The outcome of the mid-term election is not going to be as bad for the Democrats like the pundits are predicting. I have said it before and I would say it again. The Republicans are going to self-destruct. President Obama is doing the right thing and preparing good legacies for himself and his party in the melting pot that America has become.
Republicans are not going to find enough voters to achieve what they were hoping for in November.
Between 1789 and 2014 America has had 44 Presidents. We all can agree that those individuals are world leaders in their own right just by being lucky to have been Presidents of the greatest country on Earth, even if for a short time like happened to William Henry Harrison in 1841, James Garfield in 1881, and John F Kennedy from 1961-1963.
We must remember that America became the super power or the dominant nation it is today through the hard work and the leadership of those individuals. The home of the Brave and the land of freedom and opportunity actually obtained her independence from Britain on July 4, 1776 just like Nigeria and many of the British colonies did at different times.
As I looked down the window from my flight from Boston to Dallas this holiday weekend, I could not help but wonder how this amazing country has managed to get past Great Britain both in scientific breakthrough and overall development. People tend to forget that this amazing experiment in human history was at one point a colony of Great Britain.
It is a legitimate question to ask how was America governed before 1776 and from 1776 to 1789 when the great George Washington became America’s first President from 1789 to 1797. That is a story for another day.
My preoccupation for today is just to identify some of those individuals who have been Presidents and who by their performance and accomplishments are today classified among the best American Presidents. They include by consensus and acclamation George Washington (1789-97), the founding father of the nation, Abraham Lincoln, the Emancipation President, (1861-65) Ferdinand Delano Roosevelt (1933-45) Harry Truman (1945-53), Dwight Ike Eisenhower (1953-61), John Fitzgerald. Kennedy (1961-63), Ronald Reagan (1981-89) and William Jefferson Clinton (1993-2001).
History would most certainly add to the roll call the first black President, Barack Hussein Obama for the reasons I want to underscore in this write-up.
All Presidents are defined by what kind of problems they have to grapple with and how well they have succeeded on a ranking scale. The first two on this list George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were Presidents at a time America had not yet emerged or accepted by conventional wisdom as leader of the World.
The recognition of America as leader of the free world actually began to take hold as the British Empire began to shrink while American influence around the world began to grow by leaps and bounds thus pushing Great Britain to a second place.
That was long before the Soviet Union came into the lime light as a major contender with America for the leadership of the world. Great Britain saw the hand writing on the wall and she quickly became the most trusted ally of America burying forever any lingering memories of the America’s wars for independence.
By the time the Second World War started in 1939, Sir Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister had no qualms crossing the Atlantic Ocean to go seek the help of the American President FDR who eventually agreed to lead the war in toppling Adolf Hitler who had become a major threat to most of the countries in Europe including Russia. After the war, America formally launched the North Atlantic Treaty Organization NATO comprising most of the European nations that fought against Adolf Hitler.
The Soviet Union on the other hand launched her own Warsaw Pact comprising of the Baltic States and all of the 15 Russian Republics as a counter force to NATO. The rivalry and competition between America and the Soviet Union led to the Cold War which silently raged for more than three decades. It ended with the fall of the Soviet Union and the loss of the 15 Russian Republics in one fell swoop.
The development has ever since catapulted every American President to the leadership of the whole world without any question. Any time America sneezes, the rest of the world nearly always must catch cold as America has become the gold standard for everything including the Almighty Dollar as the primary medium of exchange in the global village.
Whoever became American President starting from FDR was ipso facto the leader of the Free World. So when America goes to the poll, she goes there to elect not just an American President but the President of the whole world. That became the reality with the fall of the Soviet Union.
We can therefore take it that Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, JFK, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush the First, Bill Clinton, George Bush the Second, and Barack Obama are not just American Presidents, they all qualify to be called President of the world for the period they were in office.
They all have to worry about what goes on around the whole world in addition to their duties and responsibilities as American President. That is why every American President has to receive everyday full briefings on what is going on in every corner of the globe from Costa Rica or Bahamas to Papua Guinea.
When you are an American President, the world expects you to be cautious and very careful in every decision you take and everything you do including what you say and how you say it. President Obama in a moment of candor or Freudian slip made a blunt admission that a strategy was yet to be developed on how to confront ISIS because he wanted to seek international consensus before crafting the strategy.
It was the right thing to do but probably not the right thing to say for public consumption. The statement was completely taken out of context because of the way the statement was couched by the President.
That is precisely why an American President has to be very careful in what he says or does. He cannot be accused of exercising too much caution. When you are dealing with the problems of no less than 182 countries around the world, I think it does more good than harm for the President to be “too cautious” rather than less cautious. The very nature and complexity of the job requires him to do that if he is wise and smart and I believe he is.
The Republicans are in the business of criticizing President Obama even when he is doing what they have suggested or advocated before. It appears few in his party have also joined the bandwagon. But the loudest of his critics in the Republican Party are John McCain and Lindsey Graham. They were joined lately by the Senate Chairman of the foreign Relations Committee, who recently criticized President Obama for being “too cautious”.
The world would rather have a President who is too cautious than one who is not in the dangerous world we all live today. Why for goodness sake would Obama not be cautious when he knows what he is up against in the Republican Party and even in his own party? He is arguably the most despised and the most underrated President in American History because he is the first black and the first minority President.
Those criticizing him often forget that he was carefully chosen by God and twice elected by the great majority of Americans. The President understands we need more alliances to deal with world problems and it is clearly the right position to take regardless of what the Republicans think.
He actually won a Nobel Peace award within his first year in office because God was on his side. He is a majority because God was, and is still with him. The Republicans would sooner destroy themselves in their efforts to destroy Obama. They probably think they are going to take back the Senate this November by blackmailing Obama but they are going to fail as long as “one man one vote” remains the bastion of Democracy.
The outcome of the mid-term election is not going to be as bad for the Democrats like the pundits are predicting. I have said it before and I would say it again. The Republicans are going to self-destruct. President Obama is doing the right thing and preparing good legacies for himself and his party in the melting pot that America has become.
Republicans are not going to find enough voters to achieve what they were hoping for in November. The Republicans can expect their Waterloo in 2015 as I predicted before in another article.
If this President’s track record is anything to go by I believe that history is going to be very kind to him. He is going to be sorely missed after leaving office. He is by far the best thing minus Nelson Mandela to have happened to the black race in our long history of suffering and deprivation around the world.
Those who stigmatize him as weak just don’t know what they are talking about. The man is as solid as a rock. Like every human being I would be the first to admit he is not perfect and none of us is. Even things made by God can be infinitely improved. The President might have made a few mistakes here and there, but his heart is in the right place.
When all is said and done, the man is going to laugh last and laugh best. Trust me. The world must stop judging him by his skin color. They need to judge him by the content of his character, his resiliency and unflappability in times of crisis. If they do, the man is going to go down as one of the greatest Presidents of this century. Mark my words!
The whole world is in turmoil today everywhere you look all because of problems that already existed before the young man came to the White House. He has the painful task of being the President at a most difficult time in world history but he has what it takes to be a great President. He is doing his best to solve many of those world problems using his bully pulpit as President of the United States.
The American economy was in very bad shape when he took over from George Bush. It was so because America has wasted so much time, energy and money fighting an unnecessary war in Iraq which spilled over to Afghanistan.
America has wasted so much capital on the endless war between the State of Israel and Palestine which has become the “fons et origo” of the mutual distrust between the Muslims and Christians all over the world. The development has made the Middle East in particular, but more so the Arab world, the most volatile dangerous region of the world. The Jihadists and the Islamic Fundamentalists around the world are doing everything to turn the war into an endless confrontation between the Muslims and Christians of the world. President Obama is doing his best to avoid that and to make sure that America is not viewed as god Atlas who alone carries the burden of the world on his shoulders.
No nation however powerful can alone carry the burden of the world like the Republicans are advocating. The little fly may not be able to hurt the elephant, but it can fly into the elephant’s nostril and give it a lot of discomfort like some of the tiny nations can do to America.
There is a limit to American power. Obama is methodically doing his duty as President by building international consensus among allies to make it that much easier for America to live up to her duties and obligations as leader of the Free World. The President is promoting the establishment of democracy in every corner of the globe because democratic states do not engage in wars with one another.
They prefer diplomatic and political solutions rather than wars. Where America is able to go it alone, she will gladly do so but in the age of globalization, no nation however powerful or benevolent has the magic bullet to solving every world problem. It would take the world working together to do that. Changing the world mindset from the one that says “if you are not for America, you are against America, and would be punished because America can do what she wants” The quick fix Republicans want is delusional.
Changing attitude and behavior need time and consensus between the parties involved. That is why Obama sometimes appears to be rather slow or weak or too cautious. But his gentle work of the tiger is not to be misconstrued as a sign of timidity. The guy knows what he is doing.
Obama has a spine made of steel if you see what I see. I take off my hat for the things he has done to stabilize American economy. His decision to bail out the automobile industry when it needed the Federal Government the most was exactly the right thing to do and the initiative has paid off big time.
I give him kudos for his capture of Osama Bin Laden from a nuclearized Pakistan under cover of darkness and without shedding the blood of one American soldier in so doing. I give him credit for his principled stand to sign into Law the Affordable Health Care Reform legislation which has guaranteed medical coverage for no less than 46 million Americans most of whom would have died or suffered without it.
I give him credit for what he is doing to increase the minimum wage and to pass a comprehensive Immigration Law in America despite the refusal of the Republican-controlled Congress to work with him. I give him credit for making NATO the most powerful military organization the world has known and isolating Russia and making it that much harder for Russia to extricate herself from the box it has already put herself.
President Putin is today digging himself deeper and deeper into a hole from which there is no escape. I give him credit for decapitating Al Qaeda and containing or defeating other splinter groups that have drawn their inspiration from Al Qaeda like ISIS and El Shabab and his terrorist group in Somalia and Boko Haram in Nigeria. His daring raid to kill El Shabab and in Mogadishu this morning may have made the world a safer place today. Who would have thought on Labor holiday that the President was busy issuing a red card to El Shabab half a world away? That is what I am talking about.
He initiated African Economic Summit in Washington DC recently to bolster the economy of most countries in that region and to take the region from the stranglehold of the Chinese who are making inroads to that continent as we speak. I praise Obama’s effort to de-nuclearize the world and to make the world a safer place for generations yet unborn.
I take off my hat for his effort to reduce racial tension to the barest minimum in America and to reduce Gun violence by making sure that background checks are done for anyone who may want to purchase guns in America. The goal is to ensure that Americans with mental problems or those who want to purchase guns for criminal purposes are not allowed to do so. The idea is to keep guns off the streets of America to minimize crimes and gun violence which has reached alarming proportions in America. Obama is using his presidential power to make a difference like he promised.
His decision to never leave any American behind who finds himself or herself captured or kidnapped by the enemy in a foreign land is so laudable and praise-worthy. He actually tried to rescue James Foley the American journalist recently beheaded by ISIS.
He is doing so much behind the scenes because making noise about it ahead of time is always counter-productive. While undertaking such missions, the President is also quietly executing plans to capture terrorists like El Shabab in Somalia and many others around the world who may have posed a threat to America. The President is doing as much as can be expected of any good American President. He therefore deserves our support and commendation rather than condemnation.
John McCain and Lindsey Graham, Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Rick Perry and Senator Cruz can run their mouth as much as they want. If you take an objective look at this President’s track record, he has done pretty well and he deserves to have his name written in gold in American History.