Barack Obama is in the last year and change of his presidency and, I promise you, we are going to miss this president. We will look back at his accomplishments and the way he made his decisions and we will say, "He did a lot." He did a lot against bitter opposition, he was steady and rational, there was always a well-thought reason for his decisions, even those with which we disagree, as I do with JCPOA/UNSCR 2231. There is a compelling case for, maybe not greatness, but "very goodness" for this presidency and I think very good will be the consensus among presidential historians once they have perspective that comes with time. I read that Obama currently is ranked 17th among all presidents in a composite of surveys. I think it likely that ranking will rise with time.
I have wanted to write this for, oh, maybe six months or so. I write it tonight because readers of this site may be surprised and I wanted to be on record while the corpse was still warm and I could not be accused of being nostalgic. I have lambasted Obama when my nature was up and I unsay none of those criticisms now. I am looking at his body of work and I see near greatness in that body of work. I write tonight because, gritting his teeth, the president met with and gave competing speeches against Russian president Vladimir Putin at the United Nations over Syria and because the early instant analyses are that Putin made Obama his bitch at the UN, he won the battle of the dueling speeches.
I unsay none of my suspicions, supported by incident after incident that Barack Obama does not "get" the non-Black world. He is abstracted away from Europe, considers it a jigsaw puzzle. His heart is in Africa and the Pacific. He has few friends internationally and cooperation is the exception. Non-black world leaders do not trust Obama, they do not like him, not Putin, not Xi, not Rousseff, not Merkel, not Netanyahu, not Harper, for godssake not Canada's Steven Harper, and Cameron is wary. All feel Obama is arrogant, condescending, and wrong. These are heads of state themselves, they have pride, they are strong personalities and the writ of the U.S. president's leadership does not run. This is the the glaring failure of the Obama presidency. A very good man and a very good U.S. president has less influence among major world leaders than recent presidents.
I have wondered in print several times about the specific dynamics behind this international dysfunction and I don't know what it is. I know there has been dysfunction. I have looked ever so briefly at the body language today between Putin and Obama, more so at the confrontational rhetoric, and it is as bad as it has ever been. Readers of Public Occurrences know that this is a recurring theme here. I know only that the odds are that when so many world leaders do not have a working relationship with the president of the United States that it is only common sense to conclude that they are in significant measure correct and that our president is not the only right one in the world.
But you ask me a reasonable question when you ask, as I have asked myself, "What specifically would you have had the president do or not do that he did not or did do that would have resulted in a more influential presidency abroad?", and I cannot answer that reasonable question. He has made rational decisions, he has given them forethought and still he is the one who other world leaders are wary of. Take Putin: No, in my opinion the U.S. should not have expanded NATO east and manifestly that has exacerbated Russia's paranoia. But Obama did not expand NATO east, he inherited it, he inherited it and didn't change it, as he inherited the panopticon state from Bush43 and has made some reforms but it is still a panopticon state. We should not have expanded NATO eastward and that fed into Russian paranoia but paranoia is a mental disorder, the Russians have it, the U.S. does not (at least vis-vis Russia) and the inconvenient truth that paranoids do not see is that NATO is not a threat to Russia. That Russia does not see that is Russia behaving irrationally, it is not the U.S. producing what was not there.
Obama deftly got the U.S. and to that extent the world out of the Great Recession. Affordable Care, the assassination of Osama bin Laden, the drone strikes on al Qaeda leaders (some 2,000), the Iran deal, TPP (still to come), the opening to Cuba--these are remarkable doings.
I think presidential historians will see all this when they write their post-mortems on the Obama presidency and I think there is a plausible case for greatness in that record. He should be in the top ten and may be rated higher than any president in my adult lifetime. Weasly words there, "may be," I will change those to Obama "will be" rated higher than any president since 1976.
I have wanted to write this for, oh, maybe six months or so. I write it tonight because readers of this site may be surprised and I wanted to be on record while the corpse was still warm and I could not be accused of being nostalgic. I have lambasted Obama when my nature was up and I unsay none of those criticisms now. I am looking at his body of work and I see near greatness in that body of work. I write tonight because, gritting his teeth, the president met with and gave competing speeches against Russian president Vladimir Putin at the United Nations over Syria and because the early instant analyses are that Putin made Obama his bitch at the UN, he won the battle of the dueling speeches.
I unsay none of my suspicions, supported by incident after incident that Barack Obama does not "get" the non-Black world. He is abstracted away from Europe, considers it a jigsaw puzzle. His heart is in Africa and the Pacific. He has few friends internationally and cooperation is the exception. Non-black world leaders do not trust Obama, they do not like him, not Putin, not Xi, not Rousseff, not Merkel, not Netanyahu, not Harper, for godssake not Canada's Steven Harper, and Cameron is wary. All feel Obama is arrogant, condescending, and wrong. These are heads of state themselves, they have pride, they are strong personalities and the writ of the U.S. president's leadership does not run. This is the the glaring failure of the Obama presidency. A very good man and a very good U.S. president has less influence among major world leaders than recent presidents.
I have wondered in print several times about the specific dynamics behind this international dysfunction and I don't know what it is. I know there has been dysfunction. I have looked ever so briefly at the body language today between Putin and Obama, more so at the confrontational rhetoric, and it is as bad as it has ever been. Readers of Public Occurrences know that this is a recurring theme here. I know only that the odds are that when so many world leaders do not have a working relationship with the president of the United States that it is only common sense to conclude that they are in significant measure correct and that our president is not the only right one in the world.
But you ask me a reasonable question when you ask, as I have asked myself, "What specifically would you have had the president do or not do that he did not or did do that would have resulted in a more influential presidency abroad?", and I cannot answer that reasonable question. He has made rational decisions, he has given them forethought and still he is the one who other world leaders are wary of. Take Putin: No, in my opinion the U.S. should not have expanded NATO east and manifestly that has exacerbated Russia's paranoia. But Obama did not expand NATO east, he inherited it, he inherited it and didn't change it, as he inherited the panopticon state from Bush43 and has made some reforms but it is still a panopticon state. We should not have expanded NATO eastward and that fed into Russian paranoia but paranoia is a mental disorder, the Russians have it, the U.S. does not (at least vis-vis Russia) and the inconvenient truth that paranoids do not see is that NATO is not a threat to Russia. That Russia does not see that is Russia behaving irrationally, it is not the U.S. producing what was not there.
Obama deftly got the U.S. and to that extent the world out of the Great Recession. Affordable Care, the assassination of Osama bin Laden, the drone strikes on al Qaeda leaders (some 2,000), the Iran deal, TPP (still to come), the opening to Cuba--these are remarkable doings.
I think presidential historians will see all this when they write their post-mortems on the Obama presidency and I think there is a plausible case for greatness in that record. He should be in the top ten and may be rated higher than any president in my adult lifetime. Weasly words there, "may be," I will change those to Obama "will be" rated higher than any president since 1976.
