babbling blue

Welcome to my part 1 in my 1461 part series* on Barack Obama’s first term!

Some would argue that yesterday was Day 1 of the Obama presidency. That position has some merit, but a) it was only a half day and b) it’s kind of like the first day of school. . . you don’t really do anything of substance. So I’m calling today Day 1.

Has he fixed everything yet? It couldn’t be that hard, right? Let’s check in…

• The Dow regained most of what it lost yesterday. Well, that wasn’t really his doing…
• Hillary Clinton got confirmed as SecState by a vote of 94-2 (the nays were cast by Jim DeMint, R-SC and David Vitter, R-LA).
• Obama ordered a pay freeze for his senior staff
• and tightened rules on lobbyists
• “establish[ed] what he said was a new standard of greater government openness”
• ordered a halt to pending war crimes trials at Gitmo while he reviews the handling of terror suspects (he actually did that last night. . . not bad!)

Sounds like a decent start, I guess. If “fixing our problems” (I’m going to be deliberately vague on this) is a cross-country drive, then President Obama is packing his bags. Hey, that’s important. You need clean clothes and toothpaste for a trip like that. It’s hard to respect a President with dirty, rumpled clothes and bad breath and spinach in his teeth. Tomorrow he’ll probably check the tire pressure and the anti-freeze and blinker fluid. It’ll take awhile before he can actually get on the road, and who knows how bad traffic is going to be? He might even get lost, or go antiquing, or spend too much time at a Waffle House or. . . oh I’m on a tangent.

I like to think that I’m a realistic optimist, or an optimistic realist. My brain is not firing on all cylinders right now (bonus points to me for continuing the automotive metaphor!) for some reason, so I can’t think what the difference might be. But anyway, I have Hope that things are going to Change. I think they will, but it’s going to be a long, slow process (he doesn’t drive a very fast car) and there are going to be problems (it’s not that reliable either). I know that Obama is only human, and there are limits to what he can do. He’s not perfect; he’s going to do some things I disagree with. However, I feel things are going to get better. Really…how can they not?

*Just kidding.