THE OBAMA LEGACY
Jan 16, 2017 19:14:39 #
‘He was a man of grace’
Black Americans reflect on eight years with a black president: The pride, the triumphs and the missed opportunities.
ANDREW JACKSON II in Washington for President Obama’s first inauguration. He attended with his parents and other family. () BRENDA JACKSON, center, of Jeanerette, La., with her husband, Andrew. She attended President Obama’s first inauguration. “I never imagined I’d see a black president in my lifetime,” she said. (Carolyn Cole Los Angeles Times)
By Jaweed Kaleem, Kurtis Lee and Jenny Jarvie
JEANERETTE, La. — Eight years ago, Andrew Jackson II saw himself on the cusp of possibility in a world of firsts.
He boarded a bus that January with dozens of family members and friends, headed to the National Mall to watch the nation’s first black president — the first person he had ever voted for — make history.
As he watched the jumbo screens show Barack Obama sworn in on that sub-freezing day, his body was swept with warmth.
“I can take a chance to breathe,” he remembers thinking. “Obama will put us on the right course.”
He was 27 and living on his own after graduating from Louisiana State University. By day, he worked at a flooring warehouse, but his spare time was spent auditioning for musicals in Houston’s burgeoning arts scene. He saw a future breaking his own barriers as a singer in Atlanta or an actor in Hollywood.
Today, Jackson is back living in a four-room trailer next to his parents’ house in rural Louisiana, where he works three jobs and makes $22,000 a year. He has a 17-month-old son with an ex, and owes more than $20,000 in school loans. He’s stopped acting, though he still spends weekends singing at sports bars and lounges in Baton Rouge.
“We thought our dreams would be more visible under Obama,” he said recently from his home, which sits off a gravel road across from a barren sugar cane field. “They’re not.”
As Obama leaves office, his approval ratings remain among the highest of exiting presidents. They’re even better among African Americans.
But polls have shown black people to be more satisfied with Obama the man and less with their progress under Obama the president.
“Things have improved from the dark days of the recession,” said Marc Morial, chief executive of the National Urban League, which this month released a largely positive scorecard on the president’s record on jobs, education, civil rights and health for black America. “But the recovery for African Americans has not been as fast or as deep as it’s been for whites.”
Black employment grew in 2015, hitting its highest numbers since before the recession. Poverty is decreasing; life expectancy is going up. Gaps between blacks and other racial groups in education are gradually closing. But unemployment among African Americans is still nearly twice that of whites, and blacks continue to make up a disproportionate number of prisoners. More than a quarter of the country’s 37 million African Americans still live in poverty.
In interviews across the country at the twilight of Obama’s presidency, many African Americans credited the “hope and change” president with reforming unfair sentencing procedures, bringing health insurance to millions and holding violent police departments accountable. But when there was so much to do, many wondered, was that enough?
“I’m tired of hearing about the dream,” said Fabian Williams, a 41-year-old artist from Atlanta. “I’m over poetic sentiment. It sounds good, but the country has been stuck in the same position for 40 years.”
In Jeanerette, a primarily African American town of 5,533 two hours west of New Orleans, the Obama years haven’t changed much.
The Fruit of the Loom distribution center shut down in 2010, taking nearly 200 jobs with it. The vast sugar cane fields thrive, but they’re largely owned by outside companies and tilled by migrant workers, often Mexicans. A desolate downtown strip with shuttered storefronts recently celebrated the opening of a Subway sandwich shop.
Young people have flocked away, and the middle school closed a few years ago — Jackson’s parents attend church in the abandoned school building now.
Jackson spends his days at a desk job at a nonprofit where he helps secure community grants. At night, he manages a bingo hall.
“There’s still hope,” he says. But he’s lowered his ambitions.
“I used to want to be rich. I wanted to be Denzel Washington or Will Smith.” Now, he says, “I want to be healthy and well enough to take care of my family.”
How is it, he wonders, that his sights got set so much lower? “I’m an educated young man from a very accredited university in the state of Louisiana. Like, I can’t find a decent job? This is crazy.”
Nearly 1,800 miles away in Compton, Sharoni Little has considered Obama a father figure to the two boys she’s raised on her own in a city plagued by gang violence and failing schools.
“It’s going to be tough. Really, really tough,” Little, 51, said as she sat in the living room of her family’s modest single-level house in a neighborhood of neatly tended lawns not far from the roar of the 91 Freeway.
Obama mementos are scattered everywhere. A knit blanket depicting the first couple is draped across the sofa, and a sticker fixed on a door quotes Michelle Obama’s famous line, “When they go low, we go high.” A book on U.S. presidents sits on an end table, featuring George Washington and Obama on the cover.
Little, a business professor at USC, campaigned for Obama in 2008, going door to door with her two sons. Jared and Jaren were 10 at the time, the same age as Obama’s older daughter.
“The boys saw, every day, a man who looked like them, a man who understood them, who understood what it’s like to be a black man in this country,” she said. “He has made it clear that they have every right to sit at any table.”
After Trayvon Martin, a black teenager, was shot to death by a neighborhood watch volunteer in Florida almost five years ago, Little was moved to tears as Obama spoke on TV about how, if he had a son, “he’d look like Trayvon.”
She had given her kids “the talk” about how, as black boys, some people will see them as threats — and if they are police officers, they will have guns. She felt more urgency as protests over the deaths of black men after violent police encounters erupted in Ferguson, Mo., Baltimore and New York.
“We now had someone speaking out against the injustice because we had someone who had been a subject of it,” Little said.
Little lauded Obama’s legacy on education, healthcare and criminal justice reform, and she bristles when she hears African Americans say Obama did not do enough to improve black lives.
She credits an effort the president spearheaded to empower young black and Latino men, My Brother’s Keeper, with helping her raise her sons.
The mentoring program has paired the boys over the last three years with black male role models, including local politicians and professionals. One helped Jared earn his private pilot’s license, and he has been accepted at the Florida Institute of Technology, where he’ll study aerospace engineering. Jaren has picked up photography, snapping pictures of high-end sports cars at trade shows.
When she starts to feel it’s too hard to raise two sons on her own, Little remembers that Obama’s mother also did it alone. “The president has not only shown it’s OK to come from single-parent homes, but that … it’s not a barrier,” she said.
In Atlanta, Williams, the artist, remembers driving more than 600 miles to Washington for Obama’s inauguration in 2009.
“It was sort of ‘Cinderella’ for black people,” he said. All around him, strangers hugged and passed plates of pizza and chicken wings. “Just like at church, but in politics. I’d never seen anything like it. It was hopeful, you know? I thought we’d transcended race.”
He was 33, and now sees his younger self as naive. Now, he said, he has “both feet in reality.” He understands better the challenges Obama faced that kept him from getting more done.
He remembers the time a white congressman shouted, “You lie!” during a presidential address. The time a Fox News anchor saw fit to ask whether a jubilant fist bump exchanged by the first couple was a “terrorist fist jab.” He wonders why people are still asking where Obama was born.
“I’m disappointed in humans,” Williams said, sitting in his cluttered basement studio. “You know how difficult it is given who he is.… You can’t deduct race from anything here. We’re not post-racial.”
Williams paints bright, cosmic murals that belie his own dark frustrations. Some portray politicians as puppets controlled by big money. One depicts the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. glowing as he runs barefoot through a dreamlike constellation of stars, pointing one forefinger to the viewer and another to the words “WAKE UP.”
From the beginning, he said, he saw Obama as someone he could model himself after.
“I have four different kids with three mothers.... I looked at this president, and there was no drama, no mistresses. Just beautiful kids, and a steady wife.”
The president gave him the confidence to quit his lucrative career as a graphic designer to be a full-time artist: He went from earning $130,000 a year to, one year, as little as $22,000.
While he’s proud of his decision and wouldn’t change it, he can’t afford health insurance and isn’t sure he’ll ever buy a house.
As for what the president was able to accomplish, Williams credits him with halting the financial crisis and projecting American credibility to the rest of the world. But when it came to addressing police shootings of blacks at home, he said, America’s first black president seemed aloof.
“He was too eloquent, too cool, too passive,” Williams said. “I just can’t give him a good grade in terms of civil rights for black people. We didn’t get anything, really.”
For an older generation of African Americans, back in Louisiana, it has been easier to count accomplishments than regret missed opportunities — there have always been plenty of those.
“I never imagined I’d see a black president in my lifetime,” said Brenda Jackson, Andrew’s 65-year-old mother, who in 2008 had organized the family’s trip to the inauguration even while Hillary Clinton and Obama were still competing in the Democratic primaries.
“I grew up with my family working on a sugar cane plantation before the Civil Rights Act. So to see him up there, oh my, it was something,” she said.
She followed his every move on TV when he was first elected, praying he wouldn’t be assassinated. As she watched a CNN special last month on Obama’s legacy, she broke down in tears when she thought about “all the hate” that had been directed his way.
Jackson has had her doubts. A Christian who is more conservative than her son when it comes to religion, she didn’t like it when he supported same-sex marriage. Her son says many of his friends have been unable to leave “sugar country” or find good jobs over the last eight years. Some are in jail, he said. “Some of them are dead.”
Still, Brenda Jackson credits the president for doing what he could do.
“He was able to accomplish all that he could accomplish,” she said. “He was a man of grace.”
jaweed.kaleem
@latimes.com
kurtis.lee@latimes.com
Kaleem reported from Jeanerette, La., Lee from Compton and special correspondent Jarvie from Atlanta.
Black Americans reflect on eight years with a black president: The pride, the triumphs and the missed opportunities.
ANDREW JACKSON II in Washington for President Obama’s first inauguration. He attended with his parents and other family. () BRENDA JACKSON, center, of Jeanerette, La., with her husband, Andrew. She attended President Obama’s first inauguration. “I never imagined I’d see a black president in my lifetime,” she said. (Carolyn Cole Los Angeles Times)
By Jaweed Kaleem, Kurtis Lee and Jenny Jarvie
JEANERETTE, La. — Eight years ago, Andrew Jackson II saw himself on the cusp of possibility in a world of firsts.
He boarded a bus that January with dozens of family members and friends, headed to the National Mall to watch the nation’s first black president — the first person he had ever voted for — make history.
As he watched the jumbo screens show Barack Obama sworn in on that sub-freezing day, his body was swept with warmth.
“I can take a chance to breathe,” he remembers thinking. “Obama will put us on the right course.”
He was 27 and living on his own after graduating from Louisiana State University. By day, he worked at a flooring warehouse, but his spare time was spent auditioning for musicals in Houston’s burgeoning arts scene. He saw a future breaking his own barriers as a singer in Atlanta or an actor in Hollywood.
Today, Jackson is back living in a four-room trailer next to his parents’ house in rural Louisiana, where he works three jobs and makes $22,000 a year. He has a 17-month-old son with an ex, and owes more than $20,000 in school loans. He’s stopped acting, though he still spends weekends singing at sports bars and lounges in Baton Rouge.
“We thought our dreams would be more visible under Obama,” he said recently from his home, which sits off a gravel road across from a barren sugar cane field. “They’re not.”
As Obama leaves office, his approval ratings remain among the highest of exiting presidents. They’re even better among African Americans.
But polls have shown black people to be more satisfied with Obama the man and less with their progress under Obama the president.
“Things have improved from the dark days of the recession,” said Marc Morial, chief executive of the National Urban League, which this month released a largely positive scorecard on the president’s record on jobs, education, civil rights and health for black America. “But the recovery for African Americans has not been as fast or as deep as it’s been for whites.”
Black employment grew in 2015, hitting its highest numbers since before the recession. Poverty is decreasing; life expectancy is going up. Gaps between blacks and other racial groups in education are gradually closing. But unemployment among African Americans is still nearly twice that of whites, and blacks continue to make up a disproportionate number of prisoners. More than a quarter of the country’s 37 million African Americans still live in poverty.
In interviews across the country at the twilight of Obama’s presidency, many African Americans credited the “hope and change” president with reforming unfair sentencing procedures, bringing health insurance to millions and holding violent police departments accountable. But when there was so much to do, many wondered, was that enough?
“I’m tired of hearing about the dream,” said Fabian Williams, a 41-year-old artist from Atlanta. “I’m over poetic sentiment. It sounds good, but the country has been stuck in the same position for 40 years.”
In Jeanerette, a primarily African American town of 5,533 two hours west of New Orleans, the Obama years haven’t changed much.
The Fruit of the Loom distribution center shut down in 2010, taking nearly 200 jobs with it. The vast sugar cane fields thrive, but they’re largely owned by outside companies and tilled by migrant workers, often Mexicans. A desolate downtown strip with shuttered storefronts recently celebrated the opening of a Subway sandwich shop.
Young people have flocked away, and the middle school closed a few years ago — Jackson’s parents attend church in the abandoned school building now.
Jackson spends his days at a desk job at a nonprofit where he helps secure community grants. At night, he manages a bingo hall.
“There’s still hope,” he says. But he’s lowered his ambitions.
“I used to want to be rich. I wanted to be Denzel Washington or Will Smith.” Now, he says, “I want to be healthy and well enough to take care of my family.”
How is it, he wonders, that his sights got set so much lower? “I’m an educated young man from a very accredited university in the state of Louisiana. Like, I can’t find a decent job? This is crazy.”
Nearly 1,800 miles away in Compton, Sharoni Little has considered Obama a father figure to the two boys she’s raised on her own in a city plagued by gang violence and failing schools.
“It’s going to be tough. Really, really tough,” Little, 51, said as she sat in the living room of her family’s modest single-level house in a neighborhood of neatly tended lawns not far from the roar of the 91 Freeway.
Obama mementos are scattered everywhere. A knit blanket depicting the first couple is draped across the sofa, and a sticker fixed on a door quotes Michelle Obama’s famous line, “When they go low, we go high.” A book on U.S. presidents sits on an end table, featuring George Washington and Obama on the cover.
Little, a business professor at USC, campaigned for Obama in 2008, going door to door with her two sons. Jared and Jaren were 10 at the time, the same age as Obama’s older daughter.
“The boys saw, every day, a man who looked like them, a man who understood them, who understood what it’s like to be a black man in this country,” she said. “He has made it clear that they have every right to sit at any table.”
After Trayvon Martin, a black teenager, was shot to death by a neighborhood watch volunteer in Florida almost five years ago, Little was moved to tears as Obama spoke on TV about how, if he had a son, “he’d look like Trayvon.”
She had given her kids “the talk” about how, as black boys, some people will see them as threats — and if they are police officers, they will have guns. She felt more urgency as protests over the deaths of black men after violent police encounters erupted in Ferguson, Mo., Baltimore and New York.
“We now had someone speaking out against the injustice because we had someone who had been a subject of it,” Little said.
Little lauded Obama’s legacy on education, healthcare and criminal justice reform, and she bristles when she hears African Americans say Obama did not do enough to improve black lives.
She credits an effort the president spearheaded to empower young black and Latino men, My Brother’s Keeper, with helping her raise her sons.
The mentoring program has paired the boys over the last three years with black male role models, including local politicians and professionals. One helped Jared earn his private pilot’s license, and he has been accepted at the Florida Institute of Technology, where he’ll study aerospace engineering. Jaren has picked up photography, snapping pictures of high-end sports cars at trade shows.
When she starts to feel it’s too hard to raise two sons on her own, Little remembers that Obama’s mother also did it alone. “The president has not only shown it’s OK to come from single-parent homes, but that … it’s not a barrier,” she said.
In Atlanta, Williams, the artist, remembers driving more than 600 miles to Washington for Obama’s inauguration in 2009.
“It was sort of ‘Cinderella’ for black people,” he said. All around him, strangers hugged and passed plates of pizza and chicken wings. “Just like at church, but in politics. I’d never seen anything like it. It was hopeful, you know? I thought we’d transcended race.”
He was 33, and now sees his younger self as naive. Now, he said, he has “both feet in reality.” He understands better the challenges Obama faced that kept him from getting more done.
He remembers the time a white congressman shouted, “You lie!” during a presidential address. The time a Fox News anchor saw fit to ask whether a jubilant fist bump exchanged by the first couple was a “terrorist fist jab.” He wonders why people are still asking where Obama was born.
“I’m disappointed in humans,” Williams said, sitting in his cluttered basement studio. “You know how difficult it is given who he is.… You can’t deduct race from anything here. We’re not post-racial.”
Williams paints bright, cosmic murals that belie his own dark frustrations. Some portray politicians as puppets controlled by big money. One depicts the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. glowing as he runs barefoot through a dreamlike constellation of stars, pointing one forefinger to the viewer and another to the words “WAKE UP.”
From the beginning, he said, he saw Obama as someone he could model himself after.
“I have four different kids with three mothers.... I looked at this president, and there was no drama, no mistresses. Just beautiful kids, and a steady wife.”
The president gave him the confidence to quit his lucrative career as a graphic designer to be a full-time artist: He went from earning $130,000 a year to, one year, as little as $22,000.
While he’s proud of his decision and wouldn’t change it, he can’t afford health insurance and isn’t sure he’ll ever buy a house.
As for what the president was able to accomplish, Williams credits him with halting the financial crisis and projecting American credibility to the rest of the world. But when it came to addressing police shootings of blacks at home, he said, America’s first black president seemed aloof.
“He was too eloquent, too cool, too passive,” Williams said. “I just can’t give him a good grade in terms of civil rights for black people. We didn’t get anything, really.”
For an older generation of African Americans, back in Louisiana, it has been easier to count accomplishments than regret missed opportunities — there have always been plenty of those.
“I never imagined I’d see a black president in my lifetime,” said Brenda Jackson, Andrew’s 65-year-old mother, who in 2008 had organized the family’s trip to the inauguration even while Hillary Clinton and Obama were still competing in the Democratic primaries.
“I grew up with my family working on a sugar cane plantation before the Civil Rights Act. So to see him up there, oh my, it was something,” she said.
She followed his every move on TV when he was first elected, praying he wouldn’t be assassinated. As she watched a CNN special last month on Obama’s legacy, she broke down in tears when she thought about “all the hate” that had been directed his way.
Jackson has had her doubts. A Christian who is more conservative than her son when it comes to religion, she didn’t like it when he supported same-sex marriage. Her son says many of his friends have been unable to leave “sugar country” or find good jobs over the last eight years. Some are in jail, he said. “Some of them are dead.”
Still, Brenda Jackson credits the president for doing what he could do.
“He was able to accomplish all that he could accomplish,” she said. “He was a man of grace.”
jaweed.kaleem
@latimes.com
kurtis.lee@latimes.com
Kaleem reported from Jeanerette, La., Lee from Compton and special correspondent Jarvie from Atlanta.
Jan 16, 2017 19:35:44 #
Progressive One wrote:
‘He was a man of grace’ br Black Americans reflect... (show quote)
Sounds like an epitaph, hmmmmmm...
Are you having special thought's.
Jan 17, 2017 04:04:09 #
Obama's Farewell Address
I'm King Of The World, And Have Done Nothing To Show For It In 8 Years Except, Play Golf And Spend 95 Million Dollars On Vacations and Traveling The World
I'm King Of The World, And Have Done Nothing To Show For It In 8 Years Except, Play Golf And Spend 95 Million Dollars On Vacations and Traveling The World
Jan 17, 2017 07:14:04 #
Doc110 wrote:
Obama's Farewell Address
I'm King Of The World, And Have Done Nothing To Show For It In 8 Years Except, Play Golf And Spend 95 Million Dollars On Vacations and Traveling The World
I'm King Of The World, And Have Done Nothing To Show For It In 8 Years Except, Play Golf And Spend 95 Million Dollars On Vacations and Traveling The World
Jan 17, 2017 08:13:39 #
Progressive One wrote:
‘He was a man of grace’ br Black Americans reflect... (show quote)
Obama's legacy is Donald Trump!
Jan 17, 2017 12:15:04 #
Jan 17, 2017 12:15:04 #
Jan 17, 2017 12:15:04 #
Jan 17, 2017 12:17:46 #
Progressive One wrote:
I won't even argue nonsense any more.............
Well, all you post is nonsense.
Jan 17, 2017 12:23:58 #
nwtk2007
Loc: Texas
Rivers wrote:
Obama's legacy is Donald Trump!
Exactly right. Obama just wasn't very smart. Makes one think he wanted Clinton to lose.
Jan 17, 2017 13:07:14 #
Progressive One wrote:
I won't even argue nonsense any more.............
01/16/2017 Barack Obama: a noble failure
http://angrybearblog.com/category/politics
Dan Crawford, takes a shot at evaluating the President Obama legacy.
New Deal democrat reviews, Barack Obama: a noble failure
Let me preface this essay by saying that I voted for Barack Obama twice, in both 2008 and 2012. In fact in 2008 I supported him in the primary against Hillary Clinton, who I believed had a ceiling of support at about 52% or 53% even under even under the most favorable of circumstances (which certainly seems correct now!).
I believed Obama was simply more capable of winning the Presidency, and I believed he could overcome his weaknesses and grow into the job. By and large he did, but it took 5 full years before he finally gave up on his central, failed approached to governance.
I believe that failure is going to cause him to be ranked, over time, in the bottom half of all Presidents.
“There is no red or blue America,” Barack Obama declared in the 2004 convention speech that first brought him fame. His presidency was largely based on that premise. I think very few people would agree with that statement now. This worldview was epitomized in his 2009 Inaugural Address:
Obama's Inaugural Address: The Full Text
http://content.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1872715-4,00.html
On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord.On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas, that for far too long have strangled our politics.
…. Everywhere we look, there is work to be done. The state of the economy calls for action, bold and swift, and we will act ….
…. What the cynics fail to understand is that the ground has shifted beneath them — that the stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply.
For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness….
We cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve ….
But on that very same day in 2009, Mitch McConnell and other GOP leaders also met, and resolved a strategy of total intransigence, to deny Barack Obama any bipartisan victories whatsoever.
GOP’s Anti-Obama Campaign Started Night Of Inauguration
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/25/robert-draper-anti-obama-campaign_n_1452899.html
Asked about that strategy early on, Obama replied that if Republicans would not come to the table with him, then they would miss the chance to have their imprint of the solutions to big problems. Rather than be shut out, they would negotiate with him for bipartisan Great Solutions.
Eight years later, on the eve of the inauguration of Donald Trump, a man who more than half of all Americans believe lacks the basic temperament to be President, the strategy of complete intransigence must be judged a spectacular success.
Obama’s entire governing philosophy is in shambles. Few people now would agree with Obama’s inaugural proclamation that old political battles are over, or that “the lines of tribe” have dissolved.
Barack Obama achieved three notable domestic victories in his time in office: the 2009 stimulus, Obamacare, and his “evolution” on gay marriage which helped lay the groundwork for the apparent success — so far — of that ruling.
Internationally he got American troops out of Iraq, brokered a nuclear deal with Iran, an agreement on global warming, and kept significant numbers of American “boots on the ground” being committed to any new conflict anywhere.
But while Obama acknowledged in his 2009 inauguration speech that the economy was in crisis, he aimed a firehouse of money at the financial sector, while leaving homeowners helpless. The “TARP” program was barely implemented at all; mortgage crammed-down bankruptcy legislation, which he asked be delayed in 2008, he declined to press at all once he took office.
As a result, Wall Street and corporate America rebounded to record profits quickly. Jobs came a little later, but even now after 8 years few would argue that we have returned to full employment. And wages languished for years, even now only growing at 2.5% a year for nonsupervisory personnel.
Meanwhile he failed at a basic task of administration: nominating and having confirmed candidates for hundreds of Federal vacancies, including not just judgeships, but also several appointments to the Federal Reserve, and *every one* of the nine administrators of the Postal Service. All of these will be gleefully filled by his adversaries after January 21.
And should any of the Supreme Court’s liberal justices — or even Justice Kennedy — pass away or retire from the bench in the next 4 years, the odds are very good that 5 hardline conservative jurists will roll back Obama’s victory on gay rights, along with abortion rights and perhaps even going so far as to reinstate the Lochner ruling which essentially declared all Federal economic welfare legislation unconstitutional.
Great presidents do not see their signature legislation repealed within 30 days of their departure from office. And nobody with working brain cells would deny that the nation of red and blue states is further apart than ever, with people actually making choices about where they want to live based on the political leanings of the state and locality.
Great presidents do not see the number of elected offices held by members of their party shrink to near 100 year lows.
Meanwhile Trump also promises to roll back all of Obama’s international deals. And TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, didn’t even survive to January 20, dying at the ballot box on November 8.
The root cause for all of this misfortune is that Barack Obama consistently overestimated the power of his charisma, and underestimated the determination of his opposition. He thought that the merits of his proposals and accomplishments would sell themselves. Thus as early as summer 2009, he allowed the argument about his healthcare legislation to be ceded to “tea party” protesters who appeared at Congressional town halls.
Trump takes to Twitter to use it as a megaphone when he at least temporarily saved 800 jobs at Carrier. Obama never made sure Americans understood that Obamacare had given coverage to some 20 million people, and that medical cost growth had slowed.
In 2010 retiring democratic Representative Marion Berry of Arkansas captured Obama’s quintessential shortcoming in one devastating vignette:
Berry: Obama said "big difference" between '10 and '94 is "me"
http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-congress/2010/01/berry-obama-said-big-difference-between-10-and-94-is-me-024491
“Barack Obama just kept telling us how good it was going to be. The president himself, when that was brought up in one group, said, ‘Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.’”
Disaster ensured. And ensued again in 2014 as well. And most especially in 2016, with the essential continuation of the United States as a republic more at risk than at any time since 1861.
Barack Obama had noble ideals, and a noble concept of the politics of governance. But his goals were scotched, and his accomplishments are all on the verge of extinguishment.
He is well known for taking the “long view,” but sadly for him – and for us – in the long view history will likely judge Barack Obama’s presidency a noble failure.
Barack Obama’s Long Game A month of victories has transformed the president’s second term.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/07/barack-obamas-long-game-120259_Page2.html#.
Jan 17, 2017 15:26:07 #
400 OBAMA ACCOMPLISHMENTS SO FAR, WITH CITATIONS
In 2008, we elected the most progressive president in history. And regardless of the negativity, when you actually look at the record, there has been a lot of progress since January 20, 2009. If you’ll recall, when he took over the reins of power, the economy was in free-fall and we were practically a world laughingstock. That is no longer the case.
Here is a list of many of President Obama’s accomplishments as President. Every one of them has a citation, so no one can dismiss them out of hand, although many have tried since I started to compile this list Even with the obstacles we gave him, especially the Republican Congress, this President will leave behind a wonderful legacy.
http://pleasecutthecrap.com/obama-accomplishments/
In 2008, we elected the most progressive president in history. And regardless of the negativity, when you actually look at the record, there has been a lot of progress since January 20, 2009. If you’ll recall, when he took over the reins of power, the economy was in free-fall and we were practically a world laughingstock. That is no longer the case.
Here is a list of many of President Obama’s accomplishments as President. Every one of them has a citation, so no one can dismiss them out of hand, although many have tried since I started to compile this list Even with the obstacles we gave him, especially the Republican Congress, this President will leave behind a wonderful legacy.
http://pleasecutthecrap.com/obama-accomplishments/
Jan 17, 2017 15:39:07 #
nwtk2007
Loc: Texas
Progressive One wrote:
400 OBAMA ACCOMPLISHMENTS SO FAR, WITH CITATIONS b... (show quote)
You probably think he just thought up all this on his own. LOL! This is normal business, brought to him, he's briefed, and then he signs it. But hey, he did some signing, that's for sure.
His real accomplishments have to do with worsening race relations in the states, which he actually claimed are better now that when he first took office. THAT is beyond stupid. I need not comment further.
Jan 17, 2017 15:50:59 #
nwtk2007 wrote:
You probably think he just thought up all this on his own. LOL! This is normal business, brought to him, he's briefed, and then he signs it. But hey, he did some signing, that's for sure.
His real accomplishments have to do with worsening race relations in the states, which he actually claimed are better now that when he first took office. THAT is beyond stupid. I need not comment further.
His real accomplishments have to do with worsening race relations in the states, which he actually claimed are better now that when he first took office. THAT is beyond stupid. I need not comment further.
Racists are the only people that see relations as worse. A Black POTUS made them worse by default according to their mutated asses. The rest of us are just fine.
Jan 17, 2017 15:59:07 #
Looking back to forge ahead
Paradegoers reflect on King legacy, with some preparing for Trump
THE LOS ANGELES Unified School District All City Honor Marching Band performs Monday at the 32nd annual Kingdom Day Parade. (Photographs by Marcus Yam Los Angeles Times) MARIA ARIEL DANTE, center, and her family watch the Kingdom Day Parade. The theme this year was “Now more than ever, we all must work together.” ()
By Laura J. Nelson
Bright skies greeted the dancers, brass bands and long lines of dignitaries who joined the 32nd annual Kingdom Day Parade in Los Angeles on Monday to honor the life and achievements of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
The groups that marched — including a New Orleans-style brass band and brightly clad performers from the Los Angeles Korean Dance Academy — drew cheers from the spectators who packed curbs along the parade route in South L.A.
Billed as the nation’s oldest and largest parade of its kind, the Kingdom Day celebration was expected to draw at least 200,000 people.
The impending inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump focused some officials’ attention on how they would push back against the new administration’s policies and decisions. Others referenced the parade’s theme: “Now more than ever, we all must work together.”
“We are confronting a dichotomy of democracy — something that is unique in our history,” state Senate leader Kevin de León (D-Los Angeles) said at a breakfast before the parade. “More than ever, California must remain a beacon of hope and opportunity in an uncertain world.”
He added: “California will never appease anyone who seeks to undermine our economic prosperity and fundamental human rights.”
Los Angeles County health workers, including nurses and technicians, marched in protest of a possible repeal of the Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s landmark healthcare legislation. And L.A. County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas marched with them, holding a sign that read, “Obamacare Works.”
“You cannot be silent in the face of tyranny, in the face of racism and discrimination,” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), the parade’s grand marshal, said during a televised interview. “Get together, march, organize, protest, fight for our rights.”
Riding on a float with other Los Angeles City Council members, Council President Herb Wesson said city leaders would continue to “push against hate, intolerance and division.”
Other groups celebrating at the parade Monday included representatives from local labor unions and law enforcement agencies, as well as high school marching bands and the Omega Psi Phi fraternity — the first predominately black fraternity to be founded at a historically black university.
Another float, sponsored by Denny’s and adorned in gold and green tinsel, displayed a large photo of the slain civil rights leader.
“We stand with him, and with the community, in trying to support all the things that he stood for,” Ronald Smothers, who owns a Denny’s restaurant on Crenshaw Boulevard, said in an interview with KABC-TV Channel 7.
Other events and service projects were held throughout Southern California on Monday to honor King, including group volunteer programs and a public reading of the civil rights leader’s speeches in Exposition Park.
laura.nelson@latimes.com
Paradegoers reflect on King legacy, with some preparing for Trump
THE LOS ANGELES Unified School District All City Honor Marching Band performs Monday at the 32nd annual Kingdom Day Parade. (Photographs by Marcus Yam Los Angeles Times) MARIA ARIEL DANTE, center, and her family watch the Kingdom Day Parade. The theme this year was “Now more than ever, we all must work together.” ()
By Laura J. Nelson
Bright skies greeted the dancers, brass bands and long lines of dignitaries who joined the 32nd annual Kingdom Day Parade in Los Angeles on Monday to honor the life and achievements of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
The groups that marched — including a New Orleans-style brass band and brightly clad performers from the Los Angeles Korean Dance Academy — drew cheers from the spectators who packed curbs along the parade route in South L.A.
Billed as the nation’s oldest and largest parade of its kind, the Kingdom Day celebration was expected to draw at least 200,000 people.
The impending inauguration of President-elect Donald Trump focused some officials’ attention on how they would push back against the new administration’s policies and decisions. Others referenced the parade’s theme: “Now more than ever, we all must work together.”
“We are confronting a dichotomy of democracy — something that is unique in our history,” state Senate leader Kevin de León (D-Los Angeles) said at a breakfast before the parade. “More than ever, California must remain a beacon of hope and opportunity in an uncertain world.”
He added: “California will never appease anyone who seeks to undermine our economic prosperity and fundamental human rights.”
Los Angeles County health workers, including nurses and technicians, marched in protest of a possible repeal of the Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s landmark healthcare legislation. And L.A. County Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas marched with them, holding a sign that read, “Obamacare Works.”
“You cannot be silent in the face of tyranny, in the face of racism and discrimination,” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), the parade’s grand marshal, said during a televised interview. “Get together, march, organize, protest, fight for our rights.”
Riding on a float with other Los Angeles City Council members, Council President Herb Wesson said city leaders would continue to “push against hate, intolerance and division.”
Other groups celebrating at the parade Monday included representatives from local labor unions and law enforcement agencies, as well as high school marching bands and the Omega Psi Phi fraternity — the first predominately black fraternity to be founded at a historically black university.
Another float, sponsored by Denny’s and adorned in gold and green tinsel, displayed a large photo of the slain civil rights leader.
“We stand with him, and with the community, in trying to support all the things that he stood for,” Ronald Smothers, who owns a Denny’s restaurant on Crenshaw Boulevard, said in an interview with KABC-TV Channel 7.
Other events and service projects were held throughout Southern California on Monday to honor King, including group volunteer programs and a public reading of the civil rights leader’s speeches in Exposition Park.
laura.nelson@latimes.com
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