I am sick and tired of hearing that Barack Obama is a failed president. Every time I turn on the news someone is saying this. Today as I dropped my eldest off for school we listened to the local hip hop station chronicle the abuse leveled at a handicapped white man by four black kids. What those kids did is deplorable. The fact that it is being deemed a hate crime based on race alone is, IMHO, a mistake because it appeared to be more about the disability than the color of his skin. Furthermore, the coverage by this sham of a radio news minute was more about Obama’s reaction and raising the question ‘would he have felt differently if the racial roles were reversed?’ That is a stupid question. As a result, it led to a caller saying this: “President Obama is a lame duck. Being half white and half black he should have been able to bring our country together.” That is a prime example of magical thinking. Really? How was he supposed to bring us together? How does the appearance of one man suddenly make everything better? This is the same manner of thinking that made people think that baseball was suddenly not racist because they let Jackie Robinson play, and as a result let more black (and eventually other races) players play. Of course we ignore the extremely painful period that Robinson himself suffered and the far worse treatment that the next series of black players suffered because the spotlight was on Robinson, so the others in the league could continue to openly abuse the next batch of non-white players.
Obama will never be able to live up to the expectations of the majority of the American people, because the expectations were unrealistic. Based on what I continue to hear, Obama didn’t do a damn thing as president for anyone or anything. I won’t scroll through his accomplishments here, but needless to say he did a hell of a lot for our nation and could’ve done quite a bit more had the Republican party been willing to engage him at all in a conversation. Instead they built an 8 year platform around the idea of making sure he failed and actively resisting everything he did regardless of whether it was good for the country and their constituency or not.
That is what a black president faced in America: Unimaginable odds and no support from half the country’s politicians. So, when we say Obama is a failure lets rethink that. He did the best he could ice skating uphill in an ice storm. He made it further than anyone else would have.