Mother’s Day: A Song for My Children

Earlier this week President Obama delivered his third State of The Union address to Congress  since becoming President  in 2009.   To his credit, the President’s speech was an upbeat assessment of how much conditions have improved in America since the waning days of the Bush Administration; when the U.S. economy was losing 500,000 jobs per month, and the country was teetering on the precipice of total collapse.  Obama reminded his listeners that the U.S. economy has shown increases in employment for the last twenty-two months in a row, that the banking and auto industries were saved from impending bankruptcy, and that U.S. troops have been brought home from Iraq.  Although acknowledging that unemployment was still too high, and that the economic recovery was still gaining steam, Mr. Obama painted a very realistic and optimistic picture that things were  heading in the right direction in America.  Within the Obama Administration, and certainly within the population in general, there seems to be a renewed feeling of optimism in the air.

A feeling of optimism, of course, is the last thing that many Republicans want to happen during an election year.  Senator Mitch McConnell summed up the Republican Party‘s  number one priority quite well when he stated that defeating Barack Obama in 2012 was more important than anything else, even more important than serving the interests of the very people that sent him to Congress in the first place.  For McConnell, a decrease in unemployment, a turn-around in the residential housing market, and a steady increase in the value of Americans’ retirement funds spells nothing but political disaster.  In fact, even before the ink had dried on President Obama’s State of The Union speech, Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich took to the campaign trail to tell the American people how horrible things were across the country, and how badly the Obama Administration had failed.  Unfortunately, the “truth-impaired”  Republican presidential candidates came across as desperate politicians, hell bent on doing and saying everything possible to convince the American people that the whole country would go down the tubes without the enlightened benevolence of conservative political thinking.  As the year 2012 presses on, and as the economic recovery continues to gain momentum, the Republicans no longer be able to deny the successes of the Obama Administration, and will see their “platform of dissent” melt slowly away.

There are few Americans who would deny that the last three years have been a time of unprecedented political gridlock in our county.  As a result of constant Republican obstructionism and the indiscriminate use of the power of the filibuster, the Obama Administration and the Democrats have been considerably slowed down in their efforts to improve the lives of middle class Americans.  In spite of Republican efforts to the contrary, however, the Obama Administration has guided America into a new age of prosperity, which lies just over the horizon.  There is little doubt that the radical voices of ultra right-wing conservatism will be shown the door in November, and that the progressive age of American politics will once again more forward under the leadership of Barack Obama.

Rich