From a piece in The New Yorker titled "Do the Poor Have More Meaningful Lives?" The phrase "long view" resonated with something in that much-talked-about New Yorker piece about Barack Obama. "The Long View" is the title of section 2 of the 10-part article:
While we were waiting for Obama to speak to the group, I asked [Valerie] Jarrett whether the health-care rollout had been the worst political fiasco Obama had confronted so far.What I'm hearing in the resonance between the 2 articles is: Settle down and stop expecting anything anytime soon. It's really not important that you be satisfied now, with your life or with the leaders who you might imagine should be helping you with your immediate problems. It's all for the best. Trust me. It will all make sense in the end.
“I really don’t think so,” she said. Like all Obama advisers, she was convinced that the problems would get “fixed”—just as Social Security was fixed after a balky start, in 1937—and the memory of the botched rollout would recede. That was the hope and that was the spin. And then she said something that I’ve come to think of as the Administration’s mantra: “The President always takes the long view.”
That appeal to patience and historical reckoning, an appeal that risks a maddening high-mindedness, is something that everyone around Obama trots out to combat the hysterias of any given moment. “He has learned through those vicissitudes that every day is Election Day in Washington and everyone is writing history in ten-minute intervals,” Axelrod told me. “But the truth is that history is written over a long period of time—and he will be judged in the long term.”
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It means: "You're powerless in the short term, and in the long term too, because I'm getting away with this."
Obama is thinking of all these speaking fees for left wing groups in the log term.
What difference, at that point, will it make?
First of all, why is it a given that poverty strips people of happiness.
Settle down and stop expecting anything anytime soon. It's really not important that you be satisfied now, with your life or with the leaders who you might imagine should be helping you with your immediate problems. It's all for the best. Trust me. It will all make sense in the end.
So, Progressivism is like the most depressing sects of Christianity during the Middle Ages?
That's Progress!
Well, when your policies have cratered the economy, reversed all our-hard won successes militarily and diplomatically, and your administration is destroying the public's faith in the integrity and trustworthiness of the federal government...what else are you going to say? When the present and the near future suck for most people as a direct result of your actions, the only thing you CAN say is "in the long run, things will improve."
Do the Poor Have More Meaningful Lives?
No.
Well, when your policies have cratered the economy, reversed all our-hard won successes militarily and diplomatically, and your administration is destroying the public's faith in the integrity and trustworthiness of the federal government...what else are you going to say? When the present and the near future suck for most people as a direct result of your actions, the only thing you CAN say is "in the long run, things will improve."
Telling you, the next Republican President needs to shoot for:
PROJECT SUNLIGHT
Declassify everything involving domestic policy at all Obama has ever done, considered, or passed. Put everything out there.
As someone who grew up in a working poor family I can assure you that anyone who talks about the "advantages" of poverty is trying to sell you something.
He has learned through those vicissitudes that every day is Election Day in Washington..."
seems like a short view to me.
Leave it to Axelrod to obfuscate any meaning with "vicissitudes."
Credit the Russian grandmother to put life in perspective and Obama in his sad place:
“If nothing matters, there’s nothing to save.”
Yeah, that might have the tiniest bit of credibility if this wasn't the same Administration that borrowed $700 billion from the Chinese in a hysterical fever because OMFG we have to stop the bleeding RIGHT NOW, continues piling on the bail-outs and "safety net" handouts because OMFG people can't DEAL with a spot of unemployment or the loss of a home equity bet by themselves, we better pass this 2,000 page healthcare bill without reading it because WE HAVE NO TIME TO DO THAT, and lately has been yakking about how we need executive orders and powers up the wazoo that would've made a Reichskanzler green with envy, because we can't possibly wait for Congress to pass a budget, the Senate to confirm appointments after a freaking 3-day holiday, et cetera and so forth because the oceans must be made to recede RIGHT NOW OMG OMG HELP HELP.
Fact is, every word they say is self-serving bullshit, including "a, "and" and "of," and, worse, at the intellectual level of a first-grader. The static you hear between stations on the AM dial has more meaning and, I daresay, more rhythm and rhyme.
And on the subject: anyone who thinks the meaning of a life strongly correlates with its experience of wealth has his spiritual head firmly wedged up his unimaginative miserly materialist ass.
Of course, it doesn't surprise me that lefties think that way. They're the grubbiest of keep up with the Jones materialists, with the loneliest and emptiest of hearts.
It is a rather damning indictment that all the administration has left is vague assertions that history will eventually judge Obama fondly.
I give them style points for trying to position that as a sign of Obama's cool level-headedness rather than his jaw-dropping incompetence.
Settle down. Calm down. Have a joint or two. Take your joint money to the bank.
In fact she could be right. They might just muddle through without a total disaster.
It's becoming apparent (to me at least) that the reason a considerable portion of the population was not insured before Obamacare is that they did not want to bother with insurance. That same groups wants even less now to bother, because they somehow are convinced that something or someone will take care of them if the need arises.
This group is pretty calm about the whole thing, it seems. Why not the rest of us?
Actually, Im calm. I'm on Medicare. It will a few years before that particular poop hits the power line.
Telling you, the next Republican President needs to shoot for:
There is never going to be another republican president.
Never.
Luke 6:20-26
New International Version (NIV)
20 Looking at his disciples, he said:
“Blessed are you who are poor,
for yours is the kingdom of God.
21 Blessed are you who hunger now,
for you will be satisfied.
Blessed are you who weep now,
for you will laugh.
22 Blessed are you when people hate you,
when they exclude you and insult you
and reject your name as evil,
because of the Son of Man.
23 “Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, because great is your reward in heaven. For that is how their ancestors treated the prophets.
24 “But woe to you who are rich,
for you have already received your comfort.
25 Woe to you who are well fed now,
for you will go hungry.
Woe to you who laugh now,
for you will mourn and weep.
26 Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you,
for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets.
Jimmy Carter was not considered by most to be the worst president in history immediately after his term ended, but it took a breathtakingly short period of time for that judgement to settle in to the perceived wisdom of the age.
Obama will leave office with tears of gratitude drenching the cuffs of his trousers, with encomiums flooding in from every quarter, and countless offers of positions of high honor. But it will not take long for the realities of his terms in office to rise to the surface such that even the academics who once sang his praises, free at last to be objective, will own that he has taken Carter's place.
The president takes the long view? Gee, I thought it was Keynes who said in the long run we're all dead.
"While we were waiting for Obama to speak to the group, I asked [Valerie] Jarrett whether the health-care rollout had been the worst political fiasco Obama had confronted so far.
“I really don’t think so,”"
A good reporter would ask, "So, what was his worst fiasco then"? Instead of just letting Jarrett kibbutz on about the "long view".
Place your faith in mortal gods to guide you through the thorns and thickets.
That's what they say about the population control protocol. What they fail to acknowledge is that their incompetence and greed, and your deference and greed, have determined the final solution required to make the numbers work.
Remember that Reagan is remembered better in retrospect than he was after Iran-Contra at the end of his Presidency.
In the long view, Barack Obama will be thought a better President than the scandalous Bill Clinton, malaisy Jimmy Carter, or warmongering Lyndon Johnson.
Just as Reagan is now remembered as the best Republican President since Eisenhower, Obama will be remembered as the best Democratic President since Kennedy or Truman, maybe even since Roosevelt.
And, if Hillary achieves the true aims of the Clinton Global Initiative, he may be remembered as the last American President.
"The president takes the long view? Gee, I thought it was Keynes who said in the long run we're all dead."
That's why we can't lose: because we can't win.
carrie:
It's not. Wealth or means is only one consideration in determining happiness. They continue to degrade the dignity of poor people with these general proclamations. Perhaps they do not understand because they have never experienced contextual poverty themselves.
The principal interest is peace of mind, which is correlated with wealth or means, but not exclusively dependent on it. Their perception is grounded in a submission to indulgence motivated by greed.
Will the MSM stop covering for Obama after he leaves office? If so, his legacy will become pretty sour pretty fast.
But here's my guess: A Republican will be elected president in 2016, and the MSM will do all it can to keep alive the vision of the Age of Obama as a Golden Age.
Ralph Hyatt said...
As someone who grew up in a working poor family I can assure you that anyone who talks about the "advantages" of poverty is trying to sell you something.
Yes, it's telling that those who claim there are advantages of poverty are never willing to give away their own wealth. If being poor was such a good thing, why don't they become poor themselves?
Interestingly enough, proclaiming the "advantages of poverty" is something the Catholic Church did in South America, which led directly to Liberation Theology's response that the poor would just rather not be poor, thank you very much.
Now, voluntary letting go of being controlled by material possessions is one thing. That's what Pope Francis seems to illustrate.
The President just wants to volunteer other people to let go of their possessions while living a privileged lifestyle. That's the very definition of oppression, a rather caudillo thing for him to do.
Trust me. It will all make sense in the end.
Meaning when Republicans come in and clean up the mess.
Michelle told us we'd have to do more with less.
I finally got through that endless article on Obama in The New Yorker. Whether by accident or design, the article is paired with another article about L. Brooks Patterson. Patterson manages Oakland County. Oakland County is adjacent to Detroit. As Detroit has withered, Oakland has prospered. A good part of its success is due to Paterson's management. You can pick this up from the article, but a lot of it is slanted to make Patterson look bad.......Check out the small unflattering picture of Patterson versus the two page portrait of Obama striding purposefully towards glory and destiny. That's indicative of the way the articles are written......Patterson has succeeded as the executive of his county, but he has succeeded in a way that the author disapproves of. Obama has, by most objective standards, had a number of failures, but he has failed in a way in which Remnick approves so his failures are more praiseworthy than Patterson's successes.
God says poverty is a curse.
This Obama guy wants to see population more manageable by the tyranny of the UN. So he is working diligently to eliminate prosperity with energy costs quadrupled, and resulting food costs starve the surpluses people until they are weak enough for the Designer Pandemic which is ready to kill off 90% of the world.
Not that there is anything wrong with Big Lie hoax science.
Dale Carnegie said success is getting what you want and happiness is wanting what you get.
I would add that misery is resenting the success and happiness of others.
Interesting. Those who intend to stay in a house and take the long view of the accumulation of interest payments usually choose to curb the bank's profits off the sweat from their labor: http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2012/04/how-much-does-president-obama-still-owe.html#.UuO5C_tMHs0.
What did the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac executives pull down in bonuses again? Math is so hard, when you can just listen to pretty speeches...
David.
Obama ain't god.
And this ain't the kingdom of heaven.
iow: "money can't buy happiness".
...but it sure can make some of the things that make you miserable go away.
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