In the movie, Cool Hand Luke, Luke, played by Paul Newman, wins a poker hand with weak cards by bluffing. When confronted he says, “Sometimes nothin’ can be a real cool hand” which earned him his moniker. Fast forward to Tim Geithner. He presented his financial recovery plan – long on rhetoric, but short (really absent) on details. The stock market responded by dropping about 4% on his remarks. In this case, bringing nothin’ to the table turned out to be very uncool. Secretary Geithner has been in the middle of this crisis since it started. If he doesn’t know how to help the country out of this financial situation, that’s bad news. And if he is just suffering from a “failure to communicate” that’s not so great either.
During the presidential campaign, I thought that Obama represented something different. Was I the only one? It seemed like if the George Bush government was a PC, then Barack Obama was a Mac. But look what happened. It appears that for the Director of Communications, the literal face of the office to the media, Obama hired the PC guy from the Mac commercials! Did we all miss the boat? Who was the real Mac candidate? Maybe it was Dennis Kucinich and we have all been fooled!!
(Photo credits: Alex Brandon, AP for Robert Gibbs and Apple for the PC guy).
The reputation of Olympic champion Michael Phelps took another hit this week as a picture surfaced of him using a bong. One might wonder if the next Games will have him abandoning swimming for the “high” dive. While we don’t know what impact this will have on his endorsement deals, we do know that this is his second time in trouble – the first being a DUI at age 19. You would think that the moral of this story is to keep your nose clean if you want to clean up on endorsements. But no, the moral of the story is this:
Don’t grow the Bill Richardson beard. If you do, bad things will surely happen to you.
President Obama’s greatest impediment to bipartisanship and working for the common good of the country may be in the House of Representatives. In keeping with her tradition, Nancy Pelosi once again shut out the Republicans from contributing anything to the latest stimulus bill. The House took the opportunity to put together an enormous spending bill and label it as a stimulus package. Everybody wants to stimulate the economy, right? “Stimulus” is the new “earmark.”
Obama has promised a new transparency in these bills. This might come back to bite Pelosi and her profligate spending friends. Now the citizenry will be able to see what the “stimulus” items really are. Money for COBRA and unemployment doesn’t create jobs and neither does climate change research or aid to states that have huge deficits. These may be important, but they are simply payments from one set of people to another set of people. The problem is that taxpayers don’t have a lot of extra cash to spread around these days. They might even be smart enough to separate stimulus items from just plain spending programs.
Maybe the new President will have better success in the Senate, but as far as ending partisanship and putting the country first, he just lost the first round to Pelosi.
While he did call Mrs. Reagan to apologize, I wonder if this is just a one-off mistake or is Barack stealing Joe Biden’s gaffe thunder? Obama is exceptionally smooth with the teleprompter, but the votes haven’t been tallied on his ability to speak extemporaneously. If the current trend continues, Saturday Night Live might have hit the jackpot on November 4th.
Barack Obama’s presidency will be a turning point in America politics.The impact depends on his results.If his presidency is successful, then it will empower the idealist message and the need to include all of the people of America.It might mean that the people are more important than the elected officials.
On the other hand, an unsuccessful presidency could bring out a much more cynical response.We would be forever reminded about voting for a person without much experience.It would show that even the presidency could be bought with enough ($700 million!) money.It would remind us again that great orators don’t necessarily make great leaders.
This could happen in the next four years.Obama will be in charge of the nation, and in a large degree in charge of his legacy.
If the election of Barack Obama seems to prove anything, it is that white Americans, as a group, are not racist.They voted in large numbers for Obama.If widespread racism existed, we would have seen different results.Racism isn’t a feeling that you put aside for something as important as the presidential election.
Blacks on the other hand, voted for Obama by a huge percentage.
While this doesn’t mean that black people voted racially, it certainly can’t mean that they didn’t.
Another observation is that many blacks did not believe that a black man could be elected president and the fact that he was, turned out to be an amazing moment in their lives.The reverse sentiment didn’t appear with white Americans.While many white people disagreed with Obama’s politics or thought he was inexperienced, not many were shocked that a black man was elected (and men wouldn’t have been shocked if a woman – Hillary Clinton – had been elected).This is a stunning difference between the races and sexes in America.
We can hope that this election brings great things to our country.First, that it shows that most of America is not racist.Second, it shows that American is a meritocracy – that people who work hard, improve themselves, and leverage their opportunities can become successful.Not everybody can become president, but their race or sex won’t be the limiting factor.If these two ideas emerge from this election, America will have achieved an historic victory.
