The Failed Obama Experiment

It is alarming that Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, who voted for Obama, are saying “the Obama experiment failed”. I agree that the Obama presidency has been a failure, but what bothers me is the word “experiment”. An experiment is when something is tried to see how it turns out. These types of trial and error approaches to solving problems are common in the world of science, but there are many reasons why experimenting with the government is just a bad idea.

First, an experiment is used when scientist are unsure of an outcome. It is fairly disturbing to know that millions of Americans were willing to take a chance on a presidential candidate when they were unsure of how it will turn out. This is especially true when the electorate had the opportunity to choose a well branded moderate politician in John McCain.

Secondly, the purpose of any scientific experiment should be well defined and understood. On the other hand, the purpose of the Obama experiment is sketchy at best. What was the electorate trying to prove by voting for Obama? Did Americans want to see if an African-American could do the job? Or was the experiment to see if an unqualified person can do the job? What exactly was the purpose of the experiment because there are more qualified minorities to run our country? That is the question, because I see no purpose for the Obama experiment.

Thirdly, most scientific experiments usually take seconds, minutes, hours or days. Sure, there are experiments that can take years (such as drug studies), but a high percentage of experiments take much less time than 4 years. By experimenting with Barack Obama as President, the American people are stuck with that bad decision for four years! That is a long experiment!

Fourth, and probably most importantly, in scientific experiments scientists learn from the mistakes of experiments and adjust further experiments accordingly. In the case of the Obama experiment, it is true the electorate can change course and vote him out of office. However, the problem is that many misguided and erroneous policies and decisions made by Obama cannot be undone and corrected. Think about, we are stuck with Obama Supreme Court appointees – Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan – for their lifetimes. It is also possible we will be stuck with abysmal healthcare legislation forever since it will take a Republican President and a supermajority in the Senate to repeal it. In this respect the Presidential position is not an experiment because presidential elections have permanent consequences. Sure, many Obama mistakes, especially executive orders, such as closing Guantanamo can be corrected, but the damage of other erroneous policies cannot be undone. For instance, the 862 billion dollar stimulus (Recovery Act) cannot be undone, the damage is permanent. Not only did the Recovery Act fail to create jobs, it added nearly a billion dollars of debt that taxpayers will eventually have to pay back.

In some respects the Obama Presidency can be treated like an experiment because we learned a lot. Experiments are useless if something is not learned from them. Americans certainly learned not to trust a politician with a silver tongue. Americans learned that big government and social policies are not the answer to recessions or to governing people in general. Americans also learned giving an experimental president super majorities in congress leads to a rubber stamp. And a rubber stamp leads to a plethora of bipartisan and therefore; unpopular legislation.