator that Obama was going to continue the well-established D.C. tradition of quid pro quo cronyism.
Appointing Geithner to Treasury Secretary was even worse: a betrayal of Obama’s stated principals. There was no way to reconcile his rhetoric on the economy and the middle class with his economic appointments. I completely lost my optimism in those few weeks.
William also soured on Obama for his approach to the banking crisis:
“Keep Hope Alive” worked for me after Bush II. But as a former banker who lived through Reagan’s dismantling of consumer protection regulations that led to the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999, Obama lost me when he failed to channel the nation’s outrage at the 2008 crash to reinstate a New Deal style regulatory scheme. Instead, he appointed the foxes that raided the hen house and took down the barn to now guard that same hen house. No one was charged or went to jail or even had to return all their ill-gotten gains, neither individuals or institutions. [Actually there was a single prosecution.] Instead, they got punished with bonuses at taxpayer expense.
Obama lost me that early, and later, he kept losing me—one major bonehead move after another. His Presidency was a series of “Bait & Switch.” It’s been heartbreaking.
For Erich, it was Obama’s approach to education policy that lost him:
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This article was originally published on The Atlantic.