The Obama legacy

What is also true is that the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination in almost every institution of our lives - you know, that, casts a long shadow. And that's still part of our DNA that is passed on. We're not cured of it.

- Barack Obama

I watched President Obama's last State of the Union speech with some regret, as it was his last. I also got angry looking at Paul Ryan's condescending expression throughout the entire speech - or perhaps it was more disdain on his face. It is a take on how far we have come over the past seven years of his presidency, or, perhaps how far in some ways we have regressed as a nation.

It was a reminder to me that, as Obama said, racism is part of our DNA.

I remember the jubilation in some quarters when he got elected in 2008. Even The Economist, a conservative weekly British newsmagazine said: "America can claim more credibility than any other Western country to have at last become politically colour blind." Over the next seven years their optimism (and mine) has been replaced with the ugly fact that racism does play an important part of the American political process. No one (at least in public) uses the "N" word, for sure, but the disparity in treatment is clear and our ugly past comes to the fore in sometimes-subtle ways when we look at how Obama has been treated.

I guess the layman's way of phrasing Occum's razor is correct: The simplest explanation is usually the correct one. The simplest explanation is the president has been a victim of racism.

After he got elected it seemed the country got increasingly polarized and intolerant. The political dialogue became more ugly. Obama is transformational by any standard, but the time he has been president shows just how deeply people feel about the barriers we hoped he had erased.

By all objective measures his presidency has been very successful - perhaps the most successful since FDR. He inherited an economic calamity unparalleled since the Great Depression. At no time during Ronald Reagan's presidency was the unemployment rate as low as it is now. Reagan thought a federal deficit of 3.4 per cent of GNP was wonderful when he left office. Ours, under Obama, is better at 2.5 per cent. In addition 17 million people now have healthcare who previously did not. Our military is the strongest in the world. We now have a nuclear treaty with Iran, and we are part of a worldwide agreement on climate change.

That took real diplomacy, not chest beating arrogance.

I personally applaud his approach to foreign affairs. It's been thoughtful, restrained and not reactive. Watching the Republican candidates be muscular and talk of the need for "boots on the ground" makes me thankful that Obama understands those boots have someone's sons and daughters in them and the use of that force cannot be as a result of some emotional reaction to a perceived slight. We gained back much of the international prestige that George Bush squandered, under Obama.

When Obama took office, Mitch McConnell said it was job number one to get rid of him. The job wasn't to deal with the economic calamity, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, climate change, job creation, etc. The job was to get rid of the president. One telling incident was when Jan Brewer, the governor of Arizona, shook her finger in Obama's face back in 2012. One Republican representative, in Congress, publicly called him a liar. He has been portrayed as a monkey in one publication. A very sizable percent of the population thinks he is a Muslim from Kenya. The list goes on. These things would not have happened to a white president.

I have not always agreed with him, by any means. His White House has done a terrible job of letting people know of his accomplishments in spite of a recalcitrant Congress. He could have done more to rein in banks. But he never had the criminality of the Nixon administration, the weakness of the Carter administration, the scandal of Iran Contra of Reagan, the indiscretions of Bill Clinton and the absolutely abysmal presidency of George Bush. He has been decent and honest and straight-forward.

He has borne the challenges, albeit at a lofty level, of racism as it has been a sea anchor he has had to pull the last seven years. He knows it, accepts it, and moves on. That alone makes him remarkable in my book. I think Jon Stewart was right when he said, "We have made enormous progress in teaching everyone racism is bad. Where we seem to have dropped the ball ...is in teaching people what racism actually is."