Remember how I said that, while we should take time to celebrate the genuine achievement of his election, eventually the Obama administration would foul up good and we'd find reason to start criticizing them?
Well, it happened yesterday. I mean, I knew there'd be disappointments and all, but I didn't think they'd be this big and this soon. Man.
No surprises. Obama may be black (well, partially black), but that doesn't mean he's going to be a better president. The Two-Party system offers little room for true change to the status quo, Obama's election rhetoric notwithstanding.
While I could see people voting for Obama over McCain, I frankly failed to see why so many people were so excited over it.
In the meantime, in my state, Obama and McCain were the only presidential choices offered to me, due to our restrictive ballot access laws--no third parties were able to get on the ballot.
While I went and voted in lower races, I declined to vote in the presidential race.
Despite this disappointment, Obama has done an awful lot of good in his first three weeks in office. The Ledbetter Bill alone is a step forward, not to mention his agreement to close Guantanamo within a year. That's why this specific failure to repudiate the Bush Administration's horrendous policy comes as such a blow.
He's got a lot more time in office, and I'm still willing to give him the benefit of the doubt -- but not blindly so. While there's no doubt in my mind he'll be a better president than Bush (or McCain for that matter), I'm still hoping that he'll be a *much* better president.
Also, I've never said in any of my posts that Obama's race was an automatic ticket to his being a better president. I do think it's high time we had someone other than a White man in the office, and while Obama's Blackness is certainly a major part of his identity, it's not an indication of his ability to do his job. He's a human being -- and despite being an incredibly smart and talented human being -- he will undoubtedly have his share of mistakes among his successes. Unravelling the nightmare of the last eight years will simply not happen overnight or without errors along the way, but keeping the pressure on his administration to keep hacking at that Gordian knot is the job of the people who voted for him, myself included.