I am sick to death of the Obama administration praised as some kind of Golden Age akin to JFK’s Camelot or a second coming of FDR’s New Deal.
As to the man himself, the truth is Mr. Obama could’ve been a great president. Instead what we got was basically an Eisenhower redux.
Like Ike (pun intended — if you’re old enough you get it), he wasn’t a bad president, but neither was he a great one. So why all the adulation? Oh, right he’s compared to who came after. Well in that case Warren G. Harding was great. Maybe he was no Franklin Pierce, but head and shoulders above Mr. Trump.
Following is a piece I wrote back in 2012 just before the election lamenting my having to vote for President Obama a second time.
Background: Unhappy in the extreme with George Bush 2’s presidency, I was far from overjoyed with President Obama. He bailed out banks and companies too big to fail instead of bailing out the country’s infrastructure and putting people back to work. We expected FDR, we got Ike. Like Ike, he was a good man, a decent man, but hardly the visionary I expected and now we were asked to vote for him a second time.
If your sensibilities are easily offended, you’ve come to the right place. I enjoy easy targets. If you want out, you’ve been warned.
Okay, while I’m not certain, because he’s been given credit for a lot of other stuff a lot of other people said like “the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco,” I think it was Mark Twain who wrote the story about a poor white southerner who bragged he was descended from royalty. From the look and manner of the man, most thought his claim was a royal overstatement.
However, it turned out to be true. He was descended from royalty — an African chief. Not exactly the kind of nobility a white in the nineteenth-century Deep South could relate to — or be related to.
Anyway, I thought about that story after doing a bit of research that showed I am a Negro.
Before African Americans were African Americans or black Americans, they were Negroes or colored people; not to be confused with people of color. And from the time Negroes got the vote after the Civil War, they voted Republican. Lincoln was a Republican. Lincoln freed the slaves. Who would you vote for?
They voted that way till President Herbert Hoover (the guy who had the dam named after him) ran for a second term kicking off the Great Depression.
Hoovervilles — shantytowns for formerly middle class, now homeless Americans — were also named after him in honor of his contribution to poverty. Today, however, Hoover is best known for inventing the vacuum cleaner.
Anyway, according to FactCheck.org, a nonpartisan, nonprofit project of the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, an organization that monitors political factual accuracy, it was to defeat Hoover that Negroes started voting solidly for Democrats. That was in 1932.
And, Negroes continued voting Democratic for the next three decades. But aside from school desegregation — which was ordered by the Supreme Court, not the Democratic Party — what did Democrats do for Negroes for the thirty years from 1932 to the first major legislation benefiting African Americans, the Civil Rights Act of 1964?
Not much.
So why was the Democratic Party able to count on the Negro vote? Well, who the hell else were they going to vote for?
Last election I voted for President Obama because he made a number of promises that resonated with me. Of that list, what has he done for me?
He sent Osama Bin Laden for a dirt nap in the Arabian Sea. And there’s healthcare. Okay, it wasn’t universal, single-payer and there are enough loopholes for insurance and drug companies to make you sick. But it passed.
And there’s also…. That’s about it.
On the other hand, Mr. Obama, who has the charisma of John Kennedy and the rhetorical flourish of Winston Churchill, let extreme conservatives who can barely manage more than monosyllables (with tutoring) set the nation’s agenda. So, instead of fixing infrastructure to create jobs, talk is of balanced budgets and tax cuts and killing entitlements people are entitled to. Oil companies drive drivers dotty, driving prices up when there’s an abundance of oil and driving them up when there’s a scarcity. Wars continue and nobody can quite say what the point is now that Bin Laden’s been blasted. People, who got bailed out of debt instead of jail, are still running the financial institutions that are running roughshod.
