Uncle Sam’s here to help

This week, Obama held town hall meetings in states that have been hit particularly hard by the recession and loss of jobs. Tuesday he spoke with people in Florida, and the public’s belief in Obama was visible. They clamored for the microphone to ask questions and tell him about their personal struggles.

A passionate young man who said he had been working at McDonald’s for four years and going to community college, asked how the Obama administration could help him get more benefits at his job.

Henrietta Hughes tearfully asked the President for help to find a home. She and her son have been homeless, living in a pick-up truck for the past year. Moved with compassion, President Obama hugged the woman and told her that his staff would try to help her after the meeting ended.

By the end of Tuesday, Henrietta Hughes had been given a home.

While I was moved by several stories that emerged from the town hall meeting, I was mostly struck by people’s sincere belief that Obama can help them personally. These people believe that Obama can change things in their lives, that he can help them in their struggles.

This was not a crowd of rigid ideologues. They were more likely people who had no knowledge of political philosophy. Yet they affirmed a principle unique to the Democratic Party – namely, that government is here to help.

When life begins to spin out of people’s hands and even neighbors are under financial distress, who remains to help Henrietta Hughes or to ensure that the young college student has the job benefits he deserves?

Big corporations like McDonald’s and banks who offer people home loans do not exist as charitable organizations. They exist to make a profit. Period.

This is why people like Henrietta Hughes and her son – and thousands like them – can live homeless for a year with no hope of receiving a home from charity, churches, or non-profit organizations. People simply fall through the cracks, from lack of knowledge about available resources or simply lack of access.

Denying the government’s role in helping the poor – yes, using your tax dollars – is heartless and devoid of simple compassion. We pay taxes so that America can be what it was created to be: a more perfect union.

Did the writers of our Constitution, the signers of the Declaration of Independence or the militiamen of the Revolutionary War intend for America to be only a nation adept at warfare, resolute in isolationism or socially Darwinist in our capitalism? No.

I pay taxes because a percentage of that money goes toward making sure that a toddler can get a head start at school, a family can stay afloat while the father looks for another job and so that a person in a third-world country can get the anti-retroviral drugs they need to stay alive.

I would not be so haughty to deny a poor or middle class person a tax cut when they will spend it on food and shoes, while for the past eight years rich people have received tax cuts and apparently stuffed the money in an offshore account in the Cayman Islands – because they sure haven’t been spending to help our economy.

In the past three weeks there have been many changes in the way our government is run. At the town hall meetings that Obama is holding to gain support for his stimulus plan, no one is screened before they are let in to the building.

Only weeks ago, because my loyalties lay pretty close to the left border of the political arena, I would not even be considered as a guest at a town hall meeting with President Bush, let alone be given access to a microphone to rake him over the coals.

I cannot recall a more coherent Presidential press conference than the one we witnessed last Monday. Ample time was given to those questions that deserved an answer – and the press conference ran longer than expected!

So, Colin McKim, is Obama the next FDR? Absolutely! Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal kept people from starving in America at a time when many people were jobless, hopeless and helpless.

FDR was also a three term president. He must have done some things that people liked. And he marked a renewal in people’s belief in the idea that this is a government “of the people, by the people, for the people” as Abraham Lincoln once said. People believed that FDR could help their situation – that he could bring real change to America. And he did bring change through the New Deal.

Tuesday, the same day the president’s stimulus package passed the Senate, Floridians like Henrietta Hughes showed the rest of the United States that they believe Obama will too. And that gives me reason to be optimistic about the future with President Obama at the helm.

Stephanie England is an English junior and a Mustang Daily political columnist.