The Republicans don’t want Obama's presidency remembered for anything good. They have hoped he was only going to be a one term president but Obama completely surprised them when he won a landslide victory against their best candidate, Mitt Romney.
I thought the Republicans should have learnt their lessons in 6 out of 8 years of Obama and keep off messing around with the President. I thought they should have begun to understand where they went wrong and then start to make corrections. Their situation is analogous “to those who the Gods will destroy”. What usually happens to them is what has been catching up with the Republicans They just don’t know it. You don’t mess with what God Almighty has anointed. Republicans mysteriously lost to Obama in two consecutive presidential elections and are doomed to lose again in 2016 because they have dug themselves deeper into a hole by being on the wrong side of all the issues that are going to determine the outcome of the next presidential elections.
America, the proverbial melting pot and a quintessential nation of immigrants is no longer the America the Republicans used to know. The rainbow coalition of voters that produces a President has profoundly changed from coast to coast and from sea to shining sea. I have said it before and I would say it again at the risk of repeating myself. As long as voters vote their hopes and not their fears and as long pocket book issues and enlightened self- interest determine who wins or loses in a presidential election, game over. America is not some third world country where doling out money and giving out some bags of rice to poor and starving voters would drag them to the polling booth to vote for anybody. Most American voters are informed entities who go to vote with their eyes and minds open about what is in it for them. They are preponderantly made up of youthful voters of the hip hop cultures whose values are totally different from those of their parents.
Republicans always forget that America remains that quintessential “nation of immigrants” as reminded us by Al Sharpton in his latest commercial jingle currently played at regular intervals on M.S.N.B.C TV channel. “Unless you are an American Indian, you or your parents apparently come to America from somewhere else”. Most Republicans always seem to be in denial by continuing to pretend that they have as much right as the Red Indians to claim America as their father land in the same way that the Blacks used to do South Africa in their long struggle against the Apartheid Regime. Republicans quite often insinuate and imply that by saying they are going to take back their country! They always stop short of specifying from whom? If you share the Al Sharpton hypothesis, like I do, only the Red Indians should reserve the right to be making such a claim in America. They don’t, however, because they have been dispossessed of their land for good, and they have been so weakened, polarized and marginalized that they no longer count. The Red Indians will never get sufficiently organized to want to take back their country.
Their surviving remnants across America have to know it would be self-delusion or insanity to even try, so they are completely resigned to their fate as they are in no position to challenge their conquerors!
Republicans by simply saying no every good idea coming from Obama are politically digging their own graves because history is going to be far much kinder to Obama than they ever acknowledge.That is going to happen after Obama leaves office and as Americans young and old begin to feel the full impact of some of the legislation he has managed to pass into Law with only a marginal or grudging support from the dysfunctional Republicans-controlled Congress which was fool-hardy enough to publicly admit their ultimate mission statement is to see Obama fail because they just hate him and they could care less how such a failure holds back America. Republicans would tell you if you regularly watch Fox News like I do, that Obama is up to no good. I regularly watch Fox News to hear the other side because in every argument there are pros and cons. To be fair to ourselves and the other parties involved in the endless debate that American Politics has become, we all need to do that. Republicans are not all bad people. I will be the first to admit that and that few of them who have been President like Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Ike Eisenhower and even Ronald Reagan to mention a few are my proof of that. Many of them are as patriotic as their counterparts in the Democratic party and they all want America to succeed but they sometimes do it in a very partisan way that make their motive suspect. The Republicans of the Abraham Lincoln or Ike Eisenhower era are totally different from the Republican nihilists of this era who think you are only a legitimate President when the skin of your color is white.
Their usual complaint is that Obama is too inexperienced and arguably too black to lead America. Sometimes they claim Obama uses executive orders to make his own Laws without bi-partisan support. They therefore call him a dictator or a monarch for that reason. When it is convenient for them they say he is a weak President for saying America must not dabble into every world crisis because in their convoluted mind America must continue to prove she is the leader of the world by so doing, even if that means neglecting the domestic agenda and priorities of America while putting too much strain on the American economy and too much pressure on the American Military whose capacity and resources are stretched to the limit because America is biting a lot more than it is able to chew. They think America has the resources to do things alone and without international consensus. They say a lot of things about Obama that are just not true or grossly exaggerated, if you check them out. They regularly compare Obama to Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton saying that the two Presidents were still able to work with a Congress controlled by the opposition as if Obama has not tried his best to do the same in much of his first term.
They would not tell you how much Obama tried in his first term to do just that, and how the Republicans have obstructed him every step of the way by refusing to work with him because they believe they are likely to fail if Obama is allowed to succeed and they think they can only succeed if Obama is pressurized to fail. Obama was hoping to get many more Republicans to work with him to do much of what he had promised as a candidate for President. Republicans would not budge. Their goal was just to De-legitimize him and they were very resolute and persistent in so doing. That was how they came to win the majority in the House of Representatives while failing to capture the majority in the US Senate by only a few seats. That outcome was a panacea for gridlock and that was what Republicans wanted because they figured it out that the President would take all the blame. Things are already deadlocked with a Republican House of Representatives and the gridlock could get worse if the Republicans are allowed to take over in the Senate in the mid-term elections in November.
Even though they are currently in the minority in the US Senate they have effectively used the Senate rule that requires a majority of 60 out of 100 members to pass any motion just to frustrate Obama to a point that that Obama became so unpopular with his Democratic base for trying to appease the Republicans too much because he wanted to be seen as a consensus builder. The Republicans wanted him to lose support from his base in addition to their refusal to support him. That was their formula for frustrating or distracting him every step of the way. Once that became clear to Obama, he decided to reverse course. Once he managed to win a second term on his own merit, and since he was no longer going to run for a third term, he knew it was time to call off the bluff of the Republicans if they were not ready to meet him half way. He therefore resorted to using executive orders to carry out some of the policies he knew were going to be in the best interest of the silent majority of Americans and that are likely to remain part of his legacies as President. The Republicans knew any attempt to impeach the President as advised by Sarah Palin and her cohorts would fail because the President was constitutionally empowered to do all of what he has done and he was quick to point out to them he had used executive orders far less frequently than all of his predecessors. He further argued that he was forced to do it because the non-performing Congress has refused to do their own job.
The Republicans don’t want his presidency remembered for anything good. They have hoped he was only going to be a one term President but Obama completely surprised them when he won a landslide victory against their best candidate, Mitt Romney. Obama has managed to push the Republicans to the extreme right which put the Republicans at logger head with the Independent voters who constitute the swing vote in American Politics. The advent of the Tea Party has further boxed the Republicans into a corner from which they cannot escape. Individuals like Ted Cruz and Sarah Palin with their extreme views have further dug the Republicans into a deeper hole. They now talk of taking Obama to Court and threatening him with a Law suit forgetting that the President and his first lady are top notch Harvard lawyers who could not be intimidated at all by any frivolous law suit. They are just hoping to distract him and to delay the implementation of some of his sound policies.
The Republican position on securing the borders to stop the inflow of refugees from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras is another trap they are hoping to set for Obama but they are going about it the wrong way and they are going to lose out on that front because the 2008 Immigration Law signed into Law by George Bush before he left office is essentially what Obama has been trying to enforce. The Law made allowance for victims of the Drug, Sex and Human trafficking on the border to be given special accommodation. Those victims including children who are being shipped from their home land because of drug and gang-related violence in those countries are to be investigated and accorded refugee status by a special Court. Those who do not meet those stipulated conditions would be deported and sent back to their respective countries. Obama is doing exactly the right thing by asking Congress to vote money to support those refugees while they are still waiting for the Courts and the tribunals to determine their status. They want Obama to ignore the existing Law and just deport everybody on the excuse America does not have the funds to waste on them. If Obama does what they are urging him to do, they would have turned round to accuse him of breaking the Law and that would be sufficient ground for startingimpeachment hearings against him. if only to disgrace him out of office and to dent his legacy.
By delaying action the Republican-controlled Congress is hoping and praying that Obama as the sitting President would be the one to carry all of the blame and that the current plight of children and refugees in Texas and other places would create a wedge between Obama and the Latinos and therefore create an opening for them to make peace with the Hispanics as a block vote in American Politics. But the Refugees and their families in America are no fools. They know who has been there for them every step of the way. They know the Republicans are the ones making it impossible for Obama and the Democrats to pass the long-awaited comprehensive Immigration Legislation which has been pending in the Congress for so long. They all understand it is the same Congress that is making life harder for those minorities who come to America but cannot find jobs because the Republicans would not move on those legislation like the one for minimum wage and gainful employment. They know the Republicans are the ones working in cahoots with the NRA to frustrate all the moves made by Obama to have background checks done on criminals and mentally-challenged individuals who want to freely buy and carry guns in America in the name of the Second Amendment.
They know the Republicans are the ones who want to repeal by all means the Affordable Health Care Law which has been helping millions of Americans who otherwise would never have qualified for medical coverage under the existing Laws favored by the Republicans. The voters know all of these facts and that is why the Republicans are never going to have it easy in any future presidential election because voters know their rights and they are going to vote for candidates who are going to protect those rights.
Some are predicting the Republicans can forget coming back to the White House again for the next 20 years. I would not go that far. I am predicting another 4 or 8 years for the Democrats in the White House. Sooner or later a Republican candidate in the mold of a Ronald Reagan or a John F. Kennedy is going to show up to begin to fundamentally change some of the extreme policies of the Republican Party that have put them on the wrong side of most of the issues that should determine the outcome of future presidential elections in America. I come to that conclusion because America does not subscribe to a one party dictatorship like we have in Nigeria.
There are talents and brains in the two dominant parties to suggest that. If you don’t believe me, just take time to go listen to Fox News and some of their analysis. If you only listen to M.S.N.B.C which regularly supports the Democrats or if you only listen to Fox News which regularly supports the Republican view point, you will not get a balanced view of what is going on in the country.
Republicans will not tell you why they are so much opposed to President Obama. I suspect their homophobic criticism of Obama can be attributed in large part to racism. The great majority of Republicans do not believe that anything good can come out of the black race. America is not going to appreciate Obama until after he leaves office. I don’t care what the Republicans say about that young man. I think a whole world of him to a point that I have to disagree for once with one of the most learned and respected columnists of ChatAfrik. I am talking of the one and onlyDr.Ozodi Osuji who also appears to share some of the Republican views of Obama. Dr. Osuji has argued that Obama is weak and that he lacks the administrative experience to govern a country as complex as America.
There is no school anybody goes to to learn how to be President. Most candidates learn on the job but some are fast learners while others are not. I agree that the cumulative experience a candidate picks up along the way can be very helpful when the individual gets to office. The mere fact that Obama went from being a senator in Illinois and a US senator for only one term before becoming President is not enough reason to write him off as being weak and experienced. He has done pretty good in my book and I would gladly debate anybody on that based on empirical facts.
Some people forget that Obama is a product and a hybrid of two powerful cultures. His mother is a Caucasian and the father is a black from the Luo tribe in Kenya. For his mother to fall in love with a black man from Kenya and later on with an Indonesian husband at the time she did was an act of courage any way you slice it, The observation marks her out in my opinion, as a very principled woman who ended up obtaining a PhD.D in Anthropology. The same thing goes with Obama’s father who ended up going to Harvard. I guess you can say the same thing of Barack himself who ended up going to Columbia and Harvard and he ended up dating and marrying an uppity woman like Michelle, his senior at Harvard and his senior partner in their Law Firm in Chicago.
Black History continually reveals the truth and hidden knowledge that are not often appreciated or adequately stated or documented. Obama being a product of that heritage and history is profoundly powerful in of itself if you see my point. The world will never assume its rightful balance, its normal peace, harmony and racial richness in composition until black people are given their rightful place. Obama as the first black President has done the black race proud. We must never forget that.
Need I say more? I rest my case.