Let's talk

Pick a seat and talk to me, but not just any seat. Pick the seat of your political persuasion, left or right, then, let’s talk.

The way I see it, we have a two party system and a one party, one term (by his own claim), left wing President. He is at the beck and call of the House minority leader and the Senate majority leader, both of his own party not all of whom support him either.

He made a lot of promises during his first presidential campaign, including openness, total transparency, and changing the way Washington works, along with fixing all the major mistakes of the Administration before him. Now well into his next presidential campaign, we are hearing the same stuff but a little more centrist in order to coddle the independent voters, who ultimately control which way the majority swings.

To be fair, I’m not sure what would have happened if John McCain had won the last election. As a Republican, he would have had to satisfy a Democratic majority in Congress before anything could get done, but then so did President Obama. The left would have been openly critical of anything McCain wanted to do just as the right was openly critical of anything President Obama proposed.

In 2009 a group called the Tea Party Patriots began protesting big government and an ineffective Congress. The grass roots movement was originally split evenly among Democrats and Republicans and now represents the ideals of the right including reduction of big government, less regulation, and more free enterprise.

Most recently we have seen the beginning of the Occupy Wall Street movement, another grass roots protest effort, but this time from the left. Essentially, this group is opposed to big business, wants the rich to pay more taxes, and favors more government control and subsidies to close the gap between rich and poor. It has quickly gone from a grass roots organization to one that the Democrats are claiming ownership.

So pick a chair and talk to me. We have a dysfunctional Congress, an ineffective President, two political parties that are so wrapped up in their own ideologies that they have forgotten the interests of their constituents, and two well organized grass roots movements that are diametrically opposed to each other. Where do we go from here?

Oh, before you sit down, think about which chair you’re choosing. If you pick the chair on the left, who is right? If you pick the one on the right, who is left?