Obama’s Advocate

Caitlin Carter
December 3, 2009
Filed under News, Opinions and Views

This month marked the one-year anniversary of President Barack Obama’s victory in the 2008 election. He ran on a campaign of renewed hope and the promise of real change and utilized newer technology to lasso the enthusiastic youth vote. As such, it was a campaign heavy on ideology, and Obama opponents and allies alike have been eager to critique his actions as President to see if those promises have held up.

Despite Obama’s encouragement of a bipartisan agenda, current approval ratings (around 53 percent) suggest that the country is still very much split on the issue of this charismatic politician.

To truly ascertain Obama’s effectiveness as our President, he must be critiqued on two levels: as a flesh-and-blood person taking pragmatic action, and as a symbol of our country before its citizens and the world.

The hot-button issue, both in Congress and the media, of the moment is the controversial public option health-care, one of Obama’s most notable campaign promises. The bill, which has recently passed in the House of Representatives, is the topic of fierce debate between Republican and Democratic Senators. Conservatives argue that the bill, which hopes to provide an option for public (government-regulated) health-care for those not covered by occupational insurance, will erase all private insurance competition. However, how much competition truly exists between insurance companies?

The regulated free-market economy is based on the ideal of small business being able to thrive, of an individualistic American being able to achieve financial success based only on their hard work. However, the unfortunate reality of the insurance industry is that the only truly profitable companies are few and very large. An even sadder reality is that insurance companies only profit when their clients pay more than they eventually receive. Insurance companies make money by denying their paying customers every possible health service. Take the health insurance company Aetna as an example. In 2009 alone, Aetna has spent two million dollars sponsoring politicians that will benefit their company. Those dominating the health insurance industry are already eliminating competition and destabilizing the free-market economy. By adding another affordable, effective option for citizens, the government will be providing competition that these companies have to deal with.

Another Obama-sponsored Congressional action was the $787 billion stimulus package of last February. This is another action perceived to veer on dangerously “socialist” ground. The fact that our economy has swung so low as to require such drastic action is a terrible sadness; however, the action was as necessary as it was unfortunate.

A headstrong blockade of Republican governors, including our own Mark Sanford, initially refused their states’ shares of stimulus money. What eventually occurred? Every one of the resistant governors accepted the money because the treasury of each state could not have been balanced without it. Our own school has felt the pangs of cut budgets; without the stimulus package, which sets aside money specifically for the purpose of education, our losses would have been even more pronounced.

The President is as much a symbol as a person. The symbol status means that the President represents the United States to other countries.

A personal anecdote of mine speaks to that effect. When I traveled to Europe last summer, my delegation and I visited a convent in Naples, Italy to speak with three young nuns. The topic of American politics eventually reared its inevitable head as one student asked, “What do you think about Obama?”

One of the nuns, a very young yet well-spoken Filipina, smiled broadly and proclaimed, “We love Obama because he comes from a mixed background, a disadvantaged background, and he seeks to represent all people.”

Whether U.S. citizens agree with their opinion, there is a significant amount of Obama support in foreign countries. In France, for example, Obama’s beaming face adorned magazine covers bearing the translated headline: “Superstar.”

Many people speak fondly of the time period in which the United States was more of an isolationist state. Current and former students of U.S. History will recall the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, in which the fifth President of the United States forbade any further European attempts to interfere in American land or affairs, and the Roosevelt Corollary, which stated that only the United States reserved the power to act as a regulating force for the smaller states in Central America and the Caribbean. The purpose of this was to effectively cut off European influence in this part of the world.

However, those days are over. The economy has developed in such a way as to make international interdependence a universal fact. A notable example of this is the fact that our Treasury is significantly in debt to China. For better or worse, our economy is inextricably connected to other countries’, and we are simply not in a position to assert superiority. In matters of finance, war, and human rights, diplomacy is the only viable option on the menu.

Concrete actions that Obama has taken for the purpose of diplomacy include the signing of a UN bill that protects the rights of all people with physical and mental disability; his recent trips to Japan, China, and South Korea to establish that these countries are all economic allies; allowing easier passage of correspondence and funds between families in the United States and Cuba; meeting with the Canadian prime minister and the leaders of South American countries to establish an American energy alliance; and promises to attend the Copenhagen summit to discuss environmental issues.

Some unwonted and undeserved praise has certainly been heaped upon Obama. If his award as Nobel Laureate felt awkwardly premature, it’s because it was. However, Obama’s reaction to the prize is what is most notable: our President admitted that he did not feel like he deserved the title but views it as a “call to action.” All of the praise simply gives Obama more of a reason to prove himself to the American public. He has already proved himself committed to his campaign promises and attempting to unify and stabilize our country. For many Obama does not yet represent change they can believe, but with time he can enact the change we will be able to see.