That Black Guy With A Basketball Will Be The Next President
Posted by: Baller-in-Chief in Articles(From the Dallas Morning News Online)
Editorial: Barack Obama, to the mountaintop
Last week, as Washington hummed and hammered in preparation for today’s inauguration, President-elect Barack Obama paid a low-key visit to his transition offices. As former Ronald Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan tells it: “Someone had given him a basketball; he dribbled it as he walked down the hall. Suddenly a young veteran of the campaign turned to another and said, ‘The black guy with the basketball is the next president.’ “
It’s that kind of moment in American history. The election victory of Barack Obama, born in 1961 into an America where little children with his skin color too often still lived in apartheid, is a moral victory for us all. He, and we, have overcome. Or, at the very least, begun to.
What will be accomplished today when Obama puts one hand on Lincoln’s Bible, raises the other and takes the oath of office as the 44th U.S. president is so meaningful – and such a testimony to the power and the promise of hope – that more than a few of us will be looking at the incredible event and whispering, “Oh, my God.”
As it happens, that very phrase was uttered last week by Rep. John Boehner, the top Republican in the House, when he learned the incredible cost of the proposed Democratic stimulus plan. And even that $850 billion may not be enough to save this critically wounded economy from a depression.
Awesome times, these are. The new president will walk the tightrope strung between twin peaks, Mt. Hope and Mt. Doom. It is hard to recall a president who took office with such a vast reservoir of good will and high expectations. And it is hard to recall a president who faced such dire and overwhelming threats to the economic well being of the nation.
Everywhere one looks, the fiscal numbers are in free fall – not only in the United States, but all around the world. The unfolding economic catastrophe in China, Europe and other nations will not only affect our economy but our national security, as financial instability potentially leads to strife overseas.
Moreover, when the current crisis subsides, Obama still faces a tsunami of red ink mounting just over the horizon as baby boomers start to draw on Social Security and Medicare. Absent deep and serious reform, these entitlements threaten to bankrupt America.
Taking the wheel of the ship of the most powerful state on earth in this global tempest is a 47-year-old Chicago lawyer and community organizer who has never wielded executive authority. Fortunately, Obama’s great gifts include a fierce intelligence, an unflappable demeanor, poise, charisma and an admirable ability to work well with others, even those who don’t share his views.
We have seen during the transition promising signs of how Obama will govern. He has assembled an economic team widely hailed as being second to none. He retained the steady, competent Defense Secretary Robert Gates at the Pentagon – and named another Republican, former Rep. Ray LaHood, to his Cabinet.
Obama has riled some of his fellow liberals with his moves toward the center, but we find his emphasis of pragmatism over ideology to be refreshing and confidence-inspiring. This extraordinary crisis moment demands strong, bold policy leadership, but it also requires putting naked partisanship aside for the sake of political consensus-building.
Though the first two years of his term will almost certainly be dominated by the economy, Obama faces critical foreign policy challenges. He will have to manage America’s slow withdrawal from Iraq and its steady increase of commitment to Afghanistan. The prospect that nuclear-armed Pakistan could fall apart under Islamist militia assault and that Mexico’s escalating drug wars could lead to a failed state on our southern border will command much of his attention.
Obama also will have to manage America’s critical relationship with China, as well as strengthen frayed ties with European allies, re-engage Russia and work toward settling the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Dealing with any one of those challenges would be a full-time job. The new president has to manage them all. It is a Herculean task, and he cannot do it alone.
The new administration will need the help of Congress and the American people. We expect the Republican minority to do what the opposition party is supposed to do – oppose the governing party when it must. But the situation facing the nation is far too serious for partisan game-playing. Similarly, congressional Democrats would be fools to do as their GOP counterparts did for most of the Bush presidency and exploit their legislative dominance to overreach.
This is no ordinary time in the history of our democracy, and none of us can afford to behave like ordinary people. Every patriot must wish for the new president to succeed. These wintry days are gloomy indeed, but the dawn of the Barack Obama era brings with it the light of hope. Not false optimism, but rather the assurance that though we must walk through a dark valley for a time, if we keep our eyes on the mountaintop, we can make it through, together.
“Trouble is in the land; confusion all around,” the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said in 1968. “But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars.”
Today, 40 years later, amid all the trouble and confusion of our times, look on the face of the man who will put his hand on the Great Emancipator’s Bible and see how far we Americans have come since that day – and think of where this great nation might yet go.
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