The following was posted on Dec. 4, 2009. Copyright © 2009 by Mary Meehan.

Obama So Far

Mary Meehan

Nice guy. Friendly, unflappable, has a good sense of humor. You'd love to have him as a next-door neighbor. You could shoot hoops with him, shoot the breeze, or have a deep intellectual conversation.

But as President of the United States--another case entirely.

Many of President Barack Obama's shortcomings are not unique to him. He's the latest of a series of photo-op presidents who have spent too much time running around the country--and the world--for great pictures. Presidential campaigns never end these days; they just change venue to the White House and keep on truckin'. But if recent presidents had spent more time at their White House desk, really dealing with our country's huge problems, we might not be teetering on the edge of so many disasters today.

Every president, though, faces a federal government so huge that it's impossible for one person to run the whole thing, no matter how many staff and cabinet members are there to assist. Instead of cutting the government down to size, recent presidents have added more and more programs--and more wars. Running up unbelievable debts, they have put our country on a jet plane to bankruptcy. Obama's vast overreach--in bailouts, war escalation, cap-and-trade, health care--threatens to transform the jet into a rocket. His plans bewilder and frighten a country that still reels from economic disaster.

Yet Obama's largest mistake is his failure to defend the first right asserted by our Declaration of Independence: the right to life itself. Anyone who paid serious attention to last year's campaign knew he supported escalation of the war in Afghanistan as well as unrestrained abortion--and was, at best, a question mark on end-of-life issues. Soon after his inauguration, he sent more U.S. troops to Afghanistan. Now, in early December of 2009, he has announced that he'll send 30,000 more troops to that poor country, whose people deeply want to be free of our occupation, bombs, and bullets.

In our own country, people with disabilities--including many seniors--are threatened by the rationing of medical services that Obamacare would put in place. Obama's NIH Director has just opened the floodgates for research that's based on destruction of human embryos. And despite the President's claim that his health-care reform will not involve abortion funding, key congressional Democrats keep trying to slip it in. It's hard to find the audacity of hope in all of this.

Obama's failings on life issues reflect the philosophical corruption of the Democratic Party in recent decades. A party that once defended the little people of our country has turned vehemently against the smallest people of all--unborn children. A party that generally has supported disability rights is deeply ambivalent about those rights at the beginning and end of life. (Perhaps many of its members and leaders believe, but are afraid to say out loud, that it's better to be dead than disabled.) And a party that once had courageous antiwar leaders now worries about being perceived as less militaristic than the Republican Party.

It's hard to summon optimism about the next three years of Obama's presidency. For all the talk about his "pragmatism," his advisers include ideologues and hard-bitten veterans of the Chicago political machine. They are unlikely to suggest different views or admission of mistakes.

Yet the President can make an effort to reach out beyond the staff he sees every day, the think-tank experts, and the powers-that-be in the Democratic Party. On foreign and military policy, for example, he could sit down for long talks with Prof. Andrew Bacevich, antiwar activist Cindy Sheehan, Sen. Bernard Sanders(Ind-Vt.), Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.), Rep. Walter Jones (R-N.C.), Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), and scholar Chalmers Johnson. These people, of diverse backgrounds and political philosophy, would give him a very different view of what our foreign policy should be. (Oh, would they ever!)

On abortion, he should sit down with Serrin Foster of Feminists for Life, Kristin Day of Democrats for Life, Rep. Bart Stupak (D-Mich.), Day Gardner of the National Black Pro-Life Union, civil libertarian Nat Hentoff, and Rep. Christopher Smith (R-N.J.) The President has suggested reducing the numbers of abortions; these people can tell him how to do it.

On end-of-life issues, he should speak with Hentoff, attorneys Rita Marker and Wesley Smith of the International Task Force on Euthanasia and Assisted Suicide, attorney Diane Coleman of Not Dead Yet, and Ron Panzer of the Hospice Patients Alliance. He should also talk with Dr. William Thomas, founder of the Eden Alternative that transforms nursing homes into real homes and of the "Green House" alternative for nursing care.

All of these people could give the President eye-opening information that he's unlikely to hear from his own staff and cabinet. He could ask them very tough questions, and he would learn a great deal from their answers. He might begin to see ways in which Democrats can climb out of the deep holes they dug themselves into years ago. And how our entire country can do the same.

President Obama should follow the example of his first predecessor, George Washington. John Adams, Washington's vice president, put it this way: "He seeks information from all quarters and judges more independently than any man I ever saw."