Dinner for Eight

The view of the Elizabeth Islands was breathtaking. The food delicious. A group of friends gathered to enjoy a meal and talk about their grandchildren, summer and ultimately, President Obama.

Everyone at the long dining room table had voted for him, and all were disappointed in how lousy they felt with regard to his governance. The typical comment was that he wasn’t a leader and was over his head. Someone suggested that all he knew how to do was legislate. Another person talked about his wonderful ability to deliver a speech, but we all agreed that his speeches were no longer relevant. We wanted the man behind the speeches, the one we lost along the way.

There was agreement that President Obama had indeed been handed a terrible economy and two wars, along with a huge debt from President Bush’s reign of eight years, in spite of the budget surplus Bush had inherited from President Clinton. So what happened, and how much is President Obama to blame?

I have friends who voted for McCain, holding their noses because they thought President Obama didn’t have enough experience. I paid no attention, reminding myself that President John F. Kennedy once remarked that no one is truly prepared for the job. I was seduced by hope.

At the end of our evening and after the delicious key lime pie prepared by the hostess, no one at the table had a solution or much in the way of suggestions as to what the president should do other than “be a leader” and not let himself be pushed around. Someone mentioned raising taxes and spending wisely to rebuild our country, but the popular theme was that President Obama needed to be tougher and have more grit.

What we learned in the last few months is that we have those in our government who would and will create great peril for our country in the name of their beliefs. Eric Hoffer wrote about this in 1951, when he published The True Believer. He wrote, “In order to be effective a doctrine must not be understood, but has to be believed in.” This is the basis for those individuals who got in the president’s way, both Democrats and Republicans, and succeeded in bringing our country to the edge of the cliff. Our anger at our president is that he let them get away with it.

I remember President Obama talking about clean water and renewable energy and health care that would eliminate our emergency rooms as primary care facilities for the poor. I believe what happened is that our president let himself be steamrolled in the interest of being collaborative. He should have fought for everything he believed in and not worried about whether he would have a second term. He should have relinquished being a team player and trying to work things out with a congress that gave him fair warning of their intentions.

Being a team player was important to President Obama, far more important than it needed to be. In the last analysis we got our poet orator, which is what we wanted. What we didn’t know was that what we really wanted was a poet orator who was also a warrior.

Roseline Glazer

Chilmark

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Tell It Like It Is

You might not think that someone in my demographic (old male WASP, native Kansan, former U.S. Navy OCS Instructor, Stanford Law grad) would have voted for you, but I did, with great hope and expectations. And because I still believe you understand what needs to be done and you can explain complex facts and circumstances eloquently and clearly, I want to vote for you again. But you’ve got to help me. You’ve got to stop listening to those around you who tell you that being re-elected is more important than speaking the unvarnished truth before we hold the election to see if you can have a second term.

I, of course, think that most of us know the unvarnished truth. But we need you to be the first and most persistent speaker to tell us factual truth and probable outcomes of the choices we can make now. I know. Facts and truth and probabilities are complicated . . . and messy. But we need to hear you say: “These are facts, this is the truth, these are the probable consequences of the decisions we can choose to make and I believe these are the choices we should make and these are my reasons.” Never mind that it is the Congress who must debate and decide. We (and they) need you to lead.

Tell us that if we want to continue to provide Medicare and Social Security for all, we must reduce in some way the benefits payable in the future, raise the eligibility age, means test eligibility, increase the lifetime contributions or the wage base by which those contributions are measured (or some combination of those), because fewer people will be contributing and more people will live longer, therefore collect more benefits in future years. Tell us the various ways we could effect those changes and show us predictions about who pays how much and who can expect how much as the conditions and rules change.

Tell us (if it’s true) that the “funny money” being “printed” by the Fed is necessary to fill the void left in the economy when the multiplier effect generated by private funny money (debt) disappeared in the massive deleveraging that has occurred since 2008. Show us how necessary continued stimulus is to keep the unemployment rate stable or lower in the short run and how efficient and effective a distributor of funds the employment tax holiday was (and can continue to be, if enacted again).

Show us the predatory banks’ deposit contract clauses that impose “gotcha” fees on customers who do not even understand that the bank is not obligated to decline debit card transactions when their checking account is empty, let alone to treat depositors fairly. Then tell us that’s just one reason why we need a consumer protection agency with teeth in its regulations and an Elizabeth Warren at its helm. Tell us that we need all the Elizabeth Warrens and Sheila Bairs (FDIC) and Brooksley Borns (CFTC) we can get to police the avaricious financial institutions that thrive on predatory fee income and employ “buyer beware” tactics behind “Trust me, I’m your bank” slogans.

Badger mortgage lender CEOs into creating incentives for midlevel executives to restructure salvageable defaulted mortgage loans at substantial (20 to 35 per cent?) principal write-offs and reduced and fixed interest rates to preserve neighborhoods and prevent foreclosures from destroying the housing market for both banks and innocent homeowners.

Tell us that our tax code needs to be simplified; that deductions and loopholes need to be rethought and in general reduced or eliminated, but that rates must be set to generate revenue sufficient to support what we promise to undertake.

Make it impossible for us, the media, our elected representatives (and their committee of 12) to be taken seriously if we are not talking about these issues in your terms!

Yes, it would be regrettable if you lost the election; but it would be tragic if you did not speak the truth and lost anyway. Ånd I fear that’s the most likely outcome.

Bruce Lewellyn

Vineyard Haven

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Lasting Lessons, Legacy

In 2008 my sophomore class was on fire about President Obama’s campaign, and this was quite remarkable given that the biggest challenge generally is to get them to remember the candidates’ names, but not in 2008 when they wrote their biweekly column in this newspaper and their favorite topic was Barack Obama. They even appeared on local television to discuss their passionate interest in this candidate and performed a chorus or two of No One is More Irish than Barack Obama! Their research made them among the first people in the world to be aware of the president’s Irish great, great-grandfather, a Famine Irish immigrant to this country. It would be hard to describe to the president the brightness of his appeal and the connection that we all, teacher and students, felt to him. His story of searching for his own roots resonated with our diverse class. We knew of his largely absent father, his hard-working, world traveling mother and his loving grandparents who, in many ways, raised him. We knew him to be a citizen of the world, aware of economic and social injustice. We put our faith in him, placing expectations on him that no one could have fulfilled.

That was then, and now with a worldwide economic recession, imperial wars that prove hard to disentangle and a growing movement in the country that says we don’t need a responsible government — just a flag and a free-for-all — things seem a little different. The president’s efforts to provide health and security for every citizen are laudable, while the compromises that reinforce the old mantra of government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich are distressing.

President Obama must listen to the people with a hearing heart, understanding what foreclosure and joblessness means to working people and abandon the policies of bailing out businesses that are “too big to fail” who within the year are prospering and refusing to lend a hand or a dollar to people whose very lives have been decimated by this recession. President Obama knows what it is to face economic uncertainty and lack of opportunity every day, to argue with insurance companies about medical coverage, and now is the time for him to speak. Not every promise can be fulfilled, but commitment must be shown.

I have just returned from Ireland where President Obama embodies the ultimate story of Irish success in America. Some 10,000 Irish people turned out to see this man in Dublin and his words Is Feidir Linn (Yes We Can) electrified the crowd and now appear on T-shirts, flags and bumper stickers all over the country. At a time when the world is plunged into recession and uncertainty and the United States’ reputation among the rest of the world is tarnished, President Obama is welcomed all over the world. His respect for the dignity of others may yet be his greatest legacy. He can do it here in America too.

Elaine Cawley Weintraub

West Tisbury

The writer is chairman of the history department at the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School and board president of the African American Heritage Trail of Martha’s Vineyard.