View on Obama's presidency; in a letter 

E. Ablorh-Odjidja, Ghanadot

September 16, 2014 

To President Obama:

I have not written anything disparaging about you, since my ebullient and adoring articles during the heady days of your first presidential campaign in 2008. 

Then came your premature acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize, and I went silent.  I thought the acceptance was too hurried and that it meant too much hubris on your part.  And the manner with which it was so horridly offered felt like a bribe - a pacification.

I also thought of others of the black race who had received the same award before you, after real substantive contributions to mankind and I thought yours may have cheapened the prize.

I had tentative thoughts about the Peace Prize as a good reward for world citizens of peaceful coexistence inclinations.  You could have been one of the deserving.  But the offer, barely months into your first term as the first Black American President, was a shocker.

The Prize, as I thought, was a trap to emasculate your administration. The pure expectation of peace implied has now begotten inactions and indecisions on the part of your administration. 

Not wanting to stray into the negative about you and your administration, I resisted telling you this earlier.

But six years into your presidency, something else is happening that may be more precious to me than the Peace award:  the template for Black presidencies to come after you is being set, molded, and tested by the same white power structure that has for centuries controlled us.

It looks like the prospect of more assertive Black presidents is growing doubtful.

You were elected for two reasons:  To heal the racial divide and to be a post-war president.  But these, we had hoped, would be achieved with minimal expense on Black legacy and aspirations.

Unfortunately, the legacy part is being tested and used by others; as a shield in the pursuit of ideological policies that have no direct benefits for us as Black people. But the proponents care less about how these policies may rather hurt us.

You are the leader of all of America, the world’s only superpower.  But the world sees you more as a weakened president because you are the first Black American president.  And listening to what the media is now saying about your presidency adds to the current confusion in the state of your foreign affairs.

Mark Styne, author, and conservative columnist writes you were elected to be the “Clement Attlee to Bush's Winston Churchill… in (your) case the enemy did not accept that the war was over. “

He concludes that it takes two (the enemy and you) to tango, except your principal move has been “to stand at the side of the floor looking cool.”

Mr. President, the imagery above is not nice. 

The Black culture invented the word “cool,” as a jazz idiom, to convey effectively, effervescing, fashionable, and affirmative energizing force in our acts.  But this reference to the “cool,” as used in Stein's piece, conjures up different imagery.  It means you are idle, to put it kindly.

Some whites thought they were doing us a favor and being “cool” when they voted for you – a feel-good preposition that some may now be questioning.  

Behind the thumbs up, I am certain, was the snickering: No achievement of note, but have it anyway.  Just be anti-Bush and the world would love us. 

The notion of a dormant America spread around the world would be useful for various reasons and purposes, including those that have antithetical views to America’s interest, but have no peaceful alternatives to its power.   

The sentiment that supported and cheered your novel presidency needs to be questioned.  Was it anti-Bush or anti-America?

And are you certain that this professed support is pro-Black and against racism as if racism is only confined to the United States of America?

My lowly office at home suggests that the sentiment was anti-American, Bush being a convenient factor.

Sometimes, America is its own worst enemy at home.  Locked in partisan combats here, it fails to see that part of the world that is superpower envious, that may want to play us for its own benefit.

As the world’s foremost practitioner of capitalism and most likely the richest, America is deemed to have too much power, too much consumption of global resources, and to top it all, it has also so much cultural dominance over the rest of the world.

As evidence, it is the world’s most preferred destination country for immigration.  Even immigrants already here, who rail against America daily, are reluctant to go back to their native lands. Or, migrate to some European countries where banana peels are still thrown at African soccer players!

Sure, there is still racism.  The slavery blemish cannot be forgotten.  But in comparison, America has still the first Black leader, the real leader of a modern superpower world.  A Black man in a position of envy is a magnet for influence as well as a vulnerable fulcrum that latent racism can seek to use to manipulate America’s power.

Mr. President, my peak regret is you are in that vulnerable position now.

Some of your liberal supporters have issues that have nothing to do with blackness.  They want these solved.  Your being black may be instinctively useful to them.  But they are not helping much with your current situation.  Some of these folks may be behind the push for your acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize.

These folks are not paying attention to the larger persona of your presidency, which happens to be your legacy.  The Peace Prize may end up producing optics that may later bug your legacy.

Your recent 9/11 memorial speech, staged in prime time with a background drapery that gave the impression of two horns protruding from the sides of your head, could have been avoided, or was it deliberate?

Same Mark Styne picks up another instance of your wrong optics in one of his columns:

“And so, it was that Barack Obama observed the anniversary of 9/11 by visiting something called Ka-BOOM! a non-profit that helps build playgrounds for children. Neither the President nor the First Lady nor anyone else in the 40-car motorcade appears to have thought it odd that, on the day the Twin Towers went Ka-BOOM!, America's Commander-in-Chief should be helping put children's toys in backpacks marked Ka-BOOM!”

Remember Bush in front of kids in a classroom on day 9/11?

Just sitting there in painful silence didn’t help Bush.  Neither was his tortured demeanor enough to depict the tragedy of the occasion for his detractors.  Instead, the occasion was used as a cue for the media to mock him. And now Obama promotes Ka-Boom, in front of kids on the anniversary date of 9/11?

Your mostly liberal-leaning friends in the media are not helping either.  This is not good.

They call you “Obama the reluctant warrior” and deliberately compare you to Moses.  Watch out.  The metaphor of Moses may conceal a slight, even as it sounds incoherent.  But the irony is hidden in the comparison with Moses, sir.  

In your case, you sought the presidency twice.  You were at your best at ambition; whereas poor Moses had the role of a leader entrusted on him.

As you focus on seeking some accommodations in the Middle East, you should listen to comments from some Middle East types.  They give me no hope.   To think of the acquiescence you have granted to this part of the world, yet leaders from the Middle East are still not showing you any deference should make you worry!

 “There is a disinclination to believe his promises, said Mustafa Alani of the Gulf Research Center in Dubai” to the Washington Post.

"We have reached a low point of trust in this administration," he says. "We think in a time of crisis Mr. Obama will walk away from everyone if it means saving his own skin."

And don’t expect much from the conservative press in America, they are your opponents, at least on ideological grounds.

Michael Gordon of the New York Post writes in his column “(Obama’s) worldview, his politics, his prejudices, his habits — they’ve been a mismatch for the country and its needs. He has been a dud even in the one area where he seemed a lock to make things better, racial relations.”

But here comes a shot at you from the liberal side, your friends, too:

Maureen Dowd, a liberal columnist at New York Times says, “The one thing it was impossible to imagine, back in the giddy days of the 2009 inauguration, as Americans basked in their open-mindedness and pluralism, was that the first African-American president would outsource race.”

Indeed, you have been a useful “open-minded” president, except when it came to the subject of race in Ferguson, Missouri, where Michael Brown, an unarmed 18-year-old Black was shot by a white police officer, then you became the first American president to “outsource race.”

Now Maureen Dowd accuses you of having “deputized Al Sharpton” to raise protest marches in Ferguson, thereby detaching yourself “at the very moment” when you could have made a difference on the issue of race relations!

Had a conservative written what Maureen Dowd did, he or she would have been called a racist.  In my case, if I did, the name Uncle Tom would have sufficed!

There is huge problem brewing for you in the media.  And you need to correct this fast before you leave office.  Whatever has happened and continues to happen that is negative before you leave office, including the perception of a weaker America, racial animus will put the entire blame on the first Black presidency.

It is time to pivot – to do something different.

We are six years into the first time a Black man held such phenomenal political power in the modern world. The Nobel Prize winner label hasn’t worked.  The anti-Bush sentiment that you continue to harp on hasn’t done much to burnish your reputation. 

My advice, tell the world you wanted so badly to be the peacemaker after the Nobel Peace Prize award, but the world wouldn’t let you.  And be ready to defend America’s interest first - vigorously.

E. Ablorh-Odjidja, Publisher www.ghanadot.com, Washington, DC, September 16, 2014

Permission to publish: Please feel free to publish or reproduce, with credits, unedited. If posted on a website, email a copy of the web page to publisher@ghanadot.com. Or don't publish at all.