Thursday, January 29, 2009

The 44th President, the Price and Promise of Citizenship
  Elections piece by FreeCongressFoundation: E. Ralph Hostetter

The euphoric response of the general public to the inauguration of President Barack H. Obama gave the ceremony the appearance of a coronation rather than an inauguration. The area in Washington, D.C. known as the Mall, to the west of the United States Capitol, was filled to overflowing. The crowd was estimated to be 1.8 million people, making President Obama’s inauguration one of the best attended celebrations in history.

A repeated commitment President Obama made during his Presidential election campaign was: “I intend to end this [Iraq] war. My first day in office, I will bring the Joint Chiefs of Staff in, and I will give them a new mission, and that is to end this war responsibly and deliberately but decisively.“

This commitment was reiterated in his inaugural address: “We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people, and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan.“

President Obama’s first day in office was not quite what the Nation expected. Instead, the President called a meeting at the White House to discuss “war policy.“ Present at the first day’s meeting were Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Michael G. Mullen; Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates; U.S. Ambassador in Iraq Ryan C. Crocker; and General David H. Petraeus, the general responsible for both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. The Pentagon identified the January 21 meeting as a “logical first step” for the President to meet with those people who are “most directly involved in both the war in Iraq as well as the war in Afghanistan.”

A senior military spokesman said the meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff would come within a week.

Normally the Presidency, perhaps the most daunting and stressful job in politics, is preceded by years of executive experience, most often as the governor of a State of the Union or as a senior military officer. Few have come directly from a very limited, or any, legislative background. Governors learn valuable training and governmental management, including balancing (or failing to balance) budgets and overseeing vast bureaucracies, during their time in state office.

President Obama arrives at the White House with as little, and probably the least, experience and training of any chief executive in the history of the United States. His training as a community organizer on the south side of Chicago hardly equips him for the heavy responsibilities of Chief Executive of the most powerful nation in the world, in addition to the fact he is Commander-in-Chief of the world’s largest military force.

Vice President Harry S. Truman faced a similar situation upon the death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in April 1945. He said at the time that he felt the weight of the world had suddenly been dropped upon his shoulders. Although Truman had gone through a period in his political life where he had been ridiculed as “the Missouri weakfish” of government, he later gained great respect, especially when he gave the order to drop two of the first atomic bombs on Japan in order to spare American servicemen from extensive fatalities in an invasion of the country and to end World War II.

Hopefully Obama will surround himself with the most competent political and military leaders in the Nation. He and Vice President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. both campaigned on the promise to pull troops out of Iraq within 16 months. No doubt, Obama’s first day of on-the-job training proved to be a rather sobering experience. When campaign rhetoric faces reality, rhetoric often must change substantially. During the entire campaign leading up to the November 2008 general election the word “change” seemed to be the operative word.

Noted in Obama’s inaugural speech are the words: “For the world has changed and one must change with it.” He continued:

Our challenges may be new.  The instruments with which we meet them may be new. But those values upon which our success depends - hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism - these things are old. These things are true. They have been the quiet force of progress throughout our history. What is demanded then is a return to these truths. What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility - a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task. This is the price and the promise of citizenship.

E. Ralph Hostetter

E. Ralph Hostetter, a prominent businessman and publisher, also is an award-winning columnist and Vice Chairman of the Free Congress Foundation Board of Directors. http://www.freecongress.org/

Posted by FreeCongressFoundation: E. Ralph Hostetter on 1/29/09

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