On the First Black President

There's something that has been weighing on my heart lately and now seems as good a time as ever to mention it.

I am very, very disappointed in the administration of President Barack Obama.

"Yeah, no kidding," you're probably telling yourself right now.  It is not a secret I find the current administration contemptible.  However, by disappointment, I refer to nothing more than a deep, profound sadness.

When I was a little boy in Irvington, New Jersey, I attended a school that was, as I recall, majority minority.  Thus we always had presentations regarding the heritages of various minority groups.  We even had a yearly assembly for Kwanzaa (even then, I was confused by it).

One thing that always seemed to stick in my mind, though, was the suggestion that we could, one day, have a black president.  We were told the usual childhood encouragement ("If you work hard, one day, you could even become president!").  I was taught about our nation's racist heritage and how we had yet to have a black man in the White House.  The racism never really stuck.  Historical racism stayed just that for me: historical.  However, for a long while, there was a little place in the back of my mind that always hoped to one day see a black man in the Oval Office.

Perhaps ironically, I eliminated that though at the beginning of 2008's primary season, long before Barack Obama became a viable contender for the presidency.  I had come to recognize that it did not matter what the person in the White House looked like.  Only their character mattered.  So I found myself immune to his charm and his teleprompter-based style when Sentator Obama ascended as the candidate of the Democrat Party.  That immunity kept my eyes open as I saw all the warning signs of radicalism, despite the media's shameless attempts to hide it.

Yet, on election night 2008, when it became clear that Barack Obama had won the presidency, I saw my Facebook page explode with friends who were excited to have made history.  Indeed, on the inside, I felt a small resurgence of pride in that a black man had just been elected president of the United States.  Like most conservatives, I resolved to give him a chance, despite my apprehensions.  Those feelings were driven, in part by that old spark of pride in seeing a black man ascending to the White House.

That spark has made the past four years all the more painful, disappointing and shameful.  Instead of being a beacon of hope and positive change, the past four years have been dismal with exploding debt and economic stagnation.  The president, instead of bridging divides between Americans, has intensified them and viciously attacked those he does not like or sees as convenient targets.  He has forced legislation through congress and ignored the Constitutional limits on his power time and again.

Despite his actions yielding negligible or bad results time and again, Barack Obama refuses to take responsibility.  He blames his predecessor constantly, even after being in office for four years.  He spends more time golfing and hobnobbing with celebrities than he does in intelligence briefings.  His office is empty more often than not as he speaks at rallies filled with screaming fan boys and girls, rallies that are far easier than than fielding questions from the press corps.

I feel that Barack Obama has been robbed of his sense of personal responsibility.  A man with no real accomplishments, he has been handed nearly every position he has held in life.  Some will say he excelled in college, but he has never released his transcripts.  Judging by how peculiar that is and a lack of real accomplishment in his professional life, that leads me to believe he did not do well at all.  Penning no papers on the Harvard Law Review, considered intellectually lazy as an adjunct professor and voting present more often than not in elected office, he is little more than a self-entitled shell.

Now that lack of accomplishment in his life has returned to haunt him as he is unprepared to take responsibility for his failures or defend himself against true challenge to his worldview.  And now, as his campaign appears to sputter out, latching on to internet memes week after week in a desperate attempt to stay afloat, all I can feel is a profound disappointment at how far the hope and change of 2008 has fallen.

I often hear older black people say they were taught by their own parents and grandparents to be a "credit to their race."  They had to endure racism and thus had to work harder to achieve and succeed.  Yet now, the president seems to be nothing but the antithesis of a "credit to his race."  In the end, the first black president, whether he wins re-election or not, has been everything he should not have been.

And it is a shame.