Doing Nothing Is Not An Option

Les Payne

February 10, 2009

The community organizer returned to the hard-pressed people of Elkhart this week, speaking over the heads of Congress as U.S. President much as he had spoken over the heads of his more seasoned opponents as a first-term senator on the campaign trail.  

As the winner in Indiana this time, President Barack Obama practiced the victory stride he later broke out with in earnest at his first prime-time press conference. Challenging a negotiating Congress over his slimmed-down economic “recovery plan,” the President so deft at extending his hand showed that he could also clench his fist.

“What I won't do is return to the failed theories of the last eight years that got us into this fix in the first place,” he told the nation, “because those theories have been tested, and they have failed. And that's what part of the election in November was all about.”

Less theoretical later on, and with harder eyes, the president scolded Republicans attacking his fiscal responsibility. “It's a little hard for me to take criticism from folks about this recovery package after they've presided over a doubling of the national debt. I'm not sure they have a lot of credibility when it comes to fiscal responsibility.”   

Extending the olive branch is not working with GOP members of Congress so the President hinted gently but unmistakably at the talons he keeps largely out of sight.  

Earlier, he “made a series of overtures to the Republicans, going over to meet with both Republican caucuses, you know, putting three Republicans in my cabinet -- something that is unprecedented -- making sure that they were invited here to the White House to talk about the economic recovery plan…they were designed to try to build up some trust over time.”

Asked flatly about Republicans’ failure to reciprocate with honest brokering on his stimulus package—zero votes in the House and only three in the Senate—he refused to cop to underestimating the difficulty. “It’s going to take time to break down some of those bad habits.”

This reserved optimism cuts to the heart of the challenge President Obama faces not only with the GOP in Congress but also with the awesome power entrenched in the dominant society they represent. Quiet as it’s kept; this African-American president did not come to power with the support of the majority of the white vote.

In Indiana, for example, where Obama worked a miracle in capturing a deeply conservative state that hadn’t voted Democratic in 48 years, whites favored John McCain-Sarah Palin, 54-45. Even in Elkhart--which Obama came frightfully close to adopting as his ‘Joe the Plumber,”--the dominant group, in this town where unemployment has risen more rapidly than anywhere else in the nation, voted overwhelmingly in favor of McCain-Palin.   

This noisome pattern held across the nation as the white majority voted, 55-43, for a status-quo Republican duo that mimicked Bush on the major issues. Eight years of these GOP policies rendered Bush the most unpopular president ever; and drove 80 percent of Americans to long for a new direction, mainly because the Republicans had waged a needless war in Iraq, squandered our reputation abroad and collapsed the economy at home.

Despite these cataclysmic GOP wreckages, the majority of white voters in America—faced with the prospects of a president who happens to be black--voted overwhelmingly to return the Republicans to the White House.

Yet, President Obama continues to hold out hope that the GOP minority in Congress—as representatives of the entrenched white majority that voted against him in the general election—will cue up for a bipartisan “Kum ba yah” rally.

“But I am the eternal optimist,” Obama told the gathered media at the press conference. “I think that, over time, people respond to civility and -- and rational argument. I think that's what the people of Elkhart and the people around America are looking for.”

We will stay tuned for this miracle.