Friday, September 07, 2012

Meeting Challenges



U.S. President Barack Obama has met many challenges, chief among them becoming president of the United States of America as a (bi-racial) black man, a legislator, a family man, an intellectual and a skilled politician.  He and his family comprise a beautiful picture of success and happiness, goals that all Americans strive to achieve. 

If he, with all the historical racial baggage that pre-dated his era, could succeed to the presidency, that old adage that any American could, rings true.

He did inherit a country mired in debt and war and poor international press.  There was a lot of work to be done to try to solve all of that.  He has had almost four years of struggling with the mass of his country's problems, domestic and international, and he has, in fact, solved very little.  The task is so monumental it is hardly surprising.  But he has tried.  Perhaps not hard enough.

In that, to begin with, he promised in the first flush of victory that his would be a bipartisan administration, that he would work hard as a Democratic president of his country to reach agreement with the Republicans who contested and continue to contest his rule.  The two political ideologies, it would appear, were simply too wide apart in their values and priorities and what has resulted in those four years has been a wider division than ever before.

"Our problems can be solved, our challenges can be met" he now promises, where formerly he had been swept up on a soft tsunami wave of hope for the future.  The future appears to have moved further on the horizon, proving very hard to reach.  Unemployment is high, much higher than Americans are accustomed to.  Too many people are out of work, out of hope.  The economy has not recovered as hoped, despite an enormous investment through tax funding.

"America, I never said this journey would be easy, and I won't promise that now.  Yes our path is harder - but it leads to a better place", he claims.  In this election campaign President Obama has indulged through his election team, and his agreement, in some fairly low-down accusations against his political opponent for the presidency.  Mitt Romney is a seasoned political veteran, a man of political promise just as Barack Obama was; a resolute man of personal rectitude.

"I refuse to ask middle-class families to give up their deductions for owning a home or raising their kids just to pay for another millionaire's tax cut", he promised.  Of course he too is a millionaire, but for the purposes of electioneering he is the man-on-the-street concerned about health coverage, about public safety, about job security, about international events somehow impacting on the well-being of his country, sick of being embroiled in foreign wars.

Mr. Obama has set out to soothe those concerns; re-elected he promises to create a million new manufacturing jobs by 2016.  Miraculously, he will persuade his population to boycott cheap and attractive Chinese imports and buy American instead, at higher prices, so that fellow Americans can be gainfully employed.  Just when the reverse had occurred, leaving them manufacture-less and indebted.

College and university tuition in the U.S. is sky-high, and he will cut those tuition rates to make university and college attendance more reasonable to a greater swath of the middle class.  The U.S. already has more lawyers as a percentage of the population than any other country on Earth as one of the most litigious societies globally.  Mr. Obama is attempting to re-inspire the electorate to hope, to dispel their disillusion as he once so successfully did.

Those irritating polls indicate that Mr. Romney is viewed as a better candidate for his presumed capability in wrestling with the struggling economy.  A full 60% of white males appear to be geared to vote for Mr. Romney rather than Mr. Obama.  Generally, people have a more favourable personal view of Mr. Obama's likeable personality than Mr. Romney's.

Another cliff-hanger in the works.

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