Sympathy
is what one human feels for another who is suffering. Sorrow is a
feeling that arises from loss. Loss of hope, loss of confidence, loss
of pride. Those are the attributes that President Obama has lost in
fourteen months since his election.
Here is a man from a Hawaiian high school who got into an above average private college in
California and very quickly was able to get a scholarship to a prestigious East Coast University. From there he went to an even more
prestigious law school. All this for a man who saw himself, by then,
as good looking, loquacious and black. Good fortune followed him at
every turn, from non-profit jobs, to academic positions, a law firm
role, two accidental elections to the State and then U.S. Senate and
finally, with every form of luck (Democratic primaries based on
caucuses and a presidential race at the time of the worst financial
melt down in 80 years) the U.S. Presidency.
From that election night on
it has been downhill. A series of horrible affronts. At his first
global leaders meeting the French President came out and publicly said
that Barack Obama was naive, by the time of his first G8 meeting in
Italy in July he found that the Chinese left the meeting early and the
meeting was over. Here he was president of the most powerful, richest
nation in the world but the meeting was over when the Chinese left.
He
went to Copenhagen in September, as the first U.S president to do so,
to use his personal influence to get the 2016 Olympics for Chicago.
The Olympic committee actually voted against him. In October he
campaigned for the Democratic Governors in Virginia and New Jersey
where both were expected to win. The president put his personal
prestige on the line in both cases and lost. In Virginia the loss was
very large. In November he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for being a
black Democrat elected president on an anti George Bush campaign. In
December he again went to Copenhagen to lead the anti-global warming
campaign. In a meeting with India and a low level Chinese delegate
President Obama was forced to sign a global warming statement that was
worthless and soon ridiculed by the European Union.
The final slap in
President Obama's face was the election of Senator Scott Brown in the
most Democratic state in the Union on a Stop-Obama platform (photo of Brown above left).
I
feel genuine sympathy and sorrow for President Barack Obama who has
gone from hero to publicly humiliated failure in 14 months.
Unfortunately I don't think the man has the competence, wisdom or
experience to redeem himself.