The first draft captured a feeling of anger, while this captures two feelings: aspiration and disappointment. It is, I think, a stronger draft than the first as writing to capture your emotions, but I think it is still a missed opportunity to take the emotions as feelings, and go further.

This is the first president with whom you specifically identified, and—as a potential future holder of the office—you began to experience the involvement in his decisions and their consequences, having opinions of your own about what should have been decided, and both rational and emotional responses to how things turned out. The great contemporary political theorist Michael Walzer refers to this as "vicarious participation," which he sees an elemental component of democracy: the people each individually putting themselves in the position of those who govern.

Another form of vicarious participation in political or social events is the reading of history and biography, which—at their rather different bests—also allow us to see how states are governed, or armories are run, or any other social process is conducted, from within the documented perspectives of the women and men who did the work. But when we read history we are unlikely to experience the same intensity of mobilized emotion—whether anger, aspiration or disappointment—with which we endow present vicarious political participation.

If you want to learn how to be president, however, more analytical and less emotional forms of vicarious participation will aid learning. How much of the history of American government in the last eight years justifies disappointment with the president himself? To what extent did his way of doing the job contribute to what you regard as his failures? These questions are subjective in their answers, of course, but the effort to think them through contributes to learning how to be president, or perhaps more literally to your understanding of practical politics in any setting. Not differently in essence, I think, no matter how very different in detail, than asking the same questions about John Quincy Adams, Richard Nixon, or Franklin Roosevelt, however. Asking such questions about Indira Gandhi, or Charles de Gaulle, or the Emperor Hadrian would also contribute to your own understanding, and more than likely to your way of acting for the good of society, whether you ever become President of the United States or not.

So thinking about Obama rather than being disappointed in Obama, or angry at those people who placed themselves for racist reasons (conscious or unconscious) against Obama will be most valuable to you. These two efforts seem to me together to have cleared the field for where you might instead wish to go.

Moving Forward: Reflections on the Obama Administration and Myself

I. Why I Cared So Much

II. Deep Disillusionment

I. There is a noticeable difference between the way President Obama and his agenda are treated by politicians and the populous alike and the way other presidents have been treated

Perhaps you meant the Latin noun populus (populi), meaning people. "People" would have been the best choice.

Doesn't it seem a little odd to be using one's mother as a substitute for historical research?

You have complained about some events, but you've not actually showed that this is a level of "disrespect" that is different from other, earlier periods of high partisan conflict, or that the facial expressions of the Chief Justice are somehow historically significant. If there is a factual conclusion we are to draw about the absence of precedent, surely some historical discussion is warranted.

"Can be attributed"? You mean something more, or you are just saying a thing can be said.

This sentence needs rewriting completely, for both grammar and sense.

Race is the variable in this equation that allows him to be worthy of disrespect despite otherwise powerful pedigree, and it is the consistent variable in American culture that tells us who is worth valuing and who is not.

We are now at the stage of the argument where the only factor accounting for a social phenomenon not yet established has been identified. But if the point is that in the present political environment Ivy League educated middle-aged politicians are only treated disrespectfully if they are not white, there's some contrary evidence that should be at least discussed. How we are to conclude that "other variables have been accounted for" on the basis of this paragraph, which doesn't actually account for any variables, the reader may well wonder.

Doubtless.

There have been so many comments and memes made public by the “conservative fringe” but then shared on the Facebook pages of the silent majority, as well as articles by the progressive parade goers of Arnold’s capitalist folklore and “funny” comics and pictures debasing the president and his wife because of their Blackness in their magazines that I think it is silly to present any alternative narrative to deep-seeded racist tendencies in or society.

This sentence too needs complete rewriting for grammar and sense. Note that something "deep-seated" is seated deeply: it's a mechanical, not an agricultural metaphor. On the substance, you might want to spend an afternoon at Butler looking at newspaper and magazine treatment and depictions of Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd Lincoln during the Civil War. You might then consider it not so "silly" to reflect on the similarities, including the "Ape" portrayal, which was quite a frequent trope of Lincoln's enemies in the press.

As a Black woman it is extremely obvious to me that this is a race issue.

But that's not a form of argument that one can use very effectively. If I say, "as a Jew, it is extremely obvious to me that [something] is anti-Semitism," whom I likely to persuade, and how does my statement help to make my view more persuasive?

But since the problem with racism today is that many people are not consciously racist and have an aversion to being called racist despite being heavily invested in power structures that reinforce the systematic oppression which allow racism to continue without attaching it to a face or person, People choose to ignore the power structures so the systems can continue and their personal consciences won’t be implicated. This means that no one individual who doesn’t slip up and say the N-word in public will be implicated in the system that privileges them and people can continue to be colorblind. Which means that they can pretend racism isn’t impacting our current President.

I doubt that anyone educated in American history and acquainted with the daily realities of American society seriously denies that "racism is impacting our current President," unless they believe there is no such thing as "racism." But it is a long step from that proposition to the ones which this draft claims at its outset: that the nature of the partisan conflict experienced by the present Administration is—substantively and stylistically—"unprecedented," and that the primary reason for this conflict is the race of the President. The conclusion is tiny compared to the promises made at the top, which suggests that the argument in between has not been successful.

It is not clear from the draft why the large claims matter anyway. We can see that the present Administration—which lost control of both houses of Congress in its first midterms and has never been very effective at legislative mechanics, in which the President is ostentatiously not interested—has been very effectively opposed in the Senate by an unusually disciplined party led by a very careful adversary. That Senator McConnell? 's motives are more conventional and have little to do with personal animus of any kind, racial or otherwise, is at least plausible, if not likely, in view of the historical and biographical evidence. That the House of Representatives in the era of the Tea Party was batshit crazy and unmanageable by anyone has been amply demonstrated: that this was entirely the result of racial animus against the President is obviously unlikely. A natural experiment seems likely to be conducted in the immediate future. If you find that Mrs Clinton is well-treated by those same Republican House members after next January, you will have gained strong evidence. But I don't think you expect that, anymore than I or anyone else does.

So if we can all agree that the first Black President of the US was treated in some respects differently than all the preceding White ones, and if it is quite unlikely that we can show that only this difference "accounts" for the political history of the last eight years, what is the best use of the next draft?

Reflections on the Presidency

-- By BeulahAgbabiaka - 19 Feb 2016 Reflections on the Presidency

I. There is a noticeable difference between the way President Obama and his agenda are treated by politicians and the populous alike and the way other presidents have been treated

A. He has been politically frustrated by partisanship in an unprecedented way.

B. He has been openly disrespected in an unprecedented way.

I. I feel like this discrepancy can be attributed to race

A. We can account for most of the other variables.

B. The American populous keeps showing their true colors in this “colorblind” and “post-race” society.

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