ACCEPTING THE REAL OBAMA

                The death last month of former senator, Chuck Percy, (R. Illinois) was particularly sad in that it signaled the end of the last vestiges of a whisper of an echo of hope for a two party democracy.  Percy was a dinosaur, an oxymoron, the last moderate Republican.   His passing serves as an exclamation mark for the blog I’m presenting.

                I recently ran across an article by Mellisa Harris Perry entitled,” Black President, Double Standard: Why White Liberals Are Abandoning Obama,” in which Mrs. Perry asserts that the rate at which White liberals are abandoning President Obama is a function of a subtle type of liberal racism, rather than a true referendum on his job performance.   Her arguments were based on comparisons between Obama and another centrist Democrat president, Bill Clinton.   Her article represented a rare occasion in which I could not completely agree with her.  Yet the most interesting aspect of her commentary was not the commentary itself, but the reaction of those White liberals to whom she was referring.

                The White progressives who backed Obama are frustrated and disappointed.  Many are at the point at which they will not vote at all, given a choice between Obama and the Republicans.  While I feel the same frustration with Obama, my immediate reaction was that these progressives are every bit the ideologues as the reactionaries on the Right.  Don’t they realize that Obama is the only thing standing between us and the barbaric hoards of the Tea Party who applaud executions and would gladly pay money to see gladiators fight to the death if given the option? 

                I was all set to chide the progressives, not for racism, but for their lack of pragmatism, when the tape of Obama exhorting a Black audience (including the Congressional Black Caucus)  to  “Take off your bedroom slippers, put on your marching shoes. Shake it off. Stop complaining, stop grumbling, stop crying. ”  was aired.  I was stunned by how completely inappropriate and inauthentic Obama’s performance was.   How dare the man who had listened so patiently to all of the complaining, grumbling and crying from his right wing adversaries have the nerve to say this to the least complaining and most hurting of all Americans, the African Americans?    How much time had he spent in the Black community, as president,  before making these outrageous comments?   Where had he marched for us?   The cluelessness of Obama’s exhortation (he was trying to inspire, probably called himself taking a page from Bill Cosby) forced a quasi-epiphany: It’s time to accept Obama for what he is, not what we had hoped he would be.

                Obama inspired right thinking people with his oratory, his campaign, and his slogan: “Change We Can Believe In.”  That kind of change does not come from the center; especially in a nation that has gone so far right wing that the old right is the new center.  It comes from the Left, which is where most of Obama’s base can be found.  Yet, even in her defense of Obama, Dr. Perry, by comparing him to Bill Clinton as “another Centrist Democrat” is, in a subtle way, gentling shifting us toward lower expectations.

                Were our expectations too high to begin with?  They were obviously too high for this individual, but they had to have been high to pull off the political miracle of the millennium.  Right or wrong, the First Black Syndrome demands excellence.   Can  you imagine the implications if Jackie Robinson had been a .220 lifetime hitter? (He was actually .311).  We thought we were electing a warrior; a champion.  Shaka Zulu, Pihankhi, Sundiata. 

It is painfully clear that Obama is not that warrior.  Had he replaced Achilles in the Trojan war, Troy would have wound up with half of Greece.  This is not to say that he has been a bad president.  He inherited an incredible mess, and many of his accomplishments have been laudable.  And the fact remains that he is the last barrier between us and the lunatic Right.  In fact, many of the pundits have surmised that his reelection strategy will be based on choosing Obama over the party of Rush Limbaugh.

My position is that I will continue to defend Obama when he unfairly attacked, whether it is from the rabid racists on the Right, or the jealous Media Minstrels on the Left.  But given the fact that we are laboring under a one party system, we must apply as much pressure to Obama as the Right does.  I say this as someone who grew up in a neighborhood where if you could not fight you could not go outside, yet who stood on the sidewalk on Stoney Island Avenue on the South Side of Chicago and wept openly when word came of Obama’s election; and as someone who painted a portrait of Obama surrounded by heroes of Black history.  We must make him accountable.

I lament the fact that I’ll never know the pride other Americans felt when Ronald Reagan (divisive figure that he was) stared down Mikhail Gorbachev and told him to “Tear down that wall.”  I will vote for Obama in the next election, and encourage others to do so as well.  He does stand between us and the Neanderthals.  But it feels so much better to vote for someone who is truly inspiring, than against the forces of darkness.