The Obama Administration Doesn’t Get It, Does It?
It was not so long ago that the White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs spewed venom at the liberals, calling them the "professional left," and suggested that some of them should be drug-tested. He further stated that some progressives wouldn't be satisfied until the Pentagon was eliminated and a Canadian-style health care system was introduced in the U.S., and some of them wouldn't be happy even if anti-war congressman Dennis Kucinich were president.
I am not sure what is wrong with Canadian-style health care, and will not discuss Gibbs’ other comments. Instead, I would recall what the Veep Joe Biden said the other day. Biden commented that the liberals within his own Democratic Party shall "buck up" and "stop whining."
Then President Obama gave his own psychoanalysis during the Thursday night fundraiser: “Democrats, just congenitally, tend to get—to see the glass as half empty (Laughter.) If we get an historic health-care bill passed—oh, well, the public option wasn't there. If you get the financial reform bill passed—then, well, I don't know about this particularly derivatives rule, I'm not sure that I'm satisfied with that. And gosh, we haven't yet brought about world peace and—(laughter.) I thought that was going to happen quicker. (Laughter.) You know who you are. (Laughter.) We have had the most productive, progressive legislative session in at least a generation.”
I am no one in the grand scheme of things when considering these heavy hitters; therefore, I decided to seek the advice of Rabbi Michael Lerner for this article. If you do not know who Dr. Lerner is then please check here; otherwise it may suffice that Rabbi Michael Lerner is the Editor of Tikkun Magazine. He has taught in some of the leading universities in this country, and is one of the most gifted thinkers of our time.
He wrote, “Like most other progressive activists, I understood that a president is limited in what s/he can accomplish in limiting the power of America's economic and political elites and in restraining the military-industrial complex…But what a president can do is to challenge the ideas of the powerful and rally those who have become aware that the current system is not only destructive to the future of the planet, but also to the possibility of constructing lives that have a sense of higher meaning than accumulating money and things..”
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