He’s been accused by the right of failed policies and by his own people of failure to perform, and today President Barack Obama is facing a tough march to keep his own house, the White House, from political foreclosure and to keep himself in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for four more years.
With a campaign slogan like “Change we can believe in” and massive support from the energized minority and young adult electorate, Obama’s 2008 campaign was like nothing we’ve seen before. Even its fundraising style was different, wide-ranging enough to include everyone, even those who couldn’t spare more than a few dollars.
After eight years of George W. Bush, 911, two wars, the disastrous response to Hurricane Katrina’s survivors, Wall Street and the automotive industries failing, the beginning of the foreclosure era, and an overall president that could not even speak, America saw a shiny savior in Barack Obama. We, the people, believed; and when things got worst we blamed him… and this is what the GOP will be milking this electorate cycle.
He promised to fix everything, from immigration, the sourest subject with most Latinos, to unemployment, by far the most important topic today. We did get part of healthcare fixed with Obama Care, but not all; we did get the two wars officially over and Osama bin Laden killed, but yet we linger in the middle east, killing civilians with drones and picking a fight with Pakistan and Iran; we did get “prosecutorial discretion” for deportation cases (which doesn’t seem to be applied too often), but none of the promised CIR or DREAM Act and then we got more of what we fear with massive deportations and the implementation of Secure Communities; we did get the banks and car industries up and running again, but the economy continues to be ruined and the CEO’s are back to making millions; we did learn to be frugal and live with less but we wonder if our young adults, the ones who so enthusiastically voted for Obama in 2008 and today live at home, will ever be able to have that piece of the American dream that seems to be entirely skipping their generation.
Obama faults the Republicans for not approving any of his proposals, and they blame him right back for not proposing anything they would approve. We’ve had four years of this nonsense already and more than a decade of the United States trailing behind other countries.
Today, in 2012, we have a skeptic and disillusioned electorate that will be hard to convince with a slogan like “Forward” for Obama or Romney’s “Believe in America” (or its sloppy, oh so careless, “A better Amercia”). We saw a rising of voters in 2008. We’ll probably see a decrease this year. And when all is said and done, when we face that moment of truth in the voting booth, the question for many of us who resist to be charmed away by rhetoric will be, as the beloved character Chapulín Colorado would put it, “ ¿Y ahora quién podrá salvarnos?”
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