Letter 105 to friends and familiares: Yes, I am a Republican; but still unsure enough not to be a bully.

Republican friends believe I have slipped into political apostasy.  They have a point, given my frequent defenses of President Obama, usually with a lame disclaimer of my not liking many of his policies. Truthfully, I believe the President did act within his authority on immigration. Yet, the G.O.P. has a convincing narrative by some Republicans that his action was motivated by not wanting to concede the upper hand to the Republican-led House of Representatives and, soon, the Senate.

 

My conservatism remains intact. There are many policies I dislike of this Administration, while I admire the man at the head of it. Here are six policies – two foreign and four domestic – that I have never really liked, nor ever will. While previous essays cited are often dated in their examples, analogies and details, they are based on certain fundamental beliefs that place me firmly on the right. Yes, my principles differ from those of liberals; no question.

 

President Barack Obama deserves respect from each and every American for having beliefs in the first place. Yes, they often get bogged down in the partisan free-for-all that now seems to pass for the people’s government. After all, in my own case at least, I have to admit that I am far from the smartest person in any room. That may sound silly and presumptive, but it is not. There is always the possibility that those principles so obvious to me may not be so obvious to others; they may even be wrong.

 

Abortion on demand. People know why I am a right-to-life conservative  (http://nedmcdletters.blogspot.com/2012/01/letter-52-to-friends-and-familiares.html). Kulturkampf aside, we should maintain a large margin of compassion for the hellish dilemma weighing down on decent, often poorer, women. Nevertheless, the notion of foetal viability is an intellectual hoax and I fear that part of the demoralization of American politics and culture came out of Viêt Nam and Roe v. Wade. Coercing religious institutions with the corrosive abortion-on-demand ideology violates the Constitution and further trivializes the sacred value of the life taken.

 

The second bank bail-out. The first bail-out was not a great idea but President Bush basically had four days to react decisively to prevent a collapse of the financial markets. President Obama had four months. The two situations were qualitatively different. Senator McCain articulated a better approach in 2008 that would have been easier to implement, less costly and far less intrusive. That program, at least as I perceived it at the time, would have held people accountable as well as, cleaned up the mess made by a minority of unethical bankers and a broken system
(http://nedmcdletters.blogspot.com/2013/09/this-is-yet-anotherpolitical-letter-home.html).

 

The Affordable Care Act.  True, there is a case to be made that President Obama brokered a compromise against which the Republicans turned their backs. Nevertheless, the mode of resolving the underlying question of a right to health-care and weaving it into the larger body politic was wrong (http://nedmcdletters.blogspot.com/2012/05/letter-56-thoughts-on-health-care.html). Additionally, the deceptions to get the law passed and implemented only under-cut and already fragile and unbalanced consensus.

 

Economic stimulus.  The Stimulus package was a blunderbuss approach to the Great Recession that failed to lay the foundation for manufacturing and its attendant wealth and job creation. Yet the infrastructure crumbles and corruption is detectable. The manner of financing this corrupted measure through quantitative easing has bankrupted the country. Sadly, we will only get it when the baseless dollars -- the specious specie -- flood home from overseas. Lastly, combined with the coercion of the A.C.A., this piping tepid approach has turned the Great Recession into a depression for young people; call the millennials the "tossed generation".

 

The Middle East. The President’s current policy in Iraq has been correct and sober-minded (http://nedmcdletters.blogspot.com/2014/06/letter-102-to-friends-and-familiares.html). Yet, the situation ought never have degenerated to this extreme. Inaction in the face of power grabs in Iraq in 2010 plus the unmitigated slaughter of Syrians and the infiltration of refugee camps in and around Syria by ISIS – when inexpensive means were readily available to respond – has pushed a difficult regional transition into becoming a possible flash-point for world war (http://nedmcdletters.blogspot.com/2013/08/letter-83-thoughts-on-syria-case-for.html).

Compounding these failed polices has been the use of drones to assassinate unindicted terrorists  in a manner clearly outside the laws of men and war (http://nedmcdletters.blogspot.com/2013/02/letter-75-doj-white-paper-for-black.html).

 

Russia and Ukraine. This is a complicated question, since Ukraine’s Eastern borders were drawn as arbitrarily by one colonial power as had the dotted lines across the Levant had been imposed by two others.  There are genuine questions of sovereignty to be resolved. The means employed by President Putin and tacitly condoned by President Obama, however, are wrong for Ukraine, Eastern Europe and, ultimately, Russia herself (http://nedmcdletters.blogspot.com/2014/03/letters-to-friends-and-family-94.html).  President Obama's mismanagement in this case rivals that of President Clinton in the Balkans.

As Yugoslavia crumbled into chaos, President Clinton's half-hearted measures and sanctions hurt the wrong people and managed only to harden a tin-horn dictator into a slaughter-house operator. In the case of Russian aggression, appeasement and procrastination have only made a bad situation worse and whetted the appetite of an aggressor, as the Baltics and Poland are finding out these days.  One should note that Unkraine, each of the Baltics, Hungary and Poland have been steadfast allies in Iraq and / or Afghanistan. Pulling missile defenses and conceding outcomes too readily to the Putineer by President Obama hardly seems to return their favor.

Toward a creative and inclusive dialectic. Yes, there is little doubt in my way of thinking that these and other policies from the Administration are bad for the country in the long-run. In some cases they chip away at our singular experiment in governance: due-process, the rule of law and the courage to do the right thing when it really counts. What is difficult for my more liberal friends to argue is that President Obama was simply doing what he could in the face of thorny dilemmas with no visible alternatives.

Not at all true. With the possible exceptions of health-care and abortion, each of these policies had better alternatives at the time proposed by other mainstream leaders. Within these two issues, the use of the law to enforce an ideology on long-established religiously based and funded hospitals is very, very dangerous.  That said, however, there is a palpable racism in much of the vitriol hurled the President’s way.  While these policies are headed toward popular repudiation, delighting in President Obama’s failure is even worse.

Such an attitude of political vindictiveness makes compromise harder to achieve and fails to recognize that critics have it easy in a policy debate; that is, changelings have the intellectual burden-of-proof when they attack a status quo. It is easier to attack a status-quo than to defend it. Yet the burden-of-proof needs to be pragmatic: one that permits a resolution of a debate even of morally ambiguous situations, like that of Ferguson, Missouri. Because the officer was not indicted does not nullify the contention that the police are open to criticism for often using excessive force, especially against minorities.

 

Critics tend to compare the best case scenarios inside their heads to the often disappointing policies carried out in plain sight. People seem to forget that many of these now-reviled policies emerged earlier as politically poignant and timely best case scenarios in the heads of other bright and well-intentioned thinkers. Thus, the foreign policies of President Obama, ones that I often see as feckless, may very well be avoiding unacceptable levels bloodshed that my best-case scenarios would otherwise impose.

 

Debilitating personal attacks, especially those that are unfounded, help no one, especially Republicans, as we now bear the onus of “manning up” with a new, better and attainable contract with America, one that is far-reaching, flexible and durable. We need a new consensus toward compromise, badly.