His list of accomplishments, even minus any opposition, would be
staggering.
Considering the odds against him, they are truly monumental…
It is difficult to compare presidents outside of a narrow context of
time. It is like trying to compare baseball players, like Ruth and
Aaron, or football players, like Johnny Unitas and Peyton Manning. For
athletes, the games they play were different then; and for presidents,
not only the country, but the world is different.
There is no way of knowing how a president today
would have fared when faced with the prospect of the First or Second
World War, or how they would have handled the advent of the Cold War
with the Soviet Union. These are answers we can never have answered, and
speculation is pointless. Despite any internal similarities, the
external contexts cannot be ignored: Korea is not Vietnam and Vietnam is
not Iraq.
What we can do is judge them by their
accomplishments, by how they faced the challenges of their time. Coming
off the most disastrous presidencies in our history,
that of the shrub, who cut taxes yet involved us in two un-paid for
wars, and crashed our economy and that of the rest of the world as a
result, we found ourselves with our nation’ first black president.
Not only did Barack H. Obama face the deeply
entrenched racism of the nation that elected him, but a repugican cabal
determined to obstruct his every move, to make him a one term president
and that term an utter failure. All the while, he had to face his real
work, that for which he was elected: digging our nation out of the hole
into which his predecessor had dragged us.
And it was a deep hole. Hated by the world, our
economy in shambles, two wars continuing and with no real end in sight,
let alone any idea of what, exactly, would constitute victory, Barack
Obama stepped up to the plate, and like Babe Ruth calling his shot, made
his play. Like Ruth, he hit it out of the park. This is not hyperbole.
The facts prove it.
The wars are over, the economy is booming. Unemployment, like gas prices, are dropping and we have seen record levels of job growth. By any measure of success,
including that of repugican candidates in 2012, his presidency has been a success. Even businesses and Wall Street agree that repugicans are killing the economy, and the evidence proves that the economy grows more under Democratic presidents than repugican pretenders.
And not only did he end the wars (and without
getting us into any of the new ones proposed by repugicans) and
restored the economy, but he helped speed along social change by
embracing marriage equality, kicking DOMA to the curb and ending Don’t
Ask, Don’t Tell; he has supported women’s rights, including equal pay and the right to manage their own reproductive rights; He has fought for workers and for a living wage; battled on behalf of the environment; and fought for the rights of immigrants. And with the Affordable Care Act, known fittingly as Obamacare, he has given all Americans access to healthcare for the first time in our nation’s history.
His list of accomplishments, even minus any
opposition, would be staggering. Considering the odds against him, they
are truly monumental. In all these areas, he has made life better for
Americans. Not just for the rich, but for all Americans.
Right off the bat, President Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize.
This was a measure of the world’s relief at being rid of the shrub
as much as anything else. The world heaved a sigh of relief. And that
alone spurred the much-needed cycle of healing. But it is what President
Obama did as himself, rather than as not-the shrub, that has really sealed
his legacy.
We have just seen that he has been named by Americans as the most admired man in the world for the seventh straight year.
There is good reason for that. And it is not because he is FDR or JFK
or even Abraham Lincoln. It is because he is Barack H. Obama, and that
is no small thing in itself. He was, like so many other great men in our
nation’s history, the right man in the right place at the right time.
And he answered the call.
He may not have been as liberal as some of us would
have liked, but neither was he as far left as repugicans imagined. That
he seemed to them to be a Marxist shows not how far left Obama was but
how far off the grid they had moved. In many respects, Obama is a repugican
out of the past, embracing many policies once embraced by the repugican cabal. These
make him much more of a centrist than someone to the far left of the
political spectrum. But that might have been exactly what we needed in
2008.
Some have complained and continue to complain that
Obama did not bring the change he promised, but he did bring change, and
a great deal of it. The repugicans have asked if we miss the shrub yet. No,
resoundingly, we do not. We can quibble, but it would be wrong to judge
him according to what he did or did not do from our own personal lists
of things we wanted done. What matters, and what alone matters, are the
results.
And the results, as I pointed to above, are
spectacular. Despite a steadfast refusal to do their jobs, despite every
roadblock repugicans could put in his path, President Obama has
persevered, with class and with style, holding his head up proudly like
the American he is, sharing credit for his successes and accepting
responsibility for his failures.
It is impossible not to compare the shrub and Obama: the
moron who got us into war and the man who got us out of it; the moron who
destroyed the economy and the man who restored it; the moron who alienated
the world and the man who makes friends of enemies, including Cuba.
But ultimately Obama must be judged for who he is
and not for who he is not, and according to those standards, he is a
great man indeed. He is, I will assert here and without any hesitation,
if not the greatest American president ever, the greatest president of
modern times.
