Taking an Holistic Approach

Come with me to a date not so far in our future – January 1, 2012. President Obama has completed three years of his first term and is now entering an election year.

If his policies have failed, we know very well what Republicans will say, incredulously, “On top of everything else Obama has done wrong, he tripled the national debt!” And if the economy is doing well and moving along briskly, we also know they will say, with great lamentations, “But he tripled the national debt!”

OK, now that we know, in essence, their criticism will not change, indeed, will be the same as it is today, why pay any attention to them today or listen for ideas we know will not be forthcoming.

President Obama has as full a plate as any President has been presented since President Washington – and just as many unknowns. How and when will we capture bin Laden and his lieutenants, the real perpetrators of 9/11; how and when will General Motors become a solvent manufacturer of automobiles again; how and when will health care reform be initiated; how and when will credibility be restored to the American banking system; how and when will proper oversight be restored to investment markets; how and when will America begin to make serious strides toward true energy independence?

And those are just the questions I can think of this morning. No telling how many more he has on his mind, starting with our porous Southern border, and the possibility of terrorists getting their hands on a “dirty bomb.”

We hear the voices of critics who believe our President is “taking on too much.” In my view, he has no choice. We have lost 8 full years in searching for the perpetrators of 9/11; we went to sleep while Wall Street fiddled; we complained but kept paying the bills while health costs soared out of control; we insisted on driving those road hogs GM was selling even though we knew a day of reckoning was just one oil embargo or Middle East conflict away. How foolish can a people be?

Now some of us complain because we have a President who is taking a holistic approach, attempting to solve a broad range of urgent problems virtually simultaneously. Wouldn’t it be a better use of our energy to help him?

I’m one of those who believes he may be successful in jump starting our national push toward energy independence. His ideas for controlling energy use, putting limits on emissions, stimulating renewable energy technologies, increasing grid reliability by making the grid “smarter” as well as more efficient are all part of his vision for using technology to bring change across the entire spectrum of energy use – from generation, transmission, distribution, to consumption. Microsoft and Google are already partnering with energy companies around the globe and here at home to bring some of these ideas to fruition.

I don’t know where we will be as a nation on January 1, 2012, but I do know we have a President who may exhaust us by then with his energy, his initiative, his ideas, his proposed solutions – and together we may emerge on election day, November 6, 2012, a much stronger nation, having reclaimed our role as world leader of free people and unfettered opportunity.