Well, the election is over and I congratulate President-Elect Obama.  I hope that the next four years prove my impressions wrong and you embark on a program that renews the promise latent in America.  If you do you will have my full support and my humble apologies.

How important is it to elect the first Black president today?  Is it so paramount that we don’t want to look at his character and his policies?  Now before anyone gets their knickers in a knot, I am not saying that Barak Obama is a Marxist.  I can categorically tell you that he is not because I am a Marxist and he has never been to any of the meetings .   On the contrary I am amazed that someone whose policy manual (Blueprint for Change) and whose campaign behaviour has been to run from every progressive cause and every opportunity to challenge America in another direction, is seen as this great agent of hope and change.  Saying it over and over don’t make it so.  On policy after policy in the ‘Blueprint for Change’ Obama fiddles with the knobs without changing the station.  But then why change when everything is going so well.  I mean what is wrong with what is?  American children are illiterate and innumerate in comparison to others countries.  That’s okay, if they can’t read they won’t have their little minds twisted by crazy things like ideas and stuff.  Millions of Americans are dying to see Obama’s new health care package and will continue to do so under it.  And the most popular colour for children’s pajamas this season among working families is sidewalk grey.  Oh no.  Let’s not look at fundamental change because haven’t you heard our fundamentals are strong.  I can sum up Obama’s policy book in one word, safe.  Say as little as possible and nobody will have anything to challenge you on. 

His record?  Well, here’s a man who abandons his friends, forces those who have actually fought in the trenches and sometimes risked their lives to kow tow to him, to humble themselves to a national audience, and reverses his position every time it is politically expedient.  I know those are the qualities I would look for in the leader of the free world.  As a Senator he supports a financial bailout that saves the Wall Street tycoons whose greed created the economic crisis while doing nothing to help the real people whose lives are being destroyed.  On the campaign he rejects public financing after promising to embrace it because he realizes he can out-fundraise his opponent and buy an election.  Much of his money coming from Wall Street and the corporate sector.  ‘Very interesting’ as Arte Johnson used to say on Laugh-In. 

I have waited a long time to see the first Black president of the United States and the first woman president and I could have tolerated Clinton.  Maybe.  Well if I held my nose.  This morning my class watched Mississippi Burning and this election kept creeping into my thougts.  I remembered the great Black leaders of my youth.  Malcolm X.  Bobby Seales.  Medgar Evers, Stokely Carmichael, Martin Luther King.  I thought about Julius Nyerere and Nelson Mandela.  Barak Obama just doesn’t fit.  It is not just that he doesn’t look like the other presidents on the dollar bills but that he doesnt’t act like those men I so admired.  I will celebrate the symbol but mourn the character of an Obama presidency.