‘This election is crucial, not only for America, but also for the rest of the world. We all knew what the world looked like in 2008 when Barack Obama was taking over and we know how far we have come from that precipice. America may still not have left the woods, but it’s no longer in a forest of doubts and fear, discredited in the international community by lies that saw young men and women perish in the wastelands of Iraq.’
Agreed. Good critique of Feller - but I am not so sure that America is not discredited by the drone attacks and killing of innocent civilians around the world.
It also has adopted the policy that Mobutu and other cronies used, namely, indefinite detention of citizens through the NDAA etc.
So while we all know that Obama may be a thousand times better than Romney in domestic policy, let us not ignore international
violations. Vote for Obama but let him know that he has not lived up to expectations in terms of foreign policy.
Gloria Emeagwali
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com [mailto:usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Kennedy Emetulu
Sent: Sunday, August 26, 2012 3:59 AM
To: USAAfricaDialogue
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - President Obama’s AP Interview
..
President Obama’s AP Interview
I have just read the written report of the interview Mr Ben Feller, the AP White House Correspondent conducted with President Obama on Thursday 23 August 2012. The report I must say is a little unfair to the president. Rather than just report, he was making judgments about Obama’s straightforward answers to his questions. These interpretive comments, even though not much, didn’t cast the president in good light. More crucially, he presented no evidence for such views. For instance, a fair report would not say the president was “insisting rosily that the forces of the election would help break Washington's stalemate” nor would it describe his honest attempt at proffering an opinion on how he sees a second term if he were re-elected without a Congressional majority as “a stretch”. Mr Feller may have his own view about the president’s sense of optimism, but there is nothing excessive or shady about his explanation or expectation.
Americans who have watched the president suffer in the hands of an obstructionist Congress may actually decide not to reward such obstructionism by voting out some of these obstructionists in order to give the president a more people-focused Congress he can work with in order to achieve his agenda for the American people. There is certainly nothing outrageously rosy in holding the view that even if he were to return with a Republican-controlled Congress, the dynamics would have changed. It is perfectly sound to expect that with the deep unpopularity of the present Congress, an incoming one of whatever hue will want to show responsibility and not go hug such an unwanted record. At the end of the day, the President and Congress are jointly accountable for the success or failure of government and Americans know Obama will not unite a country or change the tone of Washington all on his own, especially where the other party is on record to have declared from the very first day of his election that they are committed to sabotaging his efforts in order to make him a one-term president. And if they fail in that mission, would common sense not dictate that they quickly pull themselves out of the gutter, cooperate with the president and get something done, if only to protect their own position? I mean, they would be the ones going back to the electorate after November, not the president. Indeed, they will have far more to lose in the president’s second-term if they carry on the way they have this term. The president on his part has nothing to prove. His history certainly indicates that he’s brave enough to ruffle feathers in his own base to get things done that he believes should be done. So, really, the president was not being excessively optimistic nor can anyone by any stretch of the imagination justifiably describe anything he said there as “a stretch”. Doing so is inviting fair-minded people to read bias into the report.
Secondly, there was no need to say that the president was being “doggedly on script” just because he answered the “personal-themed questions” about whether he actually dislikes Governor Romney for supposedly getting under his skin. That was actually an awful question and the president was kind enough to let Mr Feller escape by telling him that this is all “beltway discussions”. I mean, even as he insisted on wanting to know if such feelings were expressed privately during strategy meetings, the president simply explained that he really does not know Romney that well! Did Mr Feller have any reason to think the president has some dislike or disdain for Governor Romney? Did he have any reason to believe that President Obama does not have high regard for Mr Romney outside idle chatters by agenda-driven persons that a respectable outfit like AP should be steering clear of?
The funny thing is that Mr Feller initially handled it right when he asked the president what he has learnt about Governor Romney in the course of the campaign. The president had answered appropriately that Governor Romney is a successful businessman and a good family man and that their differences only centre on their varying views about which direction to steer the country via policies. So, why get into tabloid territory thereafter? Yes, that question was in poor taste and the president was not sticking to any script by nobly explaining to Mr Feller that his disagreement with Governor Romney is based on the issues, rather than anything personal. There is no evidence to indicate he was doggedly sticking to some prepared script, except if Mr Feller has other credible information he’s keeping away from us about the president and his supposed disdain for Mr Romney. Tittle-tattles won’t do.
Thirdly, while I’m not going to stretch the fact that Mr Feller seems to have invested in Governor Romney coming out of the piece smelling of roses (even though he was not his interviewee), I think it’s a stretch to say Governor Romney has been on record “as not opposing abortion in cases of rape and incest or if it will save the mother's life”. I mean, which of the records is he referring to? As far as we know, Romney has turned flip-flopping on abortion into an art. Repeatedly speaking from both sides of his mouth, he has stumbled from pro-life to pro-choice and back again a zillion times without blinking! In fact, an exasperated opponent once appropriately described him as “multi-choice”. I think it says something about how bad his record is that at the height of his blatant meanders, his thoroughly embarrassed friends at FOX News alarmingly declared he’d used up all his flip-flop lifelines! So, if Mr Feller wanted to say what’s on record, he should have let his readers know that Romney has straddled all sides like an unrepentant eel in a desperate attempt to be all things to all men and women. At this point, any fair-minded person must assume that Governor Romney is running on his party’s pro-life platform that has no exceptions for rape or any other circumstances. It’s the only position we can lawfully pin on him now that he’s picking up that party’s nomination for President of the United States.
This election is crucial, not only for America, but also for the rest of the world. We all knew what the world looked like in 2008 when Barack Obama was taking over and we know how far we have come from that precipice. America may still not have left the woods, but it’s no longer in a forest of doubts and fear, discredited in the international community by lies that saw young men and women perish in the wastelands of Iraq. Anyone can rhetorically and excitedly ask if Americans are better off now than they were four years ago. I believe they will be rudely shocked when Americans soberly answer that question with a resounding yes in November. There is no plague of selective amnesia in America. People remember.
Those who naively expected that eight years of destruction were going to be remedied in one term or that America was somehow going to escape a deep worldwide economic recession because they elected a magician have another think coming. I say this, because there is nothing to suggest that John McCain and Sarah Palin would have done better neither can we point to anything now to make us reasonably hope that Mitt Romney and Ryan Paul will do better than Obama in the next four years. What we know as fact is that the GOP is worse than it was four years ago and that it is in its present state ideologically more dangerous than it’s been for the past fifty years. Under our very eyes, it’s been hijacked by a conglomerate of ignoramuses, dinosaurs, racists, bigots and anti-social politicos and rabble masquerading as some Tea Party activists, intent on unleashing their constipated view of life on the rest of us. All this they want to do, because they have adjudged Obama a failure based on their own warped parameters.
Well, we’ve listened to them yell up the political temperature since 2009. We’ve seen what their idea of leadership is in Congress and polls after polls tell us exactly what the American people think of them in Congress. Now, they propose to us a hostage leadership on a platform bereft of ideas, feelings or empathy for real hardworking Americans. Imagine Paul Ryan wheeling out his rich mum in front of a Florida crowd in an attempt to convince seniors nationwide that his Medicare plan works for them….
The facts are out now in the open. Obama is not the one playing hide and seek with what he believes or doesn’t believe in. He isn’t the one cherry-picking what to support in his running-mate’s agenda and what to ditch. He isn’t sitting there and watching where the wind will blow before he opens his mouth. Americans are not in doubt regarding what his intentions are for them by the very actions he’s taken and attempted to take during this first term, actions that the obstructionist have done their bit to scuttle. Obama has not snuggled up to the money people to buy an election, because he understands that all American is his constituency, not just the rich and powerful. The more he is being outraised and outspent by Romney in this campaign, the more Americans will wonder why the big bucks are lining up behind Romney and what they stand to gain at their expense from a man who despite highbrow accounts all over Europe and the Caribbean, still does not deem it fit to release his tax records to the American people. Obama is making clear that it’s not cash-and-carry America; it’s not politics as before. Ideas and not money will win the day and he’s counting on the American people to see through the hubris the other side is peddling. Those who say they want to address Americans like adults would have plenty of time to walk their talk in this campaign.
Oh yes, the choice cannot be starker. It’s either America walks back into the Middle Ages or she marches forward into the brave new world that the election of Barack Obama portended in 2008 by reaffirming that they’re still firmly on that journey of progress in November 2012. Americans are too smart to reward a party fixated with a sense of entitlement with power when its leadership and membership have not showed why they should be trusted after the unmitigated disaster their leadership visited on the nation. Yes, forget Obama for a second, why should the American people entrust their future to the hands of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan after what the Republican Party has put America through in the past twelve years?
Of course, what I express here is my view; but I am deeply convinced about it, because this view is shaped by the facts I see and how I interpret these in the context of the time and experience. Mr Feller and some others may think I protest too loudly and they may be right. But I’m not saying Mr Feller should give President Obama preferential treatment; what I’m saying is that he should give everyone a fair shake. Mr Feller can be sure that if he does an interview with Governor Romney and I notice this type of advertent or inadvertent partiality, I will be doing the same thing I’m doing here, which is write to explain why I think it’s biased. That I have an opinion about the election does not mean I have to accept unfair reporting. Of course, if he has an opinion he wants to share about the election, he should be encouraged to present it clearly as an opinion piece and not as a report so that we can appropriately deal with it as such.
Kennedy Emetulu
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