[Sangetsu]

From the moment in first saw Obama I had my doubts about him. No doubt he is a god looking man, and he he is an elegant speaker, but many men who have these traits don't have much real substance. Obama was a lifetime academic before coming to office. I have lived around academics long enough to know that academics are better at arguing or theorizing than they are at actually doing things. Those who teach law often make the worst lawyers, and are a good argument for the old saying "those that can, do. Those that can't, teach."

Of course in the contest between the Obama and McCain, the people were offered little in the way of a choice. McCain was an unpredictable old fossil who felt he was entitled to be president, and who called all the markers he had handed out in a lifetime of politics. Obama was an inexperienced academic who lacked the real-world experience to manage a Burger King competently, but looked good and spoke well.

Little has changed since the days of Bush. "Combat operations" in Iraq have ended, which is a play on words to make it sound as if the war were actually over. US troops will not leave Iraq during Obama's term, because, regardless of whatever promises he made to the antiwar nuts, he knows that pulling out the troops would leave a vacuum which would surely be filled with Islamic fundamentalist West haters.

Guantanamo Bay has not been closed because, much as he might hate the idea of holding suspected terrorists there, there is no better option for dealing with them. If he seriously believed that holding them there was an illegal matter, he could simply make a presidential finding, and it would be officially illegal.

The pseudo-healthcare plan pushed by Obama increases coverage only incrementally, while being hugely expensive. The cost was meant to be revenue neutral to taxpayers, being mainly paid for by businesses and insurance companies. Of course, the amount of money these companies must pay amounts to billions of dollars per year, and money spent on this plan is money which might have been spent on hiring news employees or expanding manufacturing. And, of course the plan has turned out not to be revenue neutral as promised, the GAO says that out-of-pocket expenses are now going to increase.

Both Bush and Obama have been able to work effectively to stop the recession. The problem was too big for the both of them, and throwing money at problems never solves them. People blame the banks and Wall Street for the recession, but they are not to blame. The current recession had it's seeds planted by President Carter when he signed a law called the "community redevelopment act" which lowered lending standards by banks in order to make it easier for inner-city residents to get housing and business loans. The banks didn't necessarily make risky loans because they wanted to, they did it because by law they were required to.

Obama's current team of economists is made up entirely of academics who have no real-world experience to guide them in their policy making process. This is like taking armchair quarterbacks watching a game at home and then putting them on the field to actually play. The results have been sadly predictable.

I don't have much faith in the new crop of congressmen who have just been elected, but I don't think they could do any worse than their predecessors.