thank god its over
I dont mind Obama is in office. I dont really care one way or the other. He is just another one of the same politicians like any of the others...and I hope I am wrong that he will pull off miracles but I am lacing bets as to...ummmm... NO
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First, I honestly think it's naive to poo-poo the speechifying. Macroeconomics is 50% psychology -- while Bush's advisors were idiots in several respects, they weren't wrong in thinking that this crisis was a crisis partly because everyone *thinks* it's a crisis. Managing expectations is going to be *deathly* critical in pulling out of the economic tailspin, and that was pretty much the entire point of Obama's long speech.
I understand that it didn't work for you, but according to everything I've seen, it *did* work well for a large fraction of the electorate. And simply by reassuring people a little, it helps to move matters that little bit in the right direction.
(Yes, I know that you're cynical about such things. But honestly, cynicism is a big part of the problem. Markets function on trust -- they can't operate without it. And cynicism is corrosive of trust: it's every bit as harmful as the starry-eyed idealism you argue against. What we need is balance; sadly, there ain't damned much of that around.)
And seriously: why are you so worked up about the speech? By historical standards, it was short and to-the-point. You seem to be comparing him to Bush, Mr. Uncommunicative. Make the fairer comparison instead -- compare him to Reagan, the last President who was a good speaker. Reagan's first inaugural address was *every* bit as melodramatic and flowery as Obama's (and every bit as long), and his second wasn't much shorter. And I'd bet you dollars to donuts that there were just as many right-wingers talking about how it changed their lives as left-wingers are doing so this week.
So it's a tad rich to complain about Obama in this regard, when he's doing nothing but follow presidential tradition more or less exactly. No, he didn't personally get down to work in the first several hours. But his staff did (many of them left immediately after he took the oath, to get to the office), and overall he's moving *much* faster than any President has in several decades.
As for the cost of the inaugural balls -- do you have numbers to back that up? Certainly a great deal of the cost was carried by tickets and various other institutions: ABC clearly paid a fortune for the "Neighborhood Ball". While it is possible that the taxpayer cost here was significant, I certainly didn't think that was so.
Far as I can tell, most of the cost of the inauguration was driven not by Obama himself, but simply by the insane number of people who decided that they just *had* to see the inauguration in person, and who thereby imposed a very heavy security cost on the city. (Yes, this undoubtedly cost vastly more than Bush's second inauguration did. Nobody *cared* about that.) Blaming Obama for other peoples' decisions seems pretty unreasonable to me...
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Well coming from one who does not believe in such ( I don't do hypnotism and ra ra crap)... that it degrades the country that the masses need such opiates to function. Perhaps you are right that so many TRUELY naive people need such things. so still in my mind it REALLY is not needed except by the naive.
Its not the speech even so much as the whole shebang (and I wasn't big into Reagens speech either if it matters. I know speeches are just what they really are: lip service and well i refuse to fall for that. I keep my eyes on the reality instead of the greatest plague of Pandoras box that so many people like to fall for).. Every channel ... every paper...non stop crap in it.. and then for days after..What did little johnny feel.. Hear the journey of jebidiah.. OMG.. and for all the people thinking the kids in school were RAPTURED by his speech? I have one in school.. I know many many high schoolers in several schools. IT WAS A FREE PASS FROM CLASS. they talked and slept and texted and did everything BUT care what obama had to say. LEt us all get real and unless we were one of those wierd kids who goes into political science, NONE of us even as school aged kids brought forward would have cared.
Nashua was a big place for Reagan if you remember. WE DIDN'T CARE> IT WAS A PASS OUT OF SCHOOL.
I guess I am just real tired of the fantasy world so many choose to live in and force the rest of us to come along. Check please.
If you want to get into racial aspect of it all that some people say because he is a BLACK president.. Well that proves racism right there for all of you. I dont give a damn WHAT color he is. NO president incoming should have that much freaking hoopla; male female , alien, woman, man, fifteen breasted whore of Izabel.
And the fact that he spent such a ridiculous amount on it? i take THAT a lot more seriously then some give me pretend hope speech. And although he is following a precedence yes, it would have impressed me a lot more if had skipped all that unneccessary junk and saved the cash. You dont prove to me you have any hope of fixing the economy wen you spend over 150 million on a freaking party. I had the source back when i wrote this, but since no one answered back then I dont recall it anymore. Its washed off my bookmarks. if I get the chance i will see if I can look it up again, but beleive me it is not a high priority as *I* already saw the data)
Obama had full control. he could have called off the party. So the blame YES is on him, AND all the ignoramuses who had to run to Washington in the freaking cold for the "chance to be there"... i dont care WHO it is. It could be my favoritist person of all times I have been dying to meet, and there is NO way in hell I am going to go through all that crap because I am a lot more secure in my needs then these people obviously are that they NEED this for their own worth.
I am worked up over it because people whom I felt were seemingly intelligent and not of the unwashed masses acted like well... unwashed masses. They "cried" and "weeped" and felt "overwhelmed with joy and adulations". You know what that is people? CULTISM. And i find it repulsive no matter WHICH side does it. Disgusted me beyond belief.
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It's not hypnotism, it's not crap, it's just the statistical reality of markets. Markets have intensely strong feedback loops -- that's why things like bank runs happen. When people *think* a market is crashing, they behave in ways that cause it to crash. When people *think* a market is booming and is going to continue booming, they behave in ways that cause it to boom. (Which is where bubbles come from.)
Really, none of this is weird fringey stuff -- it's utterly basic macroeconomics. Unfortunately, most politicians don't know a damned thing about economics. (And sadly, neither do a lot of economists on both political fringes.) Obama knows a moderate amount (and his advisors know quite a lot), so they grok that the first step of bringing things under control is winning the psychological game. This was a first step in that process, which will probably take about two years to play out if I'm reading it right.
Bush actually understood this as well, at least by the end, but his credibility was so shot by the time the problem really exploded that he couldn't do anything about it -- most of the country was inclined to listen to him and believe the opposite.
I guess I am just real tired of the fantasy world so many choose to live in and force the rest of us to come along. Check please.
Well, I suspect you won't have to wait long. Reality is already settling in, and those who voted for Obama because they were imprinting him with all their hopes and dreams are going to find the harsh light of day staring them in the face pretty soon. A lot of them are already calling "treason" on him for not being as extreme as they wanted him to be: the bloom is coming off that particular rose pretty quickly.
I agree that cultism is a risk (indeed, I alluded to it in my own journal yesterday), but I don't think it's likely for this reason. The people most likely to make a cult of Obama are precisely the ones who are going to turn on him fastest. By this time next year, he'll be just another politician -- albeit, with any luck, more competent than average. Since he's not really pushing an ideology, I don't expect a Reagan-esque long-term cult to form around him.
Personally, I voted for him because I judged him a canny, ruthless, smart, intensely pragmatic politician, which was exactly what I think the country needs right at this moment, after eight years of illustration of what unrealistic idealism gets you. So far, he's proving to be precisely what I expected, so I'm pretty happy with him.
(Truth to tell, I *loved* the whole Rick Warren flap. When you can manage to piss off the right and left wings that badly at the same time, you're clearly finding the right compromises.)
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I had the source back when i wrote this, but since no one answered back then I dont recall it anymore.
It's possible, but I'll believe it when I see the reality-checked facts. It doesn't match what I know of the situation, and I suspect it's a significant exaggeration. Don't forget that the right lies just as much as the left does, and they have a *lot* of incentive to make Obama look bad, so there's a good deal of misinformation floating around. Until I see numbers from a reliable source, I'm going to continue in my assessment that the money spent was mainly on security for the inauguration, not the parties.
And while you're welcome to your opinion (if I'm reading you correctly) that it would have been appropriate to save the money, cancel the public inauguration, do the ceremony in private and prevent anybody from coming to Washington for it, I *so* don't agree. Patriotism, however degraded by the past eight years, is not a bad thing in and of itself, and letting people show a bit of civic pride in the moment is, by and large, quite good for the country. While I didn't get teary-eyed, I thought it was refreshing to see some widespread patriotism that wasn't the sort of "America First" jingoism we've been subjected to for the past eight years. And frankly, it was important to inject some *normalcy* back into the situation, to begin to alleviate a little of the sense of crisis, and it would have been deeply radical and abnormal *not* to run things this way, since it's pretty much how it's been run for a very long time.
So in this particular case, I think you're being penny-wise and pound-foolish -- IMO, it was a good investment for the country, and I think pretty much any alternative plan would have had *severe* negative consequences...
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Well, as i dont get into these arguments much anymore, i dont just sit around babysitting things. I read, hear, look, and go. That doesnt stop you from looking it up yourself, and either agreeing or proving me wrong. I am happy either way. My life isnt based on someone elses approval anymore. I have given up on that. I know what I know and I am not in school anymore ad people can believe me or not. Especially when since in many old cases i could present evidence on golden platters with ten billion footnotes and people would still go... pffft. I just dont care anymore. i dont have the time to waste on people anymore.
>So in this particular case, I think you're being penny-wise and pound-
>foolish --
Well yes that is the good part of this country is that at the moment we can still have our own opinions, and you know me, i have opinions! LOL
I still disagree and will forever that pandering to the masses and continuing dog and pony is good. it just encourages the fantasy world that I stated and you alluded to. But then again people like that on either side, i could really go on and on about in unkind manners.
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