THE BARACK OBAMA CONUNDRUM

Commenting on "Notes on a Road Rally Revolution" (Potomac Digest, April 1), former Baltimore television news anchor Jack Bowden writes:

It saddens me that you, like most liberals, can't admit that Obama is a disaster. I proudly voted for him, but I, like a growing number of liberals (watch Jon Stewart) now admit he has been a major disappointment. His only motivation is to get re-elected and, he probably will, because the Republicans are as bad or worse.

Would George W. Bush have done anything differently in Libya? And where was the demand for intervention during the Rwanda genocide? Unfortunately, only black people were involved, instead of black oil, as in Libya. And what about the other Arab countries doing the same thing as Libya, but are our allies?

And wouldn't the U.S. have done exactly what Libya is doing if some other country had invaded us to stop our genocide of the American Indians, which by the way, Lincoln (as wrongly venerated by liberals as Reagan is by conservatives) continued during the Civil War. Captured Rebel officers were not imprisoned if they agreed to kill Indians. Until left-wingers stop making excuses for Obama, politicians like Obama, who has ordered the death of thousands of people, and whose administration has not prosecuted any of the people who caused the recession, right-wingers will continue to gain power.

To which H. N. Burdett responds:

You may be surprised to learn that I'm not quite ready to carve Obama's image into Rushmore and that I share many, if not most, of your frustrations. But I feel you've gone far overboard by labeling him 'a disaster.'

Our differences perhaps stem from our perspectives and expectations. I never regarded Obama as a liberal, but rather as a left-leaning moderate. And, yes, he has made mistakes. But providing airstrikes in Libya to save lives of those who most of us were convinced would have been slaughtered absent U.S. air cover was not one of them.

Furthermore, I think you're a little off base if you truly believe U.S. intervention in Libya was motivated by oil rather than humanitarian concern. It is my understanding that the U.S. uses relatively little Libyan oil and that most of it goes to China. If that is correct, I'm not certain why the U.S. would intervene in Libya to protect a major supplier of oil for China.

It is easy to dismiss your comment, "His (Obama's) only motivation is to be re-elected. . ." Of course he wants to be re-elected. Perhaps the reason for this is to carry through what he has begun: recovery from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and restoration of the respect the United States lost under his predecessor. In these two significant categories, he has hardly been 'a disaster.'

My heart sank, along with yours I suspect, when Obama doubled down on Afghanistan -- a war the U. S. was, and is, losing. After 9/11 an international police action, rather than two wars, was required. Had that been our approach, we might well have held together the so-called 'coalition of the willing' that followed Bush and the U.S. into the insanity of invading Iraq. Perhaps, too, we would have captured or killed Bin Laden (and, at times, I'm cynical enough to believe that neither Bush nor Obama really wanted this because it would have made Bin Laden a martyr for the ages).

You are absolutely correct in asking "where was the demand for intervention in Rwanda during the genocide. . ." But if memory serves the U.S. President at that time was Bill Clinton, not Obama. Clinton has since lamented that not intervening in Rwanda was one of the biggest mistakes of his presidency.

The inconvenient truth ignored by you and other disaffected liberals who have pronounced Obama a failure or worse is that you are forgetting that the president must deal with a sharply divided Congress. This may account for what seems to be far too many compromises and his reticence, for which he's getting battered from both the right and the left.

I'm as upset as you are that not one of the wheeler and dealers who precipitated the recession has been prosecuted. I also feel that the president might have been far more aggressive in fighting for true health care reform: single payer health insurance. But even the health insurance restructuring -- it is hardly health care reform -- is an improvement, in that more than 16 million Americans who previously had no health insurance will be protected and the 'prior condition' caveat has been lifted. I'll add the failure to close Guantanamo and foot-dragging on environmental concerns to my list of bones to pick with the current administration.

Overerall though, you've got to admit that few presidents have entered office with as much of a mess that Obama inherited and was expected to clean up. That he has done as much as he has in only 2 1/2 years is nothing short of remarkable -- most particularly from a novice politician/social worker/law professor when most of the garbage he had been handed was fermenting.

But Bowden has the last serve in this volley between opinionators:

[S]ince that note of mine we now know that U.S. planes are still bombing Libya under the direction of NATO, which we fund and run, so Obama lied about that, and there is no exit strategy. And the CBO (Congressional Budget Office) says the budget cuts are a sham -- almost all of the money was not going to be spent anyway. Both Obama and the Republicans were just playing to their bases -- it's all theater, make believe. Reagan and Bush took the deficit and the debt to record levels, but the Obama administration has outdone them. We're in a very deep financial hole and yet most economists, such as [Paul] Krugman [Nobel Prize economist and New York Times columnist] say keep digging.