Obama is No Visionary

Increasingly, one of the distinctive features of Obama's Presidency is its lack of vision. As I was reading about Obama's decision to cancel NASA's Constellation program, this thought struck me even more so than my earlier "Obama's New NASA Policy- Yet More Broken Promises and Lies" thought. Oh, I still believe that Obama's policy represents yet another example of how he breaks promises and lies through his teeth, but I'm past that now, and now I'm sad about the loss of the Constellation program because it demonstrates the lack of vision by our President.

If Obama was reaching for the stars and falling short, at least he would be getting into the upper atmosphere. If Obama was attempting to do grand new things, it would be a different story, but what we have with Obama is a President who is covering all the bases that Europe and the Soviet Union already covered long ago. Nationalized healthcare isn't bold or new- it's been tried and done and proven to be a failure for decades. High taxes, high regulation, and redistributing wealth to poor, unproductive people? USSR did that and found it failed too.

Go down the list of Obama's bold vision for the future, and what you find is someone who is firmly fixed on visions of the past put forth by people like Woodrow Wilson and FDR. Obama is not dreaming big and reaching for big things. He isn't going to remake society, or change society- he is going to drag society back into the mud, try ideas that have already been tried and failed, and display an utter lack of real vision when it comes to solving the problems facing our society today.

This is not to say that Republicans have vision- some of the approaches of the Republican Congress from 2000-2006 and George W. Bush's Presidency were pretty blind-sighted. Oh, there were visionary attempts- reforming social security, No Child Left Behind, Department of Homeland Security- but not enough. And this isn't to say that those were successes- some were, some were not- but at least he was reaching for the stars, trying to hit one out of the park, and doing something that got our nation excited.

Obama sees the moon, and instead of reaching for it, instead of dreaming about getting past it, instead of seeing Americans settling asteroids and exploring the galaxy, he looks down, and down, and down, and sees Chicago, and the power politics of that city, and drags people into the mud to squeal with him at the trough of pork and name calling. He pinches pennies from visionary programs and then throws dollars at failed policies of a bygone-era. He has an utter lack of vision. Listen to Obama talk about the America of the future and it looks strikingly like the Soviet Union of the past or the Europe of the past. It is not visionary in that it looks to the future and imagines how to get there.

As Obama's poll numbers dip, as Republicans win back the House and Senate, Obama will not become more visionary. To be a visionary, you need confidence in your vision, energy and skill to take someone there, and a self-confidence to plow ahead and drag a nation into the future behind you. That isn't Obama- he is a shell of a man, play-acting as an adult, desperately trying to hide his lack of knowledge of history and economics, and rather sadly filled with hubris and unfounded overconfidence. He has only been in office one year, and is snapping and fraying at the edges, looking old and haggard in spite of his low workload and frequent vacations. As he loses popularity, he will become less visionary and will push harder and harder for visions that he read about or was told about by someone else- you can count on that.

UPDATE: At least someone out there has vision- too bad it is Iran. Iran announced Wednesday it has successfully launched a research rocket carrying a mouse, two turtles and worms into space — a feat President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said showed Iran could defeat the West in the battle of vision.