On yet another stop of his victory lap around the country, President Obama came to Cleveland and had a great time. He deserves the warm welcome he received if for no other reason than he has survived — and to some degree has prospered in — the most partisan period of American political history.
Speaking of his accomplishments in Washington, despite having to work with a fractured, dysfunctional and increasingly irrelevant Congress, the president highlighted his economic achievements while dutifully bashing Republicans. He touted his economic recovery efforts, while avoiding the defining question: Are Americans better off today than when he took office? The answer to that question, of course, always depends on whom you ask.
Nonetheless, history, in the long term, will be kind to Barack Obama. His presidency has highlighted the best and worse in American society, culture, and politics. While he certainly possesses the smarts, skills and charisma to be a great president, his loyal opposition — based primarily on political party, but undeniably also on race — did everything in their power to stymie everything he attempted to do to make the country stronger.
In answering a question from a high school student on the differences between Democrats and Republicans, the president gave a mini civics lesson on national politics and the deep-seated conflicting views that, if we’re not careful, will cause our nation, over time, to slip into decline.
While the president — playing the Cheerleader-in-Chief role that all of his predecessors have had to adopt — posited that our greatest years are still ahead of us, he, as to be expected, avoided the obvious: The generation of Americans presently coming of age is the first one that will not realize the exceptionalism promise of doing better than their parents. Overall, achieving the American Dream is increasingly further out of the question for too large a number of hard working citizens.
Although President Obama has done everything within his power to stop this slow motion economic train wreck — to keep us competitive with the rest of the rising economies around the world such at China, India and Brazil — his best efforts in respect to attempting to unite rather than divide us have proven futile at best. Not for nothing has the approval rating of Congress sunken to the lowest level in history … with members continuing to fiddle while our modern-day version of Rome burns.
In spite of his tragic flaw of being desirous of the world viewing him as a “Good Negro” (which caused him to play much too nice with a Congress that signaled early on and often that no matter how much he attempted to do, he wasn’t going to be able to win the other side over, not even for the good of the country), Barack Obama has carried out the duties of the Office of the Presidency in the best possible manner in which Republicans would allow … and if it were not for a bunch of scared and angry old white men in the halls of Congress he would go down in history similar to his political idol Abraham Lincoln, as being one of our greatest leaders.
Alas, his failure to achieve that status is not due to his own shortcomings, but a sign of the times we live in.
From Cool Cleveland correspondent Mansfield B. Frazier mansfieldfATgmail.com. Frazier’s From Behind The Wall: Commentary on Crime, Punishment, Race and the Underclass by a Prison Inmate is available again in hardback. Snag your copy and have it signed by the author by visiting http://NeighborhoodSolutionsInc.com.