Cananito/Obama-on-Progress.md

## Obama-on-Progress.md

      
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              Obama-on-Progress.md
            
          
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When I ran in 2008, there were those posters out there. Hope, and change. And those are capturing aspirations about where we should be going. A society that’s more just. A society that’s more equal. A society in which the dignity of every individual is respected. A society of tolerance. A society about oportunity.
And the question then is how do you operationalize those abstract concepts into something really concrete. How do we get somebody a job. How do we improve a school. How do we make sure that everybody gets decent healthcare.
As soon as you start talking about specifics, then the world is complicated, and there are choices you have to make. And it turns out that the trajectory of progress always happens in fits and starts. You have this big legacy systems that you have to wrestle with. And you have to balance what you want and where you’re going with what is and what has been.
And… you know one of the interesting things is the conversations I have with supporters who will say to me “you know we think you’re a great guy, you’ve done some good things, but I’m so disappointed with ‘x’, cause ‘x’ didn’t happen exactly the way I wanted”.
And what I have to explain to them is that progress in a democracy is never instantanious and is always partial, and you can’t get cynical or frustrated because you didn’t get all the way there immediately.
So, during the healthcare debate. There are a lot of people who just wanted a single payer plan. Right? And as I said before, if I were designing a system from scratch, that would probably make more sense. We’re the only country on earth that, not the only country on earth, but we’re one of the few countries that has this weird amalgam of private sector and medicare sort of patchwork system. Hugely innefficient. We spend more than any of the other advanced countries. Our outcomes aren’t necessarily better. But, the notion that we were just gonna scrap the existing healtcare system, which is a sixth of our economy and employs millions of people, that wasn’t gonna happen.
So the question is, alright, given that where we’re starting now, how do we move as best as we can in the right direction? Five years later, we’ve got millions of people who have healthcare that didn’t have it before. We have the lowest uninsured rate that has ever been recorded.
But for a lot of people, they’re looking at it and saying “well, we didn’t get everything we wanted”. For me, what I say to myself is, for those millions of people, many of whom write to me and say you know “you saved my life”, that’s democracy working, that’s government working.
The same is true when it comes to how we think about the fight against terrorism. You know we ended two wars. But I always said from the start that there really are people out there who would have no compunction about just blowing up an entire neighborhood of American innocents, men, women, and children, for ideological reasons. We have to deal with them. And that then means that we do have to be able to identify those networks. We do have to, when we can find those folks, try to prevent them from doing what they’re doing.
And so for the last six and half years what I’ve been trying to do is to build up a legal structure that is consistent with our values and through process build up an intelligence system that is consistent with our civil libirties. And sometimes my supporteres will write in and say “you know, there’s some stuff here that you’re doing, that’s just like Bush!”. And what I explain to them is, the problems with the excesses of our counter terrorism approach after 9/11 were real. And waterboarding, and tourture, and renditions, we stopped. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t have real problems out there and that there aren’t balences that we gotta strike and figure out. And it’s complicated.
And we gotta be mindful that whatever abstract views you have about drones or that you have about intelligence gathering, that if you were sittin’ there in a situation room, you’d realize that you got some responsabilities and you got some choices to make. And it’s not all clear cut the way often times it gets presented.
So I guess to go to the point you were making earlier. That’s where yeah it’s like middle management. Somtimes your job is just to make stuff work. Sometimes the task of government is to make incremental improvements or try to steer the ocean line 2 degrees north or south so that 10 years from now, suddently we’re in a very different place than we were but at the moment people may feel like “we needed a 50 degree turn, we don’t need a 2 degree turn”. And you say, well, if I turn 50 degrees the whole ship turns. And you can’t turn 50 degrees. And it’s not just because of, you know, corporate lobbyists. It’s not just because of big money. It’s because societies don’t turn 50 degrees. Democracies certainly don’t turn 50 degrees. And that’s been true on issues of race. It’s been true on issues of the environment. That’s true on issues of discrimination. As long as they’re turning in the right direction and were’re making progress, then government is working sort of the way it’s supposed to.