Than he needs to realize he is going to be watched carefully by those who were less than enthused about having to vote for him.
Unfortunately for the American public, by the time most Presidents are campaigning for their second term, they have lived inside a bubble for so long that they have no real understanding of reality.
For the entire time period of March 2012 until the day after the November election, Obama's head was filled up with polling numbers, vote count analysis, and state by state details regarding which state populations would go for which message. In addition to needing to process all that, Obama faced the continual body and brain numbing experience of always being "on." This process produces burnout and exhaustion.
What saves democracy for a nation is when a President or other elected leader has always been faithful and true to one simple reality - whether deeply engrained ideals are embedded inside the soul of the person holding office.
It has occurred within a recent timeline. For instance, we saw that brave enactment of ideals in the first few political activities of Nelson Mandela. And his handling of how he would not let the old bodyguards of the former South African leader's entourage be fired on account of their being white. A few decades earlier, we saw this when examining the life and times of San Francisco mayor, Harvey Milk, who never forgot his original declaration of wanting to contribute to the struggle for equality of his gay brothers and sisters. We observe some currently elected officials, people like Maxine Waters, and like Bernie Sanders, holding on to ideals. We notice that they are compelled to stand for their ideals and to see that their ideals become issues that are politically supported and elevated.
In a nation wherein so many decent individuals have courageously gone out into the streets and shed blood: instances like Haymarket riots; the Wobblies, labor and union protests; Suffragette protests; the Civil Rights movement of the fifties and sixties, and the Peace movement and environmental movement, both of the later from that same time period, and all that energy for ideals such as decent pay for workers, decent working hours and safe conditions, the end of child labor, the end of discrimination and segregation, protection of the environment, becoming the results, then it is most important that we reflect on those matters. And that we always demand to have leaders that represent ideals.
This has never been as difficult as it is today. We now live inside a political process that is mostly broken. To hold onto ideals is to condemn oneself to being outside the given Big Money environment of both parties. Many of us have been made aware of how none other than Rahm Emanuel was the chosen enforcement officer of stripping ideals from the Democratic Party platform. He spent the time period of 2005 to 2008 traveling around the nation, and seeing that candidates running for office were more "centrist" than progressive. And in that activity came the birth of the "Blue Dogs."
If you live inside California, you most probably have become painfully aware of how Diane Feinstein must approve of your ideals before you an run for office locally under the Party's "Big D." Among those who have not been given the nod by Di Fi are none other than Cindy Sheehan, and myself.
This is perhaps not a new phenomena. Let's go taking a stroll on memory lane. George Seldes, who was a Chicago Tribune correspondent during the late Nineteen teens and up until 1929, relates the following conversation that he had with Dorothy Thompson -another famous news reporter of that era, and the wife of Sinclair Lewis:
Thompson told Seldes in 1935 that while en route by ocean liner from France to NYC, how one F. Sinclair, a Big Money Guy, took her away from the table where they were eating in order to talk privately with her.
"See those folks at the table who were eating with us?" F Sinclair asks Thompson?
"Yes," answers Dorothy.
"Well, all of us are the ones who actually decide who gets nominated as candidates to run for the Presidency and who gets to win that office."
Among those he meant was an important associate of the Gianinni family, who had established Bank of America.
"We give money on both sides of the aisle, so that no matter what, one of our people is always in a place to do our bidding."
"What about FDR?" asked Dorothy.
"Our support for him was a major misjudgement on our part. We saw to it that he had money and of course, we fully expected for him to say the sort of things that he always said. We just didn't expect FDR to act on those statements."
Business man F. Sinclair went on to state that the Inner Circle of Power Brokers was attempting to raise some five to twenty million to defeat FDR in 1936.
But the voting machinery was still non-hackable back in that era. And FDR had millions upon millions of everyday people to vote him back in.
In our times, Obama campaigned as a progressive in October of 2008. He made statements that only a progressive would make. But he tipped his hand to everyone when he told "Sixty Minutes" the last Sunday in Nov of 2008 that he thought that Paulson was doing a good job. Next, the American public was startled to witness some four years of his relentless overlooking of the crimes of those on Wall Street, and his relentless overlooking of the crimes of the previous Administration. His lack of conscience on those matters made many of us wonder what disconnect occurred between the Obama of October 2008, and the Obama of 2009 through 2012.
The Big Money/Inner Circle of the Elite supported Obama, and he has been true to them. This Administration has not been a friend of ideals. Not financial ideals, with such legal protections as Glass Steagall, an economic regulation stripped away by Clinton's signature, and certainly not environmental ideals. For what I mean by mentioning the environment of late: witness the Obama Administration stance on the BP oil disaster. And the EPA under Obama shutting down the air monitoring stations, so no one got any truth about radiation blanketing the country after the Fukushima holocaust. Then consider how it was the State Department, headed by Hillary Clinton, who asked that the Keystone XL Pipeline be allowed to be built, even though in building this pipeline, it would be destroying the aquifers of people living in fourteen States in the USA!
And don't even get me started on how Obama sold people out by installing rat bastard Geithner as the Secretary of Treasury. This guy should have been indicted for RICO violations that he undertook when he was the head of the NY Fed - instead he gets to collude with re-appointed Bernanke to offer the Main Street wealth to the Elite of the Financial World. Expert tell us how some 4.7 trillions of dollars "loaned" out by Bernanke to the Biggest Financial firm in the world will never be repaid. Funny how that never gets mentioned by the Big Money owned Republican and Democrats seeking the elimination of some 4+ trillions of budget cutbacks!!!!!
Obama secured a second term ONLY because so many people were forced to hold their noses and vote for him rather than let the women-hating Republicans get in. But he should realize that fact and quit colluding with the Elite's agenda of bringing about the extinction of America's middle class.
There is a line in the Bible that I find pertinent: "you may know a man by his deeds." That is truth regardless if you are a Christian or Muslim, atheist or Jewish. A President who allows cuts to Social Security to be on his end of a negotiation offer can be seen as sadly lacking in ideals. Whether Obama took this stance because he is exhausted from a long campaign, or because he has decided that he needs to be "sophisticated" and "savvy"- a "New Age Style of Democrat" not bound to the old fashioned, "New Deal" notions of sympathy for the underdog (And America's entire, remaining middle class is now in underdog status,) then all those of us who voted for him largely because he was a necessary evil need to start holding his feet to the fire.
And we need to keep holding Obama's feet to the fire, until he wakes up from the curse of being inside a bubble of advisers, political consultants and "Yes" men and women. It won't be easy, but then nothing regarding enforcing ideals into legislation and policy ever has been.
