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

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

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

I can point to the political process and look at the record-breaking number of filibusters during President Obama’s two terms, and the legislation that he has proposed that has been quickly quashed along partisan lines without a true review of the merits of the law and its potential for positive impacts on the lives of the American citizenry. A prime example of this partisanship is in republican presidential candidate Governor John Kasich of Ohio’s recent comments along the campaign trail. When he was under attack during a recent debate for choosing to comply with the Medicare expansion provision of the Affordable Care Act, Kasich asked if he was supposed to deny coverage to the people of his state who couldn’t otherwise afford coverage to cater to the party position at their expense. The response from the other candidates was essentially yes because President Obama didn’t go about the law in the right way in the Republican party’s opinion. This is ridiculous, and this level of partisanship has not occurred during my short lifetime, and upon consulting with her, my mother assured me that it hasn’t occurred since the Civil Rights Era.

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

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

Beyond his political agenda, President Obama has been openly disrespected multiple times in a way that is not consistent with the gravitas of his position or with the way other presidents have been treated by American people. I remember vividly the outrage when a foreign news correspondent threw his shoes at President George W. Bush in the ultimate show of disrespect according to his religious culture. But American reporters, politicians, and people still showed a baseline of respect to President Bush. On the other hand, a congressman screamed out “You lie!” to President Obama on the floor of the House and he was applauded by his colleagues and by a significant portion of the American public. And a reporter recently felt very comfortable heckling him during a press conference, until he commented back and asked her to be removed. (I acknowledge that she was a trans* LGBTQ activist and President Obama’s dismissal of her and her mistreatment is another huge problem in and of itself and her voice shouldn’t have been silenced, but it still illustrates my current point that I very strongly doubt that she would not have felt comfortable doing this to any other president.) Even the Supreme Court of the United States, the branch that is supposed to be above the dirty, partisan, political fray feels more comfortable disrespecting the current president. During President Obama’s comments on the Citizens United Supreme Court Decision, the Chief Justice felt completely secure in physically showing his disapproval of the President’s comments through making faces and gestures. Again, this is far outside the typical rules of decorum for the highest officer of one branch of government in addressing the other. It is disrespectful and it helps contribute to an environment where people feel comfortable denigrating our president.

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.

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

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

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

We know that President Obama is Ivy League educated, he is middle-aged, and he is an able-bodied man which all serve to reinforce a privileged position in society, but he is also a Black person which historically makes him open to disrespect here in the United States. The negative effects of elitism in regarding overpriced and overrated education from a select class of schools as better than other schools at anything but keeping the grass greener and keeping the surrounding community out, ageism, ableism and sexism do not apply to him. If he was a white man, he would be considered incredibly qualified, wonderfully competent, and innovative in his public speaking skills, ability to connect with people, and his charming fascination with helping already upwardly mobile “underdogs” who can help themselves in many ways after leaving his messianistic, boots-to the ground community advocate days behind him in which the constituents he sheparded needed more work getting to where they were going.

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.

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

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?

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