PrintSeptember 26, 2009
Barack Obama's Uninspiring Legacy
Primarily because of the color of his skin -- that patently obvious feature of his personal identity -- politically correct vernacular stipulates that our current President be grouped under the official category of African American. This should really be of no relevance to his leadership capabilities. But when there are escalating doubts about his adequacy to fulfill the role to which he has been called, the attendant invective often emerges, that pointing out this incompetence is a tell tale sign that the evaluator is surely motivated by racism. In actuality this is rarely the case.
Although President Obama himself appears to be more than happy to let the volatile issue of race loiter on the threshold of the Nation's consciousness, no sane individual would seriously conjecture that his incompetence is due to the color of his skin, anymore than I would contend my ethnic origin should make me congenitally disposed to excel as a professional salsa dancer. More than once I've been told I have no Latin rhythm to speak of.
Reason would also dictate that fear of unintentionally causing offense against a public official's race should not warrant an exemption from rendering an objective audit of his or her performance, as long as it is done with a certain measure of civility, and despite the fact that the latter may yield less than stellar results.
In short, there should be no cause for apprehension, before openly appraising the performance of our elected public officials; especially when such an appraisal can be sustained by a clear correspondence to demonstrable facts, and is based on measurable results by which such a performance can be impartially evaluated.
Still there are some who will classify any commentary of our current President's incompetence as racial bigotry. But is not the person who assumes there are traces of racism to be found under every unturned rock obviously someone who already entertains a preconceived notion that there is a direct link between race and everything? Who then is the real racist; the person making the observations or the person who almost habitually interprets such observation as having racial undertones?
Ironically, leading this bully procession of the indignant, and more than anxious to pull the Race Card, are liberal Democrats who proudly don their "Dissent is the highest form of patriotism" bumper stickers, while characterizing virtually any opposition to their illustrious leader as always being motivated by a racial animus. But something is terribly amiss when the government of a free society seeks to stigmatize a citizen's right to offer any candid assessments of a public official's performance.
Even in this presumed Post-racial age of Obama, a poor performance is still a poor performance, regardless of race. Pointing out the mediocrity of such a performance should not be automatically construed as stemming from an underlying racial prejudice against the one being evaluated.
That being said, there are some hard realities about the current administration's record that will need to be addressed at some point or another, the most conspicuous being the increasingly evident realization that President Obama is clearly a man out of his depth.
Taking stock of the current state of the economy he once promised to resuscitate, his glaring inadequacies in dealing with rogue foreign heads of state who continue to pose an imminent threat to this and other countries, and his crass trivialization of some recent domestic challenges, some of the disillusioned are begrudgingly starting to acknowledge - but many are still afraid to openly declare - that Barack Obama is not as capable of performing the duties of his office as it was once believed.
Still, I need to restate the obvious; President Obama is not inept because he is an African American; he is inept because he is dismally equipped for the task at hand, surrounded by corrupt advisors who saturate him with dubious counsel, and captivated by a narcissism that is virtually unparalleled in the history of American politics.
It will be left to historians to sift through the varied recollections and revisions of those who were either overly gracious or clinically pragmatic about Obama's relatively mediocre achievements. Notwithstanding, his presidency will be enshrined as a historic presidency, by virtue of the fact that he is -- and will always remain -- the very first African American President.
However, much like the experience of Evangelicals who are loath to commemorate the presidency of a startlingly inept peanut farmer from Georgia, the belated regrets of many African American citizens will echo throughout history, as they look back in sadness to an unprecedented opportunity that was squandered.
This colossal blunder was methodically executed by a large number of vastly misinformed moderates and very selfish liberals who -- consumed by a longing to assuage their own racial guilt -- hastened to elect a very charismatic and (provided a teleprompter is on queue) a very eloquent, but nevertheless a most incompetent African American man, thus turning what could have been the launching of a great legacy into a rather uninspiring milestone in America's race relations.
