Letter #134: a thank you letter to President Obama

"Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake."

                                                                         -- Saint Matthew; Chapter 5; Verse 11

"The future rewards those who press on. I don't have time to feel sorry for myself. I don't have time to complain. I'm going to press on."

-- President Barack Obama

The Honorable Barack H. Obama

President

The United States of America

The White House

1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W.

Washington, D.C. 20500

Friday, January 20, 2017

Dear President Obama,

Today, I write you as an American who is deeply ambivalent about some of the policies you have pursued and still who gives you a well-merited ‘two-thumbs-up’ rating. Why? The answer is simple, I am now old enough and have been around long enough to know that the majority of those ideas I deem innovative today will either be refuted in the short-to-medium term or change over the longer term.

Elements of your troubling foreign policy – in Syria and Ukraine --provide apt examples of why my ambivalence has not faded. For years, Mr President, I have come to fear that your behavior appears to be one of appeasement in the face of direct assaults on democracies – whether in place now or inchoate – in Ukraine and Eastern Europe as well as one of turning a blind eye toward appalling carnages, such as those in in Syria and México. 

Mr President, I truly do not believe you are weak or prone to appeasement when I remember to recall the following factors. 

1. The interventionist ideas I support, as opposed to yours, are really nothing more than best-case scenarios. 
2. Mr President, I supported the invasion of Iraq, a war of aggression that failed to follow its evident best-case script; you tried another path for obvious reasons.
3. You probably did not favor interceding in Libya but deferred to your Secretary of State and your top National Security Council expert on multi-lateral initiatives.
4. When the Libya initiative collapsed under the weight of mission creep, you harboured an understandable skepticism of the policy prima donnas and chose to follow your less hawkish instincts. 
5. Though tearing up the Buda Pest memorandum and failing to intervene decisively and early in Ukraine appears to be an act similar to the Munich accord of 1938, the American people clearly did not support risking war over Crimea.

In Syria, the intervention many of us viewed as worth the risk may well have landed us in another military quagmire through mission creep with thousands of sorties and boots on the ground to push it along. Nonetheless, Mr President you have taken action – a fact that many of your gainsayers (e.g., me) fail to note -- in Iraq and Syria, while simultaneously ejecting a Shi´ite strongman in Baghdad.

Additionally, Mr President, you have also displayed the diplomacy, founded on humility, to defer to Russia’s leadership in removing the chemical weapon stockpiles of President Assad, the dictator of Syria. There are other policies that I could criticize, Mr President. That is not the point of this letter. My mission here is to tell you why I give you two-thumbs-up. Policy has little to do with my assessment as admitted earlier.

The fine example you set each day, Mr President, has made you an incontestably decent leader, one that makes me proud of my country. And, for that, Sir, I thank you. Mr President, I sincerely hope your successor understands this reality of modern leadership by example. There are so many trait-based actions of yours that I admire so deeply that I can merely cite a few with enthusiasm:

• the first significant attempt at reform of a dysfunctional health-care distribution and provisioning system;
• your humility in calling on the rest of us not to rush to reaction on instances of police violence or shootings of police and children;
• working in soup kitchens and veterans’ homes on holidays;
• your compassion in pardoning Bradley / Chelsea Manning, a young person driven almost to suicide by twenty-three months of solitary confinement before facing a military tribunal for charges already confessed;
• engaging us in meaningful discourse on the trade-off between liberty and security, thus implicitly showing us respect as citizens;
• providing a consistently conciliatory and reasoned view amid bitter partisan debate;
• your gracious demeanor toward President George W. and Mrs Bush;
• taking decisive, if measured, steps toward helping those who are most vulnerable such as LGBTs, Muslims, undocumented Mexican immigrants who came to the U.S. as children, etc.; as well as,
• so very much more, Mr President.

While your record is mixed, I fear that you will never be fully appreciated as a great man, which you most assurèdly are. History tends to hang the greatness of Presidents on their performance during crises – often wars or economic cataclysms. As far as I can see, you have not displayed such high-profile leadership. What matters here is why you haven’t.

Mr President, many reasonable people will point toward your work to revive the American economy as proof-positive of your leadership in a crisis management mode. Unfortunately, I can not agree with that assessment. Again, I do not want to pursue that thread. Far more important, my political party, the Republican Party, dominated Congress throughout much of your tenure.

lnstead of answering your repeated and conciliatory overtures for compromise, these Republicans did everything they could to undermine your opportunity for greatness. Mr President, I do not understand how these political rivals can put their private – often Tea Party – interests so far ahead of the public good that they conspire to deprive you of your opportunity to lead us – all of us – forward toward a brighter day.

What my thoughts really boil down to, Mr President, is my awe in your teaching us how to behave with civility and restraint in the face of vituperation, much of it racist or implicitly anti-Muslim (based on your name sounding like a Muslim name). Frankly, Sir, your greatness lies in what you did not do:

• abuse your powers to harass Republican politicians, particularly those of the Tea Party;
• lash out at the increasingly palpable racism directed at you – and other minority officials in your Administration;
• throw Mexicans and LGBTs under the proverbial bus; as well as,
• compromise your integrity at the expense of the FBI Director during the campaign.

All that is to say, Mr President: you provided 318 million people with adult supervision. My fondest hope remains that future historians will detect these subtleties of your greatness. In closing, Sir, I salute your service to our country as well as that of the elegant and lovely First Lady.

Thank you and best regards,

Ned
Edward J. McDonnell III, CFA PMP
Birmingham, Alabama.