This diary is a brief reflection of the conversations during yesterday’s Thanksgiving day dinner that focused on the past two years of the Obama administration. My African American family is quite large and is rife with many opinions which always are exchanged at Thanksgiving and Christmas gatherings with a mixture of deep reflection and highly therapeutic strong assertive humor. When folks arrive they always expect to find plenty of good cuisine and warm conversation and they are never disappointed. Thus it is fairly obvious that sooner or later the conversation around the dinner table would turn to President and Michelle Obama which I will share with you in the next section below.
It was unanimous that all of my family members held the First Family in high regard and a series of sincere compliments were paid to the FLOTUS and her children. One nephew wondered what Obama would do if fighting breaks out between North and South Korea, considering that the U.S. is already tied up in Iraq and Afghanistan? An aunt held up her fork and said, “You know that poor man has been getting hit with one thing after another. Two wars were going on and the economy was crashing before he even took a step inside the White House. It’s a doggone shame what do they expect him to do, and all those big mouth bigots are just ripping him up day and night!” A niece, recent college graduate, spoke up and said, “Well what has he done for black folks? I realize times are bad but black unemployment is up to 30% to 40% in some areas across the country. He really needs to do something. People can’t eat speeches no matter how much eloquence he puts in them!” (The whole table breaks out with loud laughter, with side comments.)
An older family friend paused from a sip of cider and said, “You know Obama can’t really get anything through the Congress. Those darn Republicans just hate him cause of his color and they don’t intend to give him the time of day. He’s just wasting his time trying to get them to compromise, COMPROMISE FOR WHAT!” (A number of people responded to her emotional question with “that’s right” and “you know it!”)
At this point I spoke up and said, “I agree Obama’s wasting precious time trying to compromise with the Republicans. Originally when he first came into office, the Republican game was to stonewall Obama by saying NO and attending his White House meetings to give the appearance that they were trying to compromise with him on the key issues. But now that they have taken back the House of Representatives, they think that they are close to winning the entire government back, so why waste time going to meet with someone you actually hate. That’s why they snubbed a meeting already scheduled to meet with Obama last week. They have already written Obama off.”
My niece said, “That’s the reason why a lot of young people are turned off by Obama, he keeps begging the Republicans for help, instead of taking care of business.” I put down my fork and said,” My reason for voting for Obama wasn’t because he would become the first black President of the United States. Certainly I was attracted to his campaign messages, but the main reason I liked Obama was the success he had in his academic career and the respect that he had throughout the academic world. It was my opinion that the problems created by eight years of Republican administration of the America government were so perplexing that it would take a number of new highly trained thinkers to come up with new creative solutions, and this was the fastest means of solving America’s problems. It was my hope that Obama would be able to attract many high level academics to his staff in the administration. Unfortunately, he decided to settle for political retreads from the Clinton administration, and so thus far he has not achieved the miracle that the American people hoped and dreamed for. IMO Obama needs to forget about the Republicans and their “shadow government” and use all the tools that he has in the Executive to plan his own strategic moves. He needs to sit down and formulate new powerful daring “blue sky” plans, not proposals, but plans that he can execute solely within the power of the Executive as a means of attacking these problems.
He should confine Biden to speaking engagements and get highly qualified people into the Oval office to help him design these plans. The PREZ needs a real “war room” to plan how to fight his battles both on the domestic and foreign fronts.”
Another Aunt who had been quietly listening to all of the conversation responded softly and said, “What you are saying is that the President lacks vision, and the vision that I mean is vision in the Biblical sense. You know in the Bible it says “Where the people lack vision, they perish”. If the president were to achieve such vision, the rest would follow.”
The room suddenly fell quiet and remained so while everyone digested these softly spoken words of wisdom. The silence was finally broken by someone entering the room loudly asking, “Does anyone have the final score of the Patriots Detroit game?” With that question the dinner conversational buzz resumed on a different topic.
