I consider the two serious candidates in the 2016 Democratic Presidential primary to be unpalatable. I think that both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders would be a continuation of Barack Obama’s Presidency, and I have become disgusted by Mr. Obama. I voted for Obama in 2008 because I considered him to be the “lesser of two evils” at the time.
Obama’s claim that he would be a “post-racial” President also made me hopeful. At the time, I thought Obama’s “More Perfect Union” speech struck just the right balance, and frankly discussed the complications associated with race. In the speech, Obama defended his decision to continue attendance at a church where the pastor had made racist and narrow-minded comments. The basic theme of Obama’s speech on that occasion was that there may be people we care about who hold racist views, but you don’t necessarily have to disown those people because a person’s views on race is not the end-all-be-all when it comes to judging a person’s character:
“ I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother — a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe. These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_More_Perfect_Union_%28speech%29
Despite Obama’s optimistic tone in 2008, by 2013, I think Obama had abandoned any pretense of being a “post-racial” President. The event that solidified this in my mind was the George Zimmerman criminal case. I’m not going to go over the specifics of that case, or try to “re-litigate” that issue. I think the jury reached the right verdict in that trial. I studied the facts, and it was clear to me that there was reasonable doubt as to George Zimmerman’s guilt. However, for most of 2012 and 2013, I had to listen to the news media do it’s best to convict Mr. Zimmerman in the court of public opinion.
Mr. Obama, the President of the United States, chose to inject himself into a purely local matter of criminal law. (http://whitehouse.blogs.cnn.com/2012/03/23/president-obama-statement-on-trayvon-martin-case/) He aided and abetted the news media in doing its best to ensure that George Zimmerman wouldn’t get a fair trial. The fact that Obama did that, regardless of his actual comments on the matter, spoke volumes to me. It said to me that far from wanting a “post-racial society”, where race doesn’t matter, he wanted to play the usual Democratic game of whipping up racial animosity within the black community to garner political support. This game consists of convincing black people that most white Americans are racist in order to get votes.
Race relations under Obama only got worse from the George Zimmerman trial. Next there was the unrest in Ferguson Missouri. In that case, the facts are also fairly clear to me: Officer Darren Wilson acted within the law and generally accepted notions of self-defense when he shot Michael Brown. Despite this, the Obama Justice Department conducted an investigation into the shooting, once again showing me that he was prepared to inject himself into a purely local matter. If a black police officer had shot a white man under similar circumstances, I have no doubt that Obama’s administration would not have concerned itself with it. The message from the Obama administration has been clear: he believes most cops, judges, juries and prosecutors are racist, and the Justice Department must step in to right that “wrong”. Since cops, judges, and juries are all drawn from the general population of America, it means Obama believes most white Americans are racist. Obama believes what his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, believes. He was lying when he talked about a “post racial America” where we can finally move beyond this issue.
There are a lot of other reasons that I have become disgusted with Obama. The Affordable Care Act involved another lie. I specifically remember a debate between Hillary Clinton and Mr. Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary in which Obama said he was not in favor of an individual mandate for health insurance:
“OBAMA:…So we’ve got a lot of similarities in our plan. We’ve got a philosophical difference, which we’ve debated repeatedly, and that is that Senator Clinton believes the only way to achieve universal health care is to force everybody to purchase it.” http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/02/21/debate.transcript/index.html
What did we get? An individual mandate to buy health insurance.
Obama says the Bush Administration was mistaken to invade Iraq because it created a power vacuum in that area that gave rise to ISIS. Regardless of whether this is true, what has Obama done? He used military force to topple the Gaddafi regime in Lybia, which has now been infiltrated by ISIS. http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/isis-terror/fighter-jets-target-libya-s-sabratha-40-killed-official-n521506
By virtue of the fact that Barack Obama was our nation’s first black President, his policies on race relations were probably always going to take center stage. His initial promise was that he would move us beyond racial animosity and strife, but instead he has fanned the flames of racial tension with his actions and words. Instead of saying: “I am the President, and I stand for the rights of all Americans regardless of color,” his actions have been otherwise. Obama has shown us that he is more in the “political camp” of Al Sharpton: someone who wants to use the animosities against white Americans that exist in minority communities to advance his own political power. Even on other major issues that don’t involve race, he has consistently said one thing, and then done another.
