Boom. What am I talking about? That I anticipated President Barack Obama’s actions by virtue of developing a study about his modus operandi — or his ideas as political thought — in Out of Many, One: Barack Obama and the Third American Political Tradition. Put differently, I drank the Kool-Aid — which isn’t to say I wasn’t disappointed by Obama at times (especially his stance on civil liberties).
Four of the six articles on today’s New York Times front page reflect Obama’s legacy or the body of our President’s political thought, in this order:
- Transgender transformation (chapter 3 of my book)
- Representational democratic reform via social media (as an extension of Occupy Wall Street or OWS) (chapter 6)
- Obama being a hawk, not a dove, left a vacuum in foreign policy when he could not get Congress to give him enough authority to effect real change in the Middle East. He inherited not one but two wars in the Middle East when all he wanted to do with his administration was concentrate on Asia. (chapter 5)
- Obama is an economic progressive — and he used executive action to achieve it. If Congress refuses to play ball and raise the minimum wage, so what? Obama just did a due-process reform by raising the limit for time-and-a-half pay for salaried employees. Sure, this helps the middle class, but Obama was always a middle-class reformer. (chapters 1 and 2)
Finally, it’s great that Antonin Scalia is dead. Now, this could not have been predicted — at least, not the timing. And I do not mean as a man, only as an aged Supreme Court Justice who reflected a small portion of rebel rousers — called rednecks and religious rednecks — the kind that reside in Oildale CA, where my relatives lived.
Ruth Frick O'Brien 