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GEORGIE ANNE GEYER: AMERICA’S HOLIDAY BLUES (Yahoo! News/Uxpress)
There’s a strange mood in the country this holiday season, a mood we would do well to study if we are to travel the right roads in the years to come.
On the one hand, far too many of us are depressed over real losses and genuine fears. Polls show repeatedly that only about 33 percent of Americans feel the country is headed in the right direction, that 66 percent are not sure that their children’s lives will be better than theirs, and that a stunning 39 percent see China becoming the leading nation of the world in two decades.
On top of that, every day I talk to people who voted for Barack Obama, and many of them are already deeply disappointed. One of them, one of our most respected politically moderate writers, said to me last week, close to anger, “Change? Where is the change?”
Yet, on the other hand, when I count down the changes the president and his team have made, they are close to remarkable in a real political world, not some shimmering Camelot.
Most agree he has avoided the major recession his big-talking predecessor left him, and the present team is ready to reinstate meaningful regulation. And as of this writing, it looks as though a health care reform bill will actually pass Congress, in itself an accomplishment of Rooseveltian proportions.
In one short year, Obama has changed the entire lexicon of political parlance in America. Who at the top talked seriously about global warming and environmental change before? And he has changed the vision of the world toward America. The Copenhagen climate conference, which certainly had its inevitable comical U.N. moments, was a real start in an area where there was nothing but stasis before.
