The liberation of Barack ObamaPosted in Articles, Barack Obama, Media Archive, Politics/Public Policy, United States on 2013-01-24 03:33Z by Steven |
The liberation of Barack Obama
The Washington Post
2013-01-20
E. J. Dionne Jr., Opinion Writer
Barack Hussein Obama can begin his second term liberated by the confidence that he is already a landmark figure in American history. His task is not to manufacture a legacy but to leave his successors a nation that is more tranquil because it finally resolved arguments that roiled it for decades.
Whatever happens in the next four years, Obama will forever be our first African American president, and our first biracial president. He has won two successive popular-vote majorities. Andrew Jackson and Franklin Roosevelt, both of them icons, are the only other Democrats who managed this.
Obama fought for and signed a sweeping health-care law, an accomplishment matched only by Lyndon Johnson’s Medicare. He led the country out of the worst economic calamity since the Great Depression. Restoring growth will count for more on the historical scales than petty arguments over what his stimulus program achieved. He ended one unpopular war and is preparing to close another…
Read the entire opinion piece here.