1,000 Days
The Obama Legacy
Obama himself is the divisive and polarizing element in America.
It is Obama’s skin color—and that alone—that has America buying
guns instead of butter, scattering us into clans of polarized
self-interest. How Obama, who is
every bit as white as the
whitest, most middle-American blue-collar Everyman, could not
know this—that his ascension to the presidency would divide
the nation—seems nonsensical. That the president did not or could not
understand his political opponents would work their mojo around
something as wholly insignificant to his function as the color of his skin,
and in so doing lay the foundation for
irrational and improvable claims about his performance, marks him
as either hopelessly naïve or a man with an enormous and
dangerous blind spot about the nature of American politics.
Further, the political fragmentation of America based on the
president’s skin color has created the very atmosphere that has
given rise to the political extremism that now threatens the
very foundation of the country. If we never believed it before,
we certainly believe it now: blacks are not thought of as true
Americans. By ostracizing Obama, white conservatives (whom most
of Black America do not or cannot distinguish from all of White
America) reject our legitimacy as joint heirs of this America.
Every epitaph hurled at Obama is received and internalized by
every black man, woman or child. It is incredibly divisive and
will have lasting and deprecating repercussions to American
society. It is possible the Tea Party crowd are simply too
stupid to process anything beyond their immediate actions, but
Republicans are chess masters who game out how this affects that
affects the other thing. It is simply not possible mainstream
Republicans do not understand their political strategy is
undermining the very fabric of America. We are left, therefore,
to conclude these men and women are, in fact, evil and are
demonstrably racist. This conclusion hardens the hearts of Black America
and builds deep and lasting divisions Obama's election was meant
to remove.
In pursuing the presidency, Barack Obama had to know he was making his bed in a burning house. The economic numbers were all there, and the obvious political theory—divide and conquer—was evident. What was also evident was how damaging those divisive political tactics would be during a time of national crisis. Tanks and plane dropping bombs on cities are easier for people to understand and set aside petty differences to confront than are economic theory. Economic theory is largely conceptual. Most people need to be spoon-fed everything; complex ideas boiled down to ten words written in HUGE type on colorful billboards, preferably with an eye-catching picture, like the cover of Time Magazine. It’s not that the American people are stupid so much as the American people have grown so used to having information fed to them in these little Alpha Bits spoonfuls that, by and large, we believe whatever we’re told. Which logically depends on who is telling it. Which completely depends on who is most efficient at getting their message out. Which largely depends on who knows how to pander most effectively not to our intellect but our emotion. Hope, the president’s mantra, relies intrinsically upon faith. Faith is not valued in America because it relies on things unseen [Hebrews 11:1]. Fear, on the other hand, exists solely within the realm of things seen or imagined.
Thus, fear is much easier to access than hope (the premise
of
the summer flameout Green Lantern). Obama likely knows and
understand this, which made his first twenty months in office
exasperating and inexplicable. Obama was carried into office on
the shoulders of every American who’d pulled their hair in
frustration at the eight years this country was run by a
six-year old child. A man so disengaged in the science of
governing that he took us into two wars and crashed the American
economy. But the adoring crowds of Obama worshippers have
thinned due to the president’s squandering of a congressional
“super” majority that would and should have allowed the
president to effect his reforms—reforms the nation voted for in
huge numbers—quickly and efficiently. Instead, he wasted month
after agonizing month in deal-making with the very people who
created this mess; people who now held absolutely no power and
no sway. People who would have run Obama over in the street had
they held the kind of majority Obama held in Washington. Obama
had a clear mandate: fix the country, but the
president kept making these people lemonade and wasting precious
time while they continued to fund openly racist, hate-mongering
campaigns against the president, running out the cock to then
midterms. The Republicans have made a science out of investing
in ignorance, in hate and fear. They are masters of distilling
incredibly complex ideas and situations down to ten words for
the Jethro crowd. And, even as Obama wasted month after month
baking cookies for these people, chasing even a single
Republican vote, the GOP never once negotiated in good faith.
Their agenda was obvious and simple: run out the clock and
create the atmosphere of hate and fear which would get
extremists voted in during the midterms.
What most of us wanted, from day one, was Green Lantern, whose
ring is powered by his will power (a secularization of the
concept of faith). Obama’s power is hope. The Republican power
is hate and fear: hate and fear are literally all they have to
sell. Obama should have resigned himself to being a one-term
president. He should have come in and cleaned house, passing the
same legislation he ultimately passed, but passing it intact and
effective, not the half-a-loaf gang-raped anemic versions
enacted into law as a result of the president’s wasted months
appeasing people wholly unconcerned about the health of the
nation. These people want power. They want negroes back in their
ghettos and whites fully employed and back to suburbia. They
want the world to be right again—white again—for them. Their
ideology is so warped and so dug-in to postwar White Americana
that they are simply incapable of accepting the fact America has
moved on, that the nation has evolved. Barack Obama’s mere
existence as U.S. president is obvious proof of that fact.
Under the emergency powers presumed to the 14th Amendment,
the
president could have raised the U.S. debt ceiling on his own, but
that would most certainly have invited an impeachment trial in
the House. Why? Because they can. They know they’d lose, but the
U.S. House of Representatives is now the joke of the free world,
a pace of crackpots and whiny, selfish children. Children who
are too stupid to know their house is on fire. If the president
had gone that route, the House would have paralyzed the nation
over the remainder of the president’s first term with an
impeachment trial. They wouldn’t have the votes to impeach—they
know that—but they’d do it anyway just to score cheap political
points. Nothing else would get done, period, for the next year
and some while this squabbling took place, while these morons
got themselves fitted for their new foam rubber Statue of
Liberty hats and Benjamin Franklin costumes. And
the U.S. economy would most certainly collapse.
This is the fallout from the
Fox News propaganda machine, from
pandering to and ginning up these fruitcakes: they send lunatics
to Washington. Lunatics who are willing to do what the president
is not: consider themselves single-term politicians. With that
disposition these people lack political vulnerability. They can be lethally effective
as political Kamikaze.
Had the president himself arrived with that resolve, the country
and the world would not be in this position and, ironically, the
president's reelection chances would look a lot rosier. But this is the
dilemma our president finds himself in: perhaps the lone sane
person in Washington, left to the mercy of idiots in foam rubber
Statue of Liberty costumes. Idiots who
care about absolutely, positively nothing else but the
president’s defeat in 2012. And they’re more than willing to
destroy the nation in their reckless and selfish effort to
accomplish that goal.
Faulting the Republicans
for being more invested in the 1952 America that dominates the
movie playing in their head is more or less a waste of time. I
do fault them for not having learned anything at all from
history, from President Hoover insisting on the very same
economic theory the conservatives are strangling the president
with, enacting fiscal austerity at a time of national (and
global) economic crisis. But, at the end of the day, as much as
I despise what these people do and how they do it, I have no
choice but to lay the blame at the feet of the president.
He knew this was coming. He knew who these people were and how
they did business. And rather than just mow them over and invest
himself in the security and health of the nation, the president
squandered his enormous, unprecedented popularity and political
clout, something the nation had not seen since Ronald Reagan, by
trying to appease people whose only agenda is to get rid of him.
History will put all of that in better perspective, likely
remembering Obama as a man who held greatness in his hand and squandered
it by not simply mowing these guys down. Most of what the
president hoped to achieve for this country was conceptual, the
evidence and ultimate effectiveness of which would not be seen
or felt until he was out of office. In that view, getting those
things done should have been more important than seeking a
second term. I don’t think the president’s poorly-chosen
repeated kumbya initiatives to the Republicans was
politically motivated, but I do believe this is the president’s
chief failure: to lead.
I remember being annoyed at Muhammad Ali’s latter-day bouts,
where the champ, the Greatest, would lumber around the ring,
covering up, letting fighters half his stature just pound on him
in frustration. In his glory days, Ali called this strategy his
Rope-A-Dope, but in his latter days it came across more
obviously as a winded Ali just kind of phoning it in. In trying
to stay out of the corner, Obama ends up moving around the ring
in a very unsatisfying political lumber. He caves or rolls over
on everything the GOP opposes him on (which is everything),
making him seem politically exhausted and weak. Clinton took his
punches in the ring, but also managed to leave us a nation at
peace with a two-hundred billion dollar annual surplus that was
paying down the national debt. Under Bush, the debt exploded,
and under Obama, the debt is doubling down on itself. The
Republicans want to make that about Obama, but it’s still Bush:
the debt is now a beast that feeds upon itself. But the Obama
administration is so patently inept at reducing the president’s
intellectualism into ten-word messages that stick, that
all America hears from the Democrats is rambling technobabble,
while the GOP have crafted a simple, elegant lie: Obama Has
Failed.
And, he has. He should have gotten things done, gotten whupped
in 2012, and left office daring the next president to un-do the
monumental and historic change his administration had enacted.
Ironically, had the president set that course, it is likely that
would have virtually guaranteed his reelection. The president is
mired instead in the muck of his own political ineptness or
political naïveté. Independents (i.e. white males) are deserting
him in droves, not because he’s a bad guy and certainly not
because he’s black, but because he keeps giving in to these
people. He has so politically wounded himself that he is not
feared, not respected and not taken seriously. And, frankly, the
only reasons many Democrats and Independents are still on the
Obama bandwagon is the looming specter of a President Romney or,
worse, a President Bachmann.
In terms of accomplishment,
Barack Obama is many laps around the track ahead of John
Kennedy. John Kennedy has been canonized if not beatified
because of the tragic circumstances surrounding the end of his
administration. It is quite possible if not likely that, were it
not for those circumstances, Kennedy’s immeasurable popularity
among progressives and youth might not have overcome an
objective review of his first term in office (which includes
well-documented immoral personal behavior), and history might
have remembered him as a man who inspired a nation with the best
of intentions but who ultimately accomplished relatively little.
By
contrast, Barack Obama is a man who also inspired a nation but
who accomplished a staggering amount of good which was
irrationally and repeatedly evil-spoken of. The one and only
reason Barack Obama is not thought of as a great president, as a
Ronald Reagan, is the color of his skin. A white president with
a more “American” name, who’d accomplished even one-third of
what this president has, would be in line for political
sainthood. Ironically, Obama is a white president, we just
refuse to acknowledge it. His upbringing, his cultural
indoctrination, his worldview, were all shaped by traditional
middle-American Kansas values, raised by his white mother and
grandparents. The Republican mission is to make us forget that,
to paint the president as illegitimate, as a fraud, as “the
other.” The main reason they’ve been so effective at doing that
is the administration’s terrible, amateur-night communications.
In a thousand days, they’ve never made much of an effort to
paint the president as mainstream, as having been raised with
mainstream values and mainstream views. They have done little or
nothing to answer the endless barrage of hate and lies being spewed by the
right, when, the truth is, the only real difference between
Barack Obama and Joe Lunchbucket is the literal color of his
skin. In every other conceivable sense, Barack Obama is just as
white as any other U.S. president, which makes the hatred hurled
at him that much more irrational and that much harder to defend
as not being racism. It is, in fact, the purest racism there is:
hatred based entirely and singly on skin color, as the
president’s cultural disposition and experience is absolutely no
different from the “real” Americans who despise him. Ronald
Reagan was not a great president. He was an inept neophyte
bumbler who wrecked the U.S. economy and did virtually nothing
for America’s social struggles beyond creating an air of
Pollyannaish 1950’s myth, whites across the country basking in
the glow of their A.M. radios. Barack Obama is measurably, pound or pound, a much
better president than Reagan and a much more efficient president
than Kennedy, but is demonized.
We gave the president a clear mandate, a simple agenda: go clean
up the mess. Instead, he became a part of it. We can blame Bush
for the nation’s horrific decline, but, in a sense, the
Republicans are right: it’s Obama’s fault. Mainly for having
wasted time trying to deal with them. For negotiating away all
the teeth of vital legislation. For rolling over and caving on
every important relief to the nation’s historic woes. For not
having put the country first. And that is likely what the
history books will write.
Christopher J. Priest
7 August 2011
editor@praisenet.org
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