Community | December 26, 2009 | 2 comments

Obama Is...

source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/26/opinion/26douthat.html?_r=1&hp

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DeliaTheArtist
"There’s something particularly elusive about Barack Obama’s political identity. He’s a bipartisan bridge-builder — unless he’s a polarizing ideologue. He’s a crypto-Marxist radical — except when he’s a pawn of corporate interests. He’s a post-American utopian — or else he’s a willing tool of the national security state.

The press has churned out a new theory every week, comparing Obama to John F. Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt, to George H. W. Bush and Jimmy Carter — to every 20th-century chief executive, it often seems, save poor, dull Gerald Ford. But none of the analogies have stuck. We’re well into the Obama era, but neither his allies nor his enemies can quite get a fix on exactly what our 44th president really represents."

More at link! How do you see Obama?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/26/opinion/26douthat.html?_r=1&hp
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2 comments // Obama Is...

  • morirjedi
    • 0
      morirjedi  

    • In a no win situation. Just must do what he thinks is best. Will get the blame and not enough credit. Try and be a constant while others around him are running in various directions.

    • 2 years ago
  • ocanada
    • 0
      ocanada  

    • A tragic figure. Too much stress from vehement opposition, too many problems to solve, too many appelations heaped upon someone who is attempting to be a more nuanced version of your average joe. Going from state senator to Senator, to the first Black Presidential Candidate of a major party to the first balck president, to Nobel Lauriete in a span on five years makes each new acheivement too much to process or rationalize and each dulls the impact of the achievement of the next.

      He has to balance the most stressful job on earth and still manage a healthy family life while somehow by some miracle balancing normalcy and exceptionalism. Growing up poor to middle class and managing to go to an Ivy League school and excell and then choose to put the education towards helping the poor shouldn't be treated as efite simply because his wife is growing arugala in the white house garden or he would prefer to visit section sixty and risk the political ramifications of returning the dignified transfer rather than paying lip service with a flagpin. He has to fend off attacks from political detractors and manage to live a normal life, he can't even talk to schoolchildren without being called a communist indoctrinator and somehow has to raise kids in that environment.

      Politically he's too much of a blank slate because of the issues at hand. He's too much to too many too little to to few, and its making it hard for him to be alternately a distraction to his own priorities and their greatest proponents. However his strategy seems to be to use his skills to sell whatever will require the least effort, he expends political capitol too quickly while not making any efforts to secure what he has he prefers to seek consensus or new ears in the conservative movement at the expense of legislation. He's not the legislater in cheif he's the traveling salesman in chief to me.

    • 2 years ago
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