Let me start off today with my thoughts as I reflect on my feelings about GW Bush when he assumed the Presidency. I remember thinking, as he was running, “Couldn’t they find someone more qualified than this guy?” – not too positive. And then when he won with 3 million less votes than Al Gore and with the suspicions of millions that his brother had “jobbed” the system in Florida I was not a happy camper. I knew enough about Dick Cheney to be even more alarmed that he was the Vice President and then as I watched him in action once it was settled that Bush was the President-elect I braced myself for a re-run of the Reagan years. It was apparent from the start that Cheney was filling many of the important positions with the same people he had worked with in administrations dating back to the Nixon years but especially with Reagan holdovers. Donald Rumsfeld as Defense Secretary was a problem for me, but little did I know at the time how much of a problem it would become.

In listening to President Bush, in the beginning, I found myself being able to actually “pull” for him. I, despite everyone around me thinking I’m a flaming liberal, have always considered myself a conservative in many ways. I thought a “compassionate conservative” would be OK and hoped that Bush would actually fulfill that expectation. And, at this point in time, I think that Bush may have really been a compassionate conservative who screwed up by choosing Cheney as his running mate. Especially after 9/11, I was pulling for Bush to make the right decisions – I had no idea that his ultimate goal was to essentially gut the federal government of any type of regulation that hampered his business “partners” and to control the Iraqi oil fields. I was not able to conceive how strong the “Republican base” would be in determining the direction of Bush’s administration. As his administration evolved I began to wonder who was REALLY in charge? Was it Bush, was it Cheney, or was it the blowhard underlings like Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly, etc? Whoever it was, at least until the 2006 elections, I’m still convinced that Bush – if he was in charge at all – wasn’t really the “decider.” After the invasion of Iraq I started to realize that whoever it was that was in charge, their agenda was not what was best for the people of this great nation.

The thing that has struck me as I think back to this is the question: Does the office of the Presidency mold the man or does the man mold the office of the Presidency? In Bush’s case, I believe that with Cheney’s help they were consciously trying to mold the office of the Presidency. Like my sixth grade students, it appeared to me they were “pushing boundaries” at every opportunity – in a brazen attempt to increase the power of the executive branch of government in relation to the Congress. And with 6 years of a Congress controlled by Republicans they faced absolutely ZERO resistence in doing so. Obviously, this has led to a meltdown of government of proportions that may be unmanageable. The downward spiral in the economy may be accelerating faster than the Obama administration can even imagine – because failure of this proportion has never been seen before. Even the failure during the Great Depression was of far less magnitude if for no other reason than there were far less people, far less businesses, the government was far less BIG, and there were far less “second guessors” for every decision made. So Barrack Obama takes office at a time when the two questions above are very relevent and DIFFICULT.

The pressure he faces has to be HUGE. And the question which I have tonight is will Obama mold the office of President of the United States or will it mold him. I hope it’s the former but I’m afraid I’m seeing signs that it is the latter. Now, Obama took office on a campaign of “Change we can believe in.” He made many promises – and there are signs that he’s trying to fulfill them. But there are also signs that the realities he’s facing and the position he’s in along with the “advisors” he’s surrounded himself with are beginning to MOLD him. Take for example the Iraq war. He did say he would “be as careful getting out as we were reckless getting in.” But he clearly said he would have ALL the troops out in 16 months! Yesterday he announced (as I had predicted over a week ago on this site) that his 16 month timeframe would be 19 months and at that time “Our combat mission in Iraq will end.” That statement, in itself, is an example of the office molding him. IT IS DISENGENUOUS! There is no reason for a “combat mission” as I speak today. And the fact that he’s casually saying he’s leaving 50,000 troops behind “to train the Iraqi’s” is absurd! This is Bushlike speaking – again a sign that the office is molding Obama instead of the other way around.

Now, I totally appreciate much of what he’s trying to do. He is trying to appeal to a broad spectrum of the nation and it is true, whether some people like it or not, he is the President of all Americans. But he has a huge responsibility to restore this office to its rightful place in the American hierarchy of government. We are not a dictatorship, or an oligarchy, we are a representative democracy and it is on Obama to return his office to a place that respects that reality. What bothers me about his announcement of yesterday is that he made it as if he was fulfilling his campaign promise with the caveat of being a couple months more than originally “promised.” Let me tell you straight up – with 50,000 troops still in Iraq he has not fulfilled his promise – NOT EVEN CLOSE as far as I’m concerned. And it’s the way he went about this that really bothers me – kind of like taking us all for a bunch of idiots – just like the Republicans – and doing it with a straight face. The LEAST he could have done is explain to the American people why we need troops in Iraq “training” the Iraqi troops we have supposedly been training for almost 6 years. THIS IS ABSURD ON ITS FACE and I hope the so-called liberal “base” of Obama lets him know about it.

If he’s going to be “sly” about this, what is next? I know that he’s gambling everything on restoring the economy – and I, for one, am hoping that he’s successful in that regard (although, as I’ve said before, I believe his “stimulus” bill was too small and contained too many tax cuts and not enough infrastructure spending). However, in the long run, there are some other issues I consider WAY MORE IMPORTANT. For example, the government for the past five years or so has been eavesdropping on phone calls and emails from virtually every US citizen – all of this obviously without warrants (it would be very inconvenient and expensive to get warrants for millions of “wiretaps” :o) – and so far, no mention of putting a stop to this from the Obama administration. In fact, the little I’ve been able to find out, the exact opposite is true. The ugly rumors are that he “doesn’t want to give up this power.” I can say this with all honesty, if Obama continues the wiretapping policy of the Bush administration I WILL ASK FOR MY MONEY BACK. I have threatened this half-heartedly before, but I will actually send a letter to his office asking for a refund of my campaign pledges if he doesn’t reverse this blatant violation of our constitutional rights. This again would be the office molding the man instead of what I had hoped for.

Finally, if he’s going to say in front of both houses of Congress “The United States does not torture” what is he willing to do to the previous administration who did torture? Again, is Obama going to mold the office (actually by this I mean – if you haven’t figured it out – fulfill the obligations of the office based on his oath to the constitution) or is it going to mold him. If I know that George W Bush and Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld authorized torture then shouldn’t President Obama know this as well? And if he knows that someone has committed a crime isn’t he obligated to – as the President – to insure that the laws of the land are obeyed? This double talk about “Combat operations being over in Iraq” (with 50,000 troops still there) is very disheartening to me. And as I’ve said on this site before, President Obama does not get a “free ride” from me as Bush got from his supporters after the 2000 election. We are all obligated as citizens to look at issues responsibly and to speak out against things that we see which are WRONG. And to me, I hope Obama’s double talk ends with this Iraq speech he gave yesterday – but history tells me that it will be otherwise. The problem with the office of the Presidency is that the office seems to mold the man instead of the other way around. George W Bush and Dick Cheney purposefully attempted to expand the power of the Office of the President illegally (their ambition “molded” them into criminals – whether the Obama administration prosecutes them as such is another matter) and the only hope that we, as citizens, have that these abuses will be reversed is if Barrack Obama reverses them. So I say tonight; President Obama, please don’t let your office mold you into something you’re not!