Salon.com > One request for President obama

Dear Mr. President: “Fix that”

Wed, 28 Nov 2012 01:01:00 +0000

Those of us who were still awake late into election night 2012 heard President Obama say, “I want to thank every American who participated in this election, whether you voted for the very first time or waited in line for a very long time. By the way, we have to fix that." If I could ask President Obama to do just one thing over the next four years, I would ask him to use his leadership to “fix that.”

Twelve years after the startling disarray of the 2000 election, in too many states dismally bad election administration has become the expected course. Hours-long lines, malfunctioning voting machines, and hopelessly confusing ballots are the headlines potential voters see. How can we expect that busy citizens will not be deterred from voting by the thought of such barriers? Every botched election and new barrier to voting causes even more citizens to completely disengage from their own governance.

This year, we saw thousands of our fellow citizens still wait in those endless lines, cast provisional ballots and file complaints when they were illegally denied the opportunity to vote. American citizens are literally fighting for their right to vote. Now it’s time that Congress and President Obama step to that fight.

Dear Mr. President: Please admit it — you’re a Jedi

Fri, 16 Nov 2012 16:00:00 +0000

Mr. President:

With your last-ever campaign behind you, and faced with the task of rallying an American community that has nearly had the unity beaten out of it by a politics that has often forgotten its purpose, I believe that now is the time for you to reveal your truth. For it can be a healing truth, and we are ready to hear it.

It is time to admit that you are a Jedi.

How else to explain your ability to cause adversaries to crumble in confusion, losing their direction and chasing imaginary sights and sounds? Jedi mind tricks. How else to explain the uncanny precision with which your campaign was able to target voters and model outcomes? Organizing? "Math"? Rather, a deep knowledge of the Force. And I hardly need mention the on-air meltdown of the Sith Lord Karl Rove, or the Twitter implosion of his apprentice Donald Trump.

We first saw you use these powers when you were a mere Padawan, running for Senate in 2004. Faced with a formidable Republican nominee, and still early in your training, you had not yet achieved the finesse of a true master. To be sure, using the Force to replace your opponent with the feckless intergalactic mercenary Alan Keyes was effective. But it lacked refinement.

Dear Mr. President: Please fight to overturn Citizens United

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 17:02:00 +0000

Mr. President, perhaps the most important legacy you could achieve on the heels of your reelection is the preservation of the electoral process itself.

Estimates suggest that, between political party spending and super PAC largess around the presidential and congressional races, this past election cost as much as $6 billion. That is just astonishing. And astonishingly wasteful.

Karl Rove alone raised and spent upward of $400 million to influence the election. Instead, Rove and the hidden donors behind his super PAC could have given over $1,500 to every unemployed person in Virginia — that is, he could have actually done something good with the money, and maybe won the state. Leave aside the fact that Republicans oppose unemployment assistance; the point is, our electoral spending is wildly out of proportion with the realities of voters and even the proportions of the recent past. In 2004, the record $1 billion in campaign spending made headlines and set records. Now we’ve eclipsed that sixfold.

Dear Mr. President: Please junk Race to the Top

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 01:00:00 +0000

President Obama should junk the Race to the Top plan immediately. It is a deeply flawed reworking of George W. Bush's test-based, pro-charter school No Child Left Behind Act. Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan should change course dramatically and publicly admit Race to the Top doesn't and can't work and then craft a new plan that doesn't treat education like an industry and coerce teachers to "teach to the test," while marching toward education privatization.

Obama's website states "education is not a top-down, one-size-fits-all issue — that’s why he has given states the flexibility to create their own ambitious plans for reform." Well, much like CANCER is as deadly in North Carolina as it is in Colorado -- and Obama's MASSIVELY COURAGEOUS plan to expand healthcare coverage understands this -- education most certainly is EXACTLY a "top-down, one-size-fits-all issue." We need kids in New Mexico to be just as good at reading and writing as kids in Pennsylvania. Education is the mother of all top-down, one-size-fits-all issues. Or maybe it's the father, if healthcare is the mother. Point is, we need better, more stringent national standards, because EVERY OTHER COUNTRY above us (and there are a bunch) on the PISA survey done by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development every three years does. To give you a glimpse, China is first in reading and the U.S. is 17th. China is also No. 1 in math, and I don't even want to tell you where we are, but be assured: I WISH it was 17th. Further, the poverty that afflicts certain communities and not others necessitates a unified national approach -- not a punishing and divisive approach -- to fix things or the good schools get better and the bad ones get worse. Schools aren't corporations, though there are those who would change that, and they most certainly do have the president's ear.

Mr. President, remember me? It’s Bill Ayers

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 20:00:00 +0000

I have a backpack filled to overflowing with grievance and discontent, dissent and demand, as well as wild hopes and radical aspirations: end the wars and the drone strikes, slash the pentagon, fight for universal health care, tear down these walls, recognize and stand with the poor and the working class, assail poverty, put teeth into global warming measures -- the list goes on and on.

But I also know that the president is neither a sovereign nor a king, and most of us spend way too much time and energy staring dumbly at the sites of power we have no access to -- the White House, for example -- wringing our hands and hoping for the best, and far too little time focusing on the prospective power right in front of us: the community and the street, the school and the classroom, the shop and the workplace. Our job is to organize dissent and mobilize an independent movement. Remember: Lyndon Johnson was never part of the Black Freedom Movement, FDR was not a labor leader, and Lincoln never joined an abolitionist party -- each is remembered for important actions taken in response to fire from below. Even in the last years it was women, gay, immigrant-rights and environmental activists who moved a progressive agenda forward inch by inch.

Dear Mr. President: Ditch the pipeline

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 10:00:00 +0000

If the president was going to do a single thing that signaled the second term would be different, it would be: Nix the Keystone Pipeline once and for all.

He wavered and dithered in term 1, delaying approval for a year. The year that turned out to be the hottest in American history. The year with summer-in-March, with the derecho that turned out the lights for 5 million, with the crop-withering drought that covered 60 percent of the continental U.S., with superstorm Sandy, which put an indelible image of the climate crisis into the American subconscious. The president kept his studied climate silence all campaign long -- but surely he noticed, right? We’ll know when he makes his decision on Keystone. Since the Canadians have basically given up on building their own Gateway Pipeline to the Pacific, it’s the last chance for big expansion of the tarsands. For a heating world, it’s as big a deal as it gets.

Time to commence “the Obama Games”!

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 20:55:00 +0000

Overview
Congratulations! Big fan. Look, I know you're busy. The fiscal cliff, Afghanistan, your recipes Pinterest, immigration, climate change, walking Bo -- we get it, you've got a lot on your mind. We're completely behind you. Solving America's tough problems will take months of hard work, though, and we need something from you right now. When I say "instant," you say "gratification." Instant! (I'm going to assume you said it.) We've been glued to this election for over two years -- nervously vibrating to a wobbly pitch of hope and fear. We need to come down, and not all of us live in Colorado. While you're facing all of our challenges, we're suffering a crippling intellectual and emotional attention deficit left behind by the election. I have an idea. Hear me out, because I made a few jokes on Twitter that obviously turned the election in your favor so I think you owe me. I see you nodding.

Hello, Mr. President? It’s me, Roger Ebert

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 16:08:00 +0000

I would ask the president for an emergency education program. Our students at every level are below American historical norms and global standards. We're importing the best and the brightest from overseas, from nations that may not spend as much money on education but seem to produce better-prepared students.

I attended a Catholic grade school for eight years in the 1950s. When my class graduated, all of us (even the "slower" students) whizzed through public high school rhetoric so easily our new teachers remarked on it. Our school was poverty-stricken and had only basic facilities. But every one of us could read, write and do math. I believe we could read and write better than many of today's high school graduates, and some of today's colleges graduates.

Reading is the key to self-education. Let me give an example that has been obsessing me. Nearly 50 percent of all Americans reject the Theory of Evolution and believe Man was "created" pretty much in his present form some thousands of years ago. Anyone who believes that hasn't been paying attention.