President Barack Obama has been a Good President – by Randal Jelks

President Barack Obama has been a good president! Of course, there are areas where I disagree with his policy choices, but overall he has been a good president under challenging times. He forewarned the American people in his inaugural address of January 2009 that the United States faced a crisis. He stated:

That we are in the midst of crisis is now well understood. Our nation is at war, against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred. Our economy is badly weakened, a consequence of greed and irresponsibility on the part of some, but also our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age. Homes have been lost; jobs shed; businesses shuttered. Our health care is too costly; our schools fail too many; and each day brings further evidence that the ways we use energy strengthen our adversaries and threaten our planet.

These are the indicators of crisis, subject to data and statistics. Less measurable but no less profound is a sapping of confidence across our land – a nagging fear that America’s decline is inevitable, and that the next generation must lower its sights.

Today I say to you that the challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many.

They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this, America – they will be met. On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.

Mr. Obama never pretended to be a miracle worker. He ran as liberal centrist and he has been true to that position since taking office. . And he was quite clear in his inaugural address that the road to change would face plenty of difficult.

Unfortunately, many people read into Mr. Obama their own viewpoints. Because h he ran a campaign premised on hope he  was supposed to be the politician that saved America from itself In three years, according moderate to left wing pundits, he was supposed to have stopped the thirty years trajectory that the election of Ronald Reagan unleashed in 1980.

For you all who were born in 1980s and early 1990s let me highlight the Reagan years:

• Reagan used rampant militarism and brinkmanship to settle global political disputes. The media has selective memory on Reagan ending the Cold War with the former Soviet Union. One million people gathered in Central Park in New York City to protest the President’s policies in June of 1982.
• The Reagan administration tried to find legal ways of undermining the civil rights laws that were enacted in 1964, 1965, and 1967. He did this by appointing, with the approval of Democrats, young conservative jurist to the Federal District Courts, the Appellate Courts, and finally the Supreme Court.  Our current Chief Justice of the Supreme Court is a case in point.
• Although President Jimmy Carter deregulated the airlines, President Reagan’s deregulations policies allowed more and more companies to hide their assets offshore, which hastened American deindustrialization.
• It was under the Reagan administration that the symbioses of ethnic Catholic voters and white Protestant Evangelicals were cemented through anti-abortion policies. Under the banner of anti-abortion all kinds of policies were established that might have been dubious remedies. One thing for sure, both Catholics and Evangelical cut the legs out of women’s civil rights.
• Finally, President Reagan cut as many programs directed toward the poor and unemployed using a racist and sexist myth of a Black woman who lived on welfare and gamed the system so much she could afford a Cadillac.
• It was under the Reagan administration that hardball politics began to be used eventually fracturing the cordiality and respect that members of Congress had for one another across party lines. Right-wing conservatism wanted to destroy the “liberal” establishment.
• The law and order theme that President Richard Nixon used as a shibboleth in 1968 to address the disruptive force of anti-Vietnam, Civil Rights, and urban unrest protest was used by Reagan administration with more draconian force. The war on drugs became a means to criminalize black and brown people, the very people at the center of civil unrest in the 1960s and early 70s during Reagan’s governship of California and Nixon’s presidency.
• The Reagan administration sought “constructive engagement” anti-democratic and apartheid regimes of South Africa and Rhodesia (Zimbawe) in the name of anti-communism, even though the administration propped up the most profligate of governments like Congo’s Mobutu Sese Seko.

Reagan’s charisma and policies set the trajectory for the direction that Mr. Obama inherited. Both Presidents George H. W. Bush and William Jefferson Clinton presidencies were locked in by trajectory of Reagan’s unwise conservatism. In fact, President George W. Bush channeled the ghost of Ronald Reagan during his time in office. However, during Bush’s administration there were not one million protesters against the war in Iraq. The Bush administration effectively appealed to nativist and racist ideas of various Arab speaking people to placate the general population and put into play the “Patriot Act.”

Most of the vitriol coming at Mr. Obama has been largely misplaced. It is misplaced because the congress passes laws and set spending. This is how our United States Constitution mandates. This has meant that all those who enthusiastically supported Mr. Obama in the fall of 2008 had to challenge their lawmakers, Democrats and Republicans alike, to work in cooperation with the President.

Religious bodies, labor unions, civil rights and human rights organizations, and environmental coalitions all had to inform their respective bases and turn out voters to elect Senators and Representatives. We live in a democracy, where an influential oligarchy has undo power, but they don’t have all the power. Remember they could not stop Mr. Obama from being elected. Many blame the president for the direction country has taken, but the president with great prescience told the voters what was lay ahead. It was we, the voters, who forgot what he said to America the day he took office.

On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.

And here is where I criticize the President.  He wanted to believe by his election that the mythologize legacy of Reagan had been slain. In this regard, the President’s sentiments were correct, but he underestimated the cooperation he would receive from a portion of the country that still believed in Reagan’s contentious legacy.  Mr. Obama, in a rightful attempt to govern, too quickly demobilized all the voters who worked so hard to get him elected allowing the “Empire to Strike Back,” to use a Star Wars film description.

Nevertheless, Mr. Obama has been able and steady leader accomplishing important legislation. And he should be given credit as a good political leader:

The Lilly Lebetter Sex Discrimination Act

Healthcare policy :Obamacare, as his political opponents call it, is a good thing for the country not a bad thing.

“Race to the Top”: A better school reform policy than Bush administration’s “No Child Left Behind.”

Consumer Protection Agency, although a part of it the Banking lobbyist watered down, it is an operating agency and working people will have some laws to protect them from avaricious and usurious fees and clearer understanding of their contractual arrangements with credit cards.

Guiding the military leaders to end “Don’t Tell, Don’t Ask,” the policies that discriminated against Gay and Lesbian from serving in United States Armed Forces.

Stylistically some people want Mr. Obama to be someone he is not. He is not a populist leader or folksy—he cannot or should be a black version of LBJ or Bill Clinton. Style, however, should never be confused with substance. He is a leader that deserves to be reelected. In his own words:

For everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act – not only to create new jobs, but to lay a new foundation for growth. We will build the roads and bridges, the electric grids and digital lines that feed our commerce and bind us together. We will restore science to its rightful place, and wield technology’s wonders to raise health care’s quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.