The Case for Obama

Below in the italics is an extended comment that I posted last night on Juan Cole's "Informed Comment." This is one of my favorite sites, and one reason is that he must put in some extra time and effort into moderating the comments to his posts, because what always appears are efforts to make sense, instead of being infested and eventually overcome by the dashed-off gutter-sniping that sooner or later mars so many comment sections to other people's articles and posts.

My comment was to a guest column by one Taylor Marsh, posted yesterday and titled "Marsh on Obama: The Party's Over." I wasn't the only one that was stirred by what Marsh had said, because as of now 51 comments have survived Professor Cole's moderating clicks, an unusual number for his site. I hope my comment contains enough indications of what the issue was all about:

After I finished struggling through Taylor Marsh’s guest article, I couldn’t believe it, and I wondered what it was doing being published on Informed Comment. Usually the stuff that Juan Cole writes or even just hosts comes from a much calmer and more well-reasoned and enlightened point of view than this rant about all that is wrong about some of the many approaches that B. Obama has or has not taken, while being written as if the author has paid little attention to all the horrible things that the Republican Party has been stooping to advocate, not just in this primary season but for years and even decades. So that in the end Marsh shows how lacking his presentation was by saying that the argument that Republicans are worse is no longer enough, presumably as a basis for voting.

My question is, why isn’t it enough, and more than enough? Since there is no other alternative available to American voters at this time, in terms of actually occupying the Oval Office, the author in effect is advocating bringing the Repubs back into power. But does he or any other sensible person really want that? Are memories really so short that people don’t recall the many messes that Bush & Co, certified Republicans if I recall correctly, had been creating in all the previous eight years and that Obama inherited little more than three short years ago? And don’t they also recall that almost on the day that Obama took office, R. Limbaugh, the guiding ayatollah of the Republicans, vowed to do all that he could to make sure than Obama’s presidency would not be successful? That was an anti-American act if I ever saw one, for it was the duty of every American to help the new President dispose of all those messes. Yet the Republican Congress especially took Limbaugh’s lead, and have done all they could to obstruct or poison everything that Obama has ever tried to do to set things straight, while at the same time firing up a chorus of concerted personal hatred toward Obama in preference to doing or thinking anything else, just so that they can guickly take over the reins and pick up again their ruinous deeds where they left off in 2009.

If the Obama re-election campaign hasn’t adopted a slogan as yet, it undoubtedly is because it has so many to chose from that it’s hard to decide, from the abundance of riches furnished by the staggering Republican poverty of ideas and of soul.