President Obama and the Hopes of the Nation

Today Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States, and tomorrow morning he will start work with an almost immeasurable burden of the nation's hopes weighing on his shoulders. Right now, the New York Times has a fascinating interactive feature called "I hope so, too" (or at least, that's how it would read if the writers at the Times were still literate people) that distills into 29 categories the responses of 200 people from 14 states who were asked to name their greatest hopes for the Obama presidency . The feature allows readers to hear excerpts from the answers of the people who were interviewed and click on a button if they share the hopes that were expressed. In addition, there are already over 600 posted comments that state many other hopes not included in the feature.

I clicked on so many of the hopes in the feature that I lost count, but these ten were among the ones I shared:

1. Enact universal health care
2. Protect the environment
3. Improve the economy
4. Improve education
5. End the war in Iraq
6. Promote gay rights
7. Restore civil liberties
8. Close the prison at Guantanamo Bay
9. Increase government accountability
10. Restore the separation of church and state

There were other hopes expressed that I also share whole-heartedly (such as ending global poverty) and some that I definitely do not share (such as ending the right to abortion or keeping our troops deployed in the Middle East), but ten seems like a good number, so these are mine. However, it seems to me that the one hope that would make at least some of the hopes listed above possible is that the government should embrace bipartisanship in order to act in the best interests of the nation and the world. Unfortunately, given the entrenched behavior of politicans, I expect to read about the discovery of a universal cure for cancer before I read about concrete examples of politicians of both parties working together to accomplish important national goals.

In my experience, political behavior denotes self-interested action that is mainly directed at pleasing the interest groups that will keep the politician in office, whether it benefits the nation or not. Think of kowtowing to the corporations that give the politicians money. Think of pork barrel projects. Think of the military-industrial complex. Think of Henry Paulson giving $350 billion to his friends at U.S. banks and insurance companies without demanding any accountability. How do we get from these actions to enacting universal health care or rescuing the economy? Yes, I believe in separation of church and state, but even so it will take a lot of prayers to get the powers that be in our government to change the way they operate, and I am not optimistic.