I wonder
how many people who comment on what President Obama said in any particular
speech actually heard him speak. It’s far easier to read the media and form an
opinion, but often there’s very little difference between an article that’s
supposed to be journalism and the op-ed pages that are openly personal
opinion.
Not long ago he said he made two promises at his inauguration: that he wasn’t a perfect
man and wouldn’t be a perfect president; and that he would work unflinchingly
towards giving the middle class better opportunities to be rewarded for their
work. He smiled as he said he didn’t break either of those promises. And he
hasn’t. As to the first, nobody’s perfect. But it’s a rare American President
who will stand up and acknowledge that, and then do what he needs to do to fix
whatever problem has resulted from his imperfection.
Obama has
done that with Obamacare. He has acknowledged that HealthCare.gov is flawed,
and he hasn’t blamed the IT specialists who set it up. He’s clearly said
“that’s on me”. He promised people they could keep their old medical insurance
policies and it turned out they couldn’t. Again, he shouldered responsibility
for that and did something about it.
You would
think, from the way the media interprets what he says and how he says it that
he’s on the back foot. But he isn’t. If you listen to him speak you can
see that.
He was
never going to have it easy. It’s one thing for a country to want change; it’s
another for everybody to actually be willing do what’s necessary for that
change to happen. For Obama to have been optimally effective, voters needed to
take responsibility for properly informing themselves about the Republican
agenda, and not give them so much power to thwart Obama at every step.
And as for him being African American, the racist river of blood that has tainted
America since forever never dried up, it just flowed underground. It will be
generations before every white conservative American can look at an African
American president and see a man or a woman before they see the color of their
skin. If it ever happens. What's more likely is that the conservative base will die out. They're vocal, often vicious, and counter-productive. But they aren't smart. They don't even wait for somebody to give them rope. They just grab it and go about hanging themselves.
There’s been
a lot of noise about how the ACA is Obama’s legacy, and Republicans celebrated wildly whilst they thought
they could take it down, then when HealthCare.gov floundered at first. They believed part of their main objective – to destroy Obama – was achieved.
Firstly,
they didn’t succeed, and HealthCare.gov is already functioning a whole lot
better. Secondly, Obama’s legacy is that as the first African American
president in a country still dessicated by racism he hasn’t buckled and given
in to Republican efforts to derail him and his mission – to improve the lives
of the majority of Americans; to strengthen the middle class and to change a
status quo that’s brought the US to its knees. Part of that has been to provide
all Americans with affordable quality healthcare and destroy the power
insurance companies have had which they abused by selling low quality
insurance.
Obama has
also withdrawn America from war-mongering and brought the deficit down from
9.2% of GDP in 2009 to less than half of that, at 4.1%, currently. It’s the
fastest sustained decline in a deficit since World War II. No wonder House
Republicans, whose main opposition to Obama in 2012 was the deficit, who don’t
want the status quo to change, don’t want reform, don’t want to lose the power
they’ve abused for way too long, stir up dust storms wherever they can to
distract Americans from the truth.
That Obama is successful. He was always
going to be, no matter how hard it was for him.
