That Poster From Facebook: How We See President Obama
For those of you who think of Teddy Roosevelt as the man who merely wielded a big stick in the American lake and elsewhere (the Great White Fleet), you forget he also broke the trusts, and was the president who resisted the conservative label, calling himself a progressive. He called his domestic program The Square Deal. See how things start: The New Deal was thought of an extension of the Square Deal. Franklin really liked his uncle Teddy.
Roosevelt also had dinner with an acknowledged black leader in the White House. While I still have my problems with the likes of Booker T. Washington, Teddy did it against even his own prejudices. For this, he deserves my grudging respect. However, what he started, his favorite niece Eleanor merely extended.
Which is why Teddy later considered William Howard Taft an apostate to his beliefs. Fat bathtub-lolling Taft just went along to get along, and when he became president with the former president’s help, he sucked up to the very interests Roosevelt had brought to heel. Sometimes, you can’t trust strangers to bring your legacy forward.
President Obama with the visiting child of one of his aides (Courtesy: Urban Livin)
But no, I don’t believe President Obama is Superman, nor the harbinger of the hammer and sickle. And who wants him to be either? After reading a few Obama biographies/books lately, I think that the man is more complicated than we think. He cannot be pegged, and he refuses to be easily pegged. The man who is running for a second term of office is not what the Baggers and conspiracy freaks fervently wish to believe that he is, if only to confirm their nightmarish visions of what Obama’s ascent truly means to America.
(Transporting a blog is quite a learning process. I am going to try again to make it so in the coming days. Toodles.)
Related articles
- Obama: Historian-in-chief (politico.com)
- What 2012 can learn from Teddy Roosevelt (edition.cnn.com)
Recent Comments