Dear President Obama

Here’s the thing. I voted for you in November, and I’m thinking seriously of never voting again. I can’t say that I believed you were the progressive some people thought you were, but I did believe that you would, as you promised, try to make change. Change for me meant change for ordinary people, for those of us who aren’t investment bankers, aren’t in the top five percent, who are struggling to keep our heads above water as this country tilts farther and farther towards those with wealth.

It has recently occurred to me that for you, change meant the election of an African American (or perhaps, in an attempt to put miscegenation laws behind us, a person of mixed race). You therefore incarnated change, and your election fulfilled that promise. Since your election we haven’t seen much else that has looked all that different.

The election of a black man as president of the United States meant an enormous amount to me, a middle-aged white woman who grew up in the era of civil rights. It felt like the keeping of a promise, the making good on a pledge, and when, as I walked away from the polls after casting my ballot, the tinny carillon on the Methodist church began to play “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” I began to cry. Most of the white people I know described to me how they cried—at news of your victory, during your inaugural address—tears of relief, tears of fulfillment. How much more did your election mean to the black people I know, especially my students at the Community College of Philadelphia? During the election campaign in Philadelphia, many black people wore tee-shirts that made you look not just like a rock star, but like a savior. Even at the time I wondered if you would keep the promise.

It’s for each person to say what your promise meant, so here’s what it meant for me: An end to military adventurism in the Middle East and elsewhere, an end to the abuses of civil liberties and the constitutional damage done by the Bush administration, an end to the lock the Republican party has had on this society since 1980 and which the Bush administration screwed down tight. That is to say, an end to policies that favor the wealthy over the rest of us, that siphon our hard-earned money into the pockets of a few, that in an attempt to destroy government, destroy by neglect those dimensions of government that help ordinary people—education, infrastructure, public transportation, environmental regulation—and categorically refuse to implement policies, like universal health care, that would free us up from worry, expense, and fear. The morning after your election, I felt I could breathe for the first time in eight years. A weight had been lifted. I didn’t even know how hard it had been to make it through the last eight years until that moment. I was ready for change.

Since that time things have mostly gone downhill. The weight is back, and so is the anger. Yes, you make an excellent impression abroad. You make an excellent impression, period. It is indeed a relief to be represented by an intelligent, articulate, personable man, someone of whom I need not be ashamed. This year students in my public speaking classes invariably point to you as the epitome of a good speaker, whereas only a year ago they were still pointing to George W. Bush as the epitome of a bad one. Your appointments in the area of energy, environment, just about anything to do with science, have been strong.

But why did you appoint the architects of deregulation to run the economy? Why has your administration followed the Bush administration in taking care of the banks, famously too big to fail, while neglecting the rest of us, too small to succeed? I still pay taxes through the nose to support the lifestyles of people who enjoy massive tax breaks. Why? Why have you not repudiated the torture and interrogation policies of the Bush administration, the curtailment of civil liberties in the name of national security? Why did we get “sovereign immunity” rather than a return to constitutional order? Why haven’t you closed Guantanamo? Why have you sought to shut down even a Truth and Reconciliation commission to investigate the human rights abuses of the previous administration? Criminal prosecution is more in order. Why has that been left to a Spanish judge?

This is not a bipartisan, much less a post-partisan, world. We’re in the middle of a fight for the soul of this country. Maybe the last fight because if the far right wins, what's left for the rest of us, those who aren't millionaires? And when you and the congressional Democratic party, after some pious (you) or aggressive (Congress) posturing, once again back a "bipartisan" bill that gives the Republicans just about everything they want and sells the ordinary people of this country out, I wonder Wwy I should bother to vote for Democrats when I get Republicans anyway?

To let you know how radical that statement is, I should tell you that I first set foot in a polling place at the age of three, when I was taken along by my mother, a supporter of Adlai Stevenson. Voting has been part of my religion ever since, as has allegiance to the Democratic party. I’m not sure what is left of the Democratic party, if you’ll pardon the pun. In his World War II diaries, my father, then as later a supporter of Roosevelt and Truman, a union organizer when he taught high school, expressed his anger and concern at the menace posed by the “forces of reaction”. Reading those words, all I could think was that the forces of reaction have been busy since 1944, and they look like they’re winning.

I remember sitting in my kitchen in Oakland after Jimmy Carter conceded to Ronald Reagan. I left the lights off as it got dark, listening to KPFA radio broadcast uninterrupted rock music from the sixties. Whoever preempted the news with that music knew, as I knew, that it was the end, the end of a time that began with the civil rights movement of the 1950’s. It was the end of the time we of the sixties had marched for—against unnecessary, immoral war, for the rights of black people, women, gay people. I had hoped that you would try to breathe life into the vision that sustained a lot of us during that time, a vision of this country as a place of opportunity for all, and of government as an engine of equality, a vision that goes back to the New Deal, to the progressive movement, the labor movement, the abolitionist movement, and beyond. However imperfect the realization of that vision, it was there. It was, for me, growing up in a progressive household in the fifties and sixties, the American Dream.

What is the dream you offer us, President Obama? That dream or the other one, the one that’s all about getting rich? One dream brings us all along. The other leaves most of us behind. Which is it to be?