A Potpourri on Obama

Here are few thoughts on our president elect. Now that he’s won everybody’s saying what I was a few weeks ago. Even Obama is saying it now. He, his supporters and his detractors are all admitting there are no quick and easy answers to the present economic or military situation.
The media talk about the grimness or seriousness of his expression when he talks about the financial mess we are in. Actually that’s not all bad. At least he knows he was talking twaddle on the campaign trail. Some politicians never admit it; worse, some never even realize it. That’s terrible; that he knows and admits it gives us hope.
Obama knows he’s got a steep climb in front of him, and he’s trying to find workable ideas and places to put his feet as we make that climb. He’s talking to a lot of the right people, and he’s taking it all seriously. That encourages me.
I read something in Newsweek yesterday that also made me feel better about him. The writer strongly suggested that Obama is the same kind of liberal that Ronald Reagan was conservative—at bottom a pragmatist. In other words, Obama isn’t any more likely to shift far to the left than Reagan shifted to the right.
Reagan preached a lot, but he didn’t lead his congregation any farther off dead middle than they were willing to go. Obama, writes Newsweek, is no more likely to lead his congregation any farther off the political middle. Reagan annoyed conservatives for his waffling; Obama will annoy liberals the same way.
I can live with that the same way Tip O’Neill could live with Reagan. I’m not happy; I certainly could wish he held some other views, but the most conservative of us can survive him. We appear to have a man who may prove to be a nearly moderate pragmatist.
There is no question that the mere fact of Obama’s election sends a message to the world and to us that we are no longer paranoid about people who are not like us. From the founding of the Republic, Americans have been victims of that fear. Now we seem to have taken a step or two past it. That can be very good.
But the Secret Service is reporting very high levels of threats to the president-elect—unprecedentedly high threat levels. That brings us to another worrisome American reality. On several occasions in our history our dislike of “others” has reached homicidal levels.
Let’s just talk about one period eighty years ago. It was a time when Americans were bitterly disillusioned with a war (World War I), and were facing a speculator fed prosperity that was doomed to collapse. Whole sectors of the economy were left hurting badly and our economic relations with the rest of the world stunk.
History books don’t stress how strong the “crazies” were then. But Ku Klux Klan rallies could gather thousands all over the nation. (Here in West Michigan, a trove of KKK records were uncovered several years ago that showed how incredibly many sheriffs and officials in the state were KKK members in the 1920s. That’s not the South, that’s Michigan!)
Then the entire economy collapsed. The GNP went down 50%; world trade dried up, families of four—the lucky ones—lived on $15 a week. Nazism and Fascism were on the rise all over the planet. We had the KKK here—and Father Coughlan, Huey Long—as well as a whole lot of students who were turning to Communism.
We were an entire nation about to fly apart over our own radicalism. Just as in Weimar Germany, there were millions of disillusioned, unemployed and angry voters ready to follow the extremist positions of any demagogue who came along (remember how many did listen to Coughlan and follow the Longs).
We were blessed with a Roosevelt whose greatest contribution to the United States would be to defuse the forces that could have given the Axis an ally on the Potomac. That’s a problem that Obama faces now. He’s doing a beautiful job of defusing. Will it be enough?
What happens to us if some crazy gets through the Secret Service in the next few months? Will there be rage? Riots? An explosion of radicalism on both sides of the political spectrum? I for one cannot imagine a more terrible blow to the nation than having something happen to Barak Obama. It will make the entire election a lie. It will shatter hope irretrievably in many quarters.
I suggest that people of all parties unite to pray for the safety of the president elect. We don’t even want to think of the alternative right now.