Ronald Regan asked Americans to consider one thing before deciding on whether or not to reelect him to a second term of office. Were we better or worse off after four years of his leadership? Americans overwhelmingly responded their approval and elected him to a second term.
It won’t be that simple in 2012. To begin with, President Obama came into office while the country had yet to hit rock bottom due to factors he inherited. A year from now, there will be many of us who can say their lives are worse off than before he entered the white house. I know my pay has decreased while my kids’ college tuition has increased at a much faster rate than inflation. We now carry the burden of another war to add to the wars Obama picked up from the Bush administration. Gas has shot up to over four dollars a gallon and shows no sign of decreasing any time soon. The town I live in is struggling more today than it did three years ago and improvement does not appear in sight.
But is the election of 2012 about whether or not we are better off after four years of Obama or is it more about how we define ourselves as a nation?
Much of our woes, I believe, are the result of what I call our fast food mentality. America has become increasingly impatient over the course of my life and it is this impatience that has compounded our problems. It has resulted in a quick fix approach to our long term problems by our leaders and we are now being forced to pay the price for problems that were never really solved in the past, just merely just put off.
It is why states like mine, California, are broke. Rather than dealing with financial troubles in their early stages, our leaders decided to borrow on our future hoping the bills would never come due. Like our diets, we wanted our problems solved quickly and without much fuss. However, most of us know a fast food diet will lead to major long term health concerns just as our fast food solutions have finally resulted in our nation’s poor health.
One of the things I hear troubles Americans about President Obama is he seems to take too much time before reaching a decision. While many view this as a weakness, I see it as a strength. We had eight years of knee jerk reactions and look what it got us? Sure, we felt good when President Bush was quick to identify the enemy who attacked us on 9-11. We were supportive of his claim we needed to go after Iraq despite him not waiting for the evidence to back his claims. We loved it when he wore a flight jacket and declared victory despite not being able to tell us when our troops would come home.
The quick fix approach has been used by both political parties, in part because once someone gets elected to office; they are under tremendous pressure to prove to an impatient public they have accomplished something. Otherwise, they risk not getting reelected.
President Obama can be criticized on several fronts. You can argue against him on how he has handled our wars, the economy, health care, and just about anything else. These arguments are largely based on our political beliefs and nothing more.
However, if we pause longer than it takes to click from one web site to the next, we should be grateful that in a time of epic uncertainty we have a leader who is patient enough to listen to everyone and who takes his time to make what he believes is the right decision while allowing the public time to argue it on political terms rather than the knee jerk, emotionally charged arguments we have grown used to.
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