OPA: The Goods are coming, don’t bid prices up
By Joseph Tohill
Less than two weeks to go in the US presidential election campaign, and the candidates are (surprisingly) running neck and neck. The sense of disappointment in incumbent President Barack Obama is palpable, especially after his sleepy first debate performance turned what should have been a runaway race into a real contest. Of course, the current disappointment is just the latest in a string of disappointments—from the failure to close Guantanamo Bay to the failure to reform social security. Combined, they have turned 2008’s campaign slogans such as “Change We Can Believe In!” into a bitter memory for many audaciously hopeful liberals, lefties, and social activists of all sorts.
Remember “Yes We Can!”—exuberant, confident, optimistic? Compare that with 2012’s “Forward,” which seems less like a campaign slogan than the kind of thing you might hear desperately shouted in one of those tragic films about the Great War. You know, the hoarse cry of some ill-fated officer, his eyes filled with terror, standing in the middle of ‘no man’s land,’ half his troops lying dead and butchered around him, trying frantically to rally what’s left of his company to fix bayonets and carry on with their pointless charge toward certain doom before the enemy’s trenches. (Incidentally, as we learned in the final presidential debate, bayonets are no longer the fashionable battlefield accessories they were a century ago.)
Small wonder there’s little of the excitement of 2008 in this year’s campaign. But there is the record of the Obama administration. Despite tenacious opposition, tough legislative fights, and dire warnings from opponents about the sky caving in, there have been some notable successes, such as bringing the war in Iraq to an end and ending (eventually) “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” Continue reading
