PraiseNet.Org: Obama 2.0: What's Next?

Obama 2.0

What's Next?

What They Want: Radio

It is difficult to comprehend that, before Barack Obama, the U.S. president was still using radio—radio—as his primary if not singular avenue for addressing the American public. That was only four years ago, though it seems laughably improbable now. This is what McConnell and Graham represent—radio. It’s what they insist this country turn back to. Its why they spend every waking hour trying not to govern or to help anyone, but live only to find ways to damage Barack Obama’s presidency and slow his progress. Their contempt for the very American public on whose behalf they claim to be working keeps them railing against the president’s plan—no matter what that plan is and even if the president’s plan was, in fact, their plan that he said “yes” to. They keep faulting his approach, whatever that happens to be, to fixing problems *they* created. The Great Recession? Caused by Republicans. Starting two wars while cutting tax rates? Republicans did that. Reckless deregulation of banks and Wall Street? Republicans did that. Turning a $200 billion surplus into a $11 trillion deficit? Republicans did that. Bringing the world economy to the brink of collapse? That was Republicans politicizing a routine raising of the debt ceiling. The Fiscal Cliff? Republicans created and insisted upon that idea.

I single out McConnell because his is the face of a dying America, the America of Ozzie and Harriett. He and his buddies like Lindsey Graham and, yes, a bitterly sore loser John McCain, represent an America that no longer exists. They are Old Rich White Men, desperately out of touch with a nation whose values they purport to defend. Their way of life, their view of America and its global role, are corrupted by their simple inability to embrace change. Their way of life is dead and gone, but they are insistently clinging to it, threatened with extinction by the values the mixed-race, slow-jamming-the-news, Tweeting Facebook presidency of Barack Obama represents.

These people are so out of touch with reality, they failed to realize how badly an anti-Obama ad, lambasting the president for his hipness, backfired on them. The negative ad actually reminded young Americans of how cool Obama is, thus restoring much of the president’s celebrity status, diminished over time by the rigors of actual governing. It was an insanely stupid commercial whose negative, anti-Obama attributes were drowned out by the kaleidoscope of slick images and hip-hop drum beat. The ad was so wrongheaded, it underscored how incredibly lost in space the GOP is.

Lost In Space: A GOP attack ad that reminded us all of how cool Obama is.

The Gentleman From Illinois

One of many profound lessons learned from Steven Spielberg’s amazing biopic, Lincoln, was a genuine sense of shock at the alarming level of disrespect shown our 16th president by friends and foes alike. If Mr. Spielberg’s record is accurate, Lincoln was not necessarily well liked. He was, in fact, openly mocked even by his friends who grew weary of the president’s over-long contemplations of issues, his unflappability and easy-going style. Lincoln, the film, clearly and unapologetically evokes Obama, the two Illinoisan presidents separated only in scale and historical perspective. Both men faced the dissolution of this nation, Lincoln in more literal terms and in unimaginable numbers of American lives lost. I, like most African Americans, remain deeply wounded and angry at the sheer weight of racist hatred—in this enlightened, modern age—hurled daily at our 44th president. Lincoln helps put some of that into perspective. Like Obama, Lincoln never seemed to mediate, even for a moment, on his critics—most of whom were irrational, raving, histrionic extremists similar to those who have taken over Lincoln’s political party today. The dynamics of opposition and extremist forces which fostered the ignorant Southern mindset that provoked men like John Wilkes Booth to violence are exactly the same dynamics and threat our president deals with daily. Like many African Americans, there has not been a single day, since or president’s first inauguration, that I have not harbored some moderate anxiety over his and his family’s safety. The election of Barack Hussein Obama has uncovered a deep vein of irrational racism, given a political face in the ribald obstructionism and obvious racism of U.S. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, that has both empowered and encouraged sinister forces behind the scenes; lunatics threatening cessation because their guy lost the election.

The Old Rich White Men McConnell and Graham, still emotionally grafted to the 1960’s, are a far greater threat to America than Barack Obama dancing with the lesbian lesbian lesbian that’s why the included that clip Ellen Degeneres. America should not, must not, be led by men and women who refuse to embrace reality and deal with reality in a sane way. The struggle seems to be between people who see the world as it is and people who want to force the plant—not just America but the whole world—back to their fond memories of it. A smaller, leaner government that keeps its hands off your guns while regulating who sleeps in your bed.

These old white people are resentful of MTV and frightened by whatever ‘Facebook” is, and by irrational extremists who hate spics and Jews and niggers. These are the only demographics falling for the GOP’s tired rhetoric of Blame Obama For Everything. The economic crisis this nation faces was caused and prolonged by Republicans who treat the American people like they’re too stupid to know that. Republican fingerprints are on every piece of destructive legislation that caused this crisis and every single obstructionist tactic to block the president’s efforts to resolve it, and the American people know it.

The most frustrating part of the encouraging new generation of political activists is the self-induced coma they go back into after they vote for the president. Young people, even college educated young people, have virtually no understanding of how vital a role they play in Congressional midterms. The current gridlock in Washington, about which we all complain, was caused not by Republicans but by young people not showing up to the polls in 2010. There was no president to elect in 2010, and young people, too busy partying and fornicating, couldn’t be bothered to read all that clutter about their senator or congressman. Who did show up in 2010? The nuts. The frightened old people who keep dinosaurs like McConnell and Graham in power. The foam rubber hat extremists. And they sent the 112th U.S. Congress—the least productive Congress in the history of the United States—to Washington with a mandate to oppose any and every initiative the president offered. These men and women came to work with only one job in mind: stop Obama. This is what happens when you stay at home.

We are likely on course for a repeat of this phenomena in 2014 because the evil, yes evil, men and women voted in by the racists and the scared old folk have quietly changed Congressional districting to benefit themselves politically, making it harder for these old fogies to be retired from Congress. They’ve worked Congressional district maps in such a way as to compensate for the overwhelming number of under-40 voters who are least likely to show up in 2014 and to weigh heavily on the retirees and nut jobs who most certainly will. Young people will stay home smoking dope and playing video games while grampa and Cousin Earl with the swastika on his arm fire up the El Camino with the confederate flag license plate holder and head off to the polls to reelect the dinosaurs. Then the Michele Bachmann lunatic fringe crowd will immediately sponsor legislation to abolish Obamacare rather than do anything actually productive or act in a bipartisan way.

Never As Good As The First Time: Please assure us you've learned from first-term mistakes.

A Second Chance At Legacy

That is, perhaps, the biggest drawback of our grand experiment in democracy, this electing of the first African American president. We didn’t anticipate how much irrational racism actually still existed in this country. I remain, to this day, shocked and deeply saddened by the blatant displays of obvious racism, by how racism polarizes this nation to the point of obvious racists like McConnell hating the president so personally that he actively works against the best interests of the nation in his ongoing futile effort to harm Barack Obama’s presidency. Senator McConnell would likely be deeply offended by such an accusation, but this is the rational conclusion of any reasonably objective observer. The problem with racism, however, is that it is so tribal, so deeply grafted to our DNA, that most of us simply fail to acknowledge it exists within all of us. The only people deny racism are racists. McConnell lacks the emotional distance to see his main motivator in his childish war with the president, which is harming the American people by his abject failure to compromise, is fueled by an illogical personal hatred of the man; an illogic which can have only one rational foundation. The country has been harmed, perhaps irrevocably, by the failure of Old Rich White Men to even consider the possibility they are acting irrationally out of old, decrepit tribalism: race hatred and the obliviousness that attends the generational divide between themselves and that of relatively young people like Barack and Michelle Obama.

How the president overcomes these obstacles will define his legacy. The president appears to be now taking a firm stance on his positions and refusing to play rope-a-dope with the GOP. He has, perhaps and finally, learned the lessons of his first term, where Congressional Republicans would routinely pretend to engage and pretend to negotiate while running out the clock on the narrow window through which a president has a chance to govern. Those were painful and expensive lessons both for the president and the nation. I am saddened that some of the president’s hopeful (bordering on naïve) exuberance has obviously been eroded—he no longer talks about changing the way things work in Washington so much as accepting what they are. I am hopeful that, through his narrow second-term window, before he becomes a lame duck in 2014 when Hillary Clinton, Andrew Cuomo, Chris Christie and, likely, Joe Biden are sure to announce their candidacy, Obama will take off the gloves with the McConnell-McCain-Graham crowd and get something done. Some of Obama’s positioning is just rhetorical bluster, of course, as these Old Rich White Men remain in power and, incredulously, continue to say “no” to the president no matter what the White House proposes. But, on some level, my optimism is heightened by the notion of the president’s silent admission of terrible first-term errors in his handling of Congress—suggested by the genuine relief shown on the president’s face upon first learning of his reelection victory. Having learned from those mistakes, I am hopeful that the president, grateful for a second at-bat, will operate with a leaner, better-focused and more dynamic strategy for progress.

My looming fear, at the moment, is that the Republicans will again play politics with the routine raising of America’s debt limit and that, this time, the president will call their bluff and simply raise it without Congressional approval. This will provide Mitch and his Old Rich White Man what they want most: grounds for futile Bill Clinton-style impeachment hearings which will fail in the Senate but will serve polarize the nation, tank the global economy and grind all progress in Washington to a halt. I have no doubt impeachment is a fat prize for these Republicans, so obsessed with personal hatred for this president that destroying him politically is all they live for. These men serve themselves, not their constituents, not the American people. The president, ruling out this course of action so far, seems to have read that play—the Republican haters sticking their chin out. However, Obama seems more than willing to take them on, which is a hopeful change from his previous posture of strategic disengagement. Perhaps the lesson has finally been learned: the president cannot count on Congress to make and pass laws, which is what these people have been elected to do. They, instead, behave like children. A law scholar, this president seems to have sadly concluded that he must treat Congress like children. He cannot expect them to be adults working in the best interest of the American people, and he must, finally, accept the reality that it is he himself and the blackness of his skin which are the true origins of this unprecedented Washington gridlock. To that end, the president cannot rely upon our nation’s lawmakers to come together and make laws, but must instead lead them by the hand and swat them on the snout with a rolled-up newspaper as occasion demands. I only hope Obama 2.0 moves beyond posturing and instead mounts a credible offensive against the network of out of touch millionaires who have been a blood clot in the circulatory system of U.S. government for far too long.

Radio. That’s what they want.

Christopher J. Priest
20 November 2012
editor@praisenet.org
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