The audacity of disappointment

With the Occupy movement making headlines and a dysfunctional Congress dragging our nation through the mud, Obama must hold to his principles if he wants to reunite with a disillusioned public. Three years ago on the night of the 2008 election, I was covered with champagne, having just filled up Broadway with a pile of other Columbia students to rally all the way into Harlem. The air was electrified. I looked out at the New York City skyline from my Carman room, turned to my roommate, and said, “Here comes the big Obama hangover.” But wide-eyed first-years that we were, we expected that he would soon have his moment to shine. The democratic demand for unconditional, universal health care was finally conceivable. Republicans were not having it, but progressives held the House and the Senate. We were blue through and through and this was our time. Public education would be salvaged, the Bush-era tax cuts for the rich would be allowed to end, Wall Street and the failing corporate megaliths would be forced to pursue their profits with much more restraint. Obama wanted these things—he said as much in his election speeches.

But then the fight for health care took a nasty turn. Extreme right-wing “populists” heeded the ultra-wealthy Koch brothers’ call to libertarianism. On the surface, they looked like they might have had a legitimate stance. America has, after all, always had at its core a conflict between the romantic dreams of freedom and the declaration’s promise of equal opportunity. But this health care debate was a false dialectic. The fact is, ordinary Americans are doing worse than they believe. They have become convinced that if they rely on their own resources, they too can buy a yacht and a second home and several cars—the same delusion that Goldman Sachs was well aware of when it bet against the subprime loans Americans naively pounced on. Naysayers claimed that America was too far in debt to be able to afford to support the bill, but its architects had taken measures that would ensure a lower impact on our budget. The public option could have been completely covered with taxes on the ultra-wealthy or with money originally allocated to handouts for that demographic. It’s no wonder that top earners had no desire for this to happen—it is, however, a wonder that the Republicas share in that sentiment. They are convinced that the system that allowed speculative capitalists to harvest the profits of America’s delusions will ensure their own prosperity, and it is this failure of judgment I hoped to hear called out by this administration. In a united effort, many Americans elected Obama to regain our faith in government. So when he chose Bernanke to chair the Fed and backed down on his previously stated convictions in the name of “compromise,” our disappointment was understandable. Three years after champagne in the street, Columbians are still feeling the hangover—some say that Obama has been cornered and that we must concede on our ideals. I firmly disagree with that perspective.

Obama wrote in “The Audacity of Hope” that he admires Abraham Lincoln for his virtues as a great compromiser and for his “team of rivals” style of governance, but he missed the point that from the very start of his political career, Lincoln abhorred injustice (particularly in the overt and despicable example of slavery). He was a man of principle, and while he did what he could to adhere to the Missouri Compromise that had for so long preserved the union, his outspoken hatred of slavery in part provoked a violent secession and subsequent war that finally put an end to the question. I am not attempting to suggest by this that Obama must start another civil war, but I am finally demanding that he stand up audaciously against the abuse of power evident in a private sector that is very quickly consuming what’s left of our federal government.

The author is a Columbia College senior majoring in English and film studies.