Black History Month: The Obama Effect
Not much here in the way of acknowledging/celebrating Black History Month….
I guess that’s still my “job”….
Ok, so be it….Here’s another of my BHM contributions:
Former President Barack Obama completed his two-term presidency with distinction. He and others will, no doubt, spend considerable time contemplating his “legacy”. A legacy that, by definition, will become a featured aspect of ‘Black History’ for generations to come.
I’m not going to provide a litany of debatable accomplishments or a list of achievements that could be argued ad infinitum and ad nauseam….
I’ll leave that to the talking heads and pundits who will continue to quibble and quarrel over the nature and consequence of the historical impact of the first black president….
Any way they choose to slice, dice, or mince it, the Obama Presidency is, and will continue to be, momentous American history….
My commentary on the “legacy” of the Obama presidency is not likely to be mentioned or echoed anywhere in the media….
However, I believe this simple observation to be substantive and accurate.
It has to do with the lasting effect the Obama presidency will have on the Republican Party and the intramural politicking that will continue to be the circus spectacle that the selection of a presidential candidate the Republican process has become.
I call it the “me too reflex or impulse”…
Here’s what I mean by this seemingly innocuous phrase:
Many Republicans had become so crazed and incensed over the mere thought of a black man in the White House that they had literally lost their minds to the notion that: “If they’ll elect a black man, they’ll elect me too!”
So there they were, the clinking, clanking, clattering, collagenous, collection of racist Republican clowns who believed that since a black man took the Presidential Oath, qualifications for the office of President of the United States no longer mattered and were of no merit, value, or consequence to the American voter….
This is the Republican clown car that Trump jumped out of to become the first reactionary Republican elected to the post- Obama Presidency.
In the wake of the one term Trump debacle and loss of the Presidency to Obama’s former vice president, we can see how the jockeying for primacy in the Republican Party presidential sweepstakes has taken turns and twists that would make a circus acrobat or a sideshow contortionist shake his or her head in amazement as next season’s crop of bilious Republican buffoons push and shove one another for space in the center ring spotlight of the three ring circus that is Republican Party politics….
It may not be the “greatest show on earth”, but it will continue to entertain “ladies and gentlemen, and children of all ages” for years to come….
(This is a revised and updated repost of an article I wrote and posted during the campaign and primary season prior to the 2016 presidential election.)
02/16/2021 @ 9:15 am
In terms of current politics, what the immediate aftermath of Obama’s election taught us is everything we had to know about Mitch McConnell, which we learned in January of 2009. No honeymoon period for a Black President in spite of his being the most conciliatory Democratic President to Republicans in living memory. Emphasis of power over governance. Putting legal way before ethical. Exactly what we’re seeing a dozen years later. We should expect everything we see.
The first thing Obama’s Presidency taught us is that America was proudly ready to elect a Black President but not ready to have one. The extent to which that was and is true is beyond disappointing. Another thing it taught us is that Obama couldn’t afford to embrace being biracial because of who it would have meant abandoning. He had to endure all this Birther/Kenyan bullshit while having a grandfather who fought in WWII and thirteen ancestors who fought in the American Revolution, while Trump’s American pedigree consists of having a father on the wrong side of a Woody Guthrie song and his American life consists of meticulously avoiding public service to the point of being able to avoid public service completely while being President of the United States, an accomplishment I would have thought was physically impossible.
02/16/2021 @ 11:24 am
Trump’s concept of governance was to simply undo everything Obama had done and dismantle the administrative infrastructure of the executive branch…
There are 74 million people in this country who are OK with Trump’s using Obama as the surrogate and scapegoat for everything negative in their miserable and deplorable existence…
They are OK with Trump’s attempt to eradicate the ‘Obama Legacy’ and ‘mystique’ and replace democracy and the rule of law with the lawlessness of a racist kleptocratic autocracy and the ‘deconstruction of the administrative state’.