NYU Black Renaissance Noire Summer/Fall 2011 | Page 12

Salon.com

FireDogLake.com

The Nation.com

10

Should Obama run again? If he were
to serve one term he’d be ranked as a
superior president by future historians.
He saved the Nation from a depression
and destroyed Al-Qaeda by taking out
bin Laden, erasing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell
are only a few of his accomplishments.
Running again will increase the possibility
of a “lone- gunman-who-only-paranoidswould-believe-was-part-of-a-conspiracy”
doing harm to him, or members of
his family. He can probably contribute
more by using his prestige as an ex
president like Carter and Clinton.
A second term will only lead to more
grey hairs, sleepless nights, anxiety
and could possibly lead him to start
smoking again, which will further
destroy his organs and precipitate lung
cancer. We lost Malcolm, Martin
Luther King Jr., RFK, and JFK who
were in their prime. We need one of
ours to stay around for a while.

004-Essay-Ishmael-Reed.indd 10

If he runs again he will be pestered by
progressives who represent only a
fraction of the Democratic Party but
who get generous media time because
they are anti Obama and (who continue
to believe naively that the Tea Party is a
grass roots uprising against Wall Street.)
Some of the worst bad mouthing of
Obama comes from “progressive” sites
like Salon.com, Firedog Lake, and
The Nation. Katrina Vanden Heuvel,
the Nation’s editor wouldn’t even give
credit to Obama for capturing bin
Laden. The Nation’s John Nichols says
that Obama is shameful. Nation
contributor Ari Melber has been
especially critical, whiny, petty and
abusive. He said that all that Obama
had accomplished were modest health
care reform, and Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.
Tell that to the millions of autoworkers
whose jobs were saved because Obama
bailed out the auto industry and the
estimated 2-3 million who held jobs as a
result of the stimulus. The “Progressive”
Nation beats up on Fox News, yet
Fox has a higher percentage of black
contributors than the Nation; the
special sports issue, edited by radical
sports commentator, David Zirin,
didn’t include one black or latino
contributor. Paul Krugman says that
Obama should have spent more on
the stimulus, ignoring the fact that
the Republican Party blocked his
wishes. He wanted to close Guantanamo.
The Republicans blocked that.
Progressive radio’s Nicole Sandler says
that Obama hasn’t accomplished
anything. When I reminded white
progressives that they weren’t his base
since the majority of Democrats still
supported Obama, I got bawled out
by Salon’s Joan Walsh, who called my
comment, “pernicious.” She said that
she was resentful of my saying that
blacks were his political base. I made
no such comment and her readers
reminded her, yet she still refuses to
provide a link to my New York Time’s
article where I criticized the vanity
of white progressives.

The bad mouthing of the president
led to the billionaire Koch brothers
funded puppet Tea Party victory
in 2010 because, influenced by the
incitement of progressives, thousands
of voters stayed home. Gays stayed
home because they didn’t get Don’t Ask
Don’t Tell fast enough. White women
stayed home even though Obama, on
January 29, 2009, signed The Lilly
Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which accords
equal pay to women. The president
put two women—Sonia Sotomayer in
2009 and Elena Kagen in 2010—on
the Supreme Court. But despite these
Obama driven accomplishments for
women, a recent pew poll says that
the percentage of white women who
wish to join the Republican Party has
increased. Like the pumas at The Daily
Beast, who want to insure a Republican
victory by urging that Obama be
primaried, some women want to
risk the election of those who would
condemn them to back alley abortions
and return them to house arrest.
Some women are the last of the
oppressed to vote for people who
would deny them choice. This is
nothing new. While visiting Toronto
in 2010, I learned that southern white
women had sponsored a plaque to
be placed in front of a hotel because
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