Obama is not a statesman

President Obama spoke today on the anniversary of Martin Luther King's great "I Have a Dream" speech. Said the President:

[O]ur politics has suffered. Entrenched interests -- those who benefit from an unjust status quo resisted any government efforts to give working families a fair deal, marshaling an army of lobbyists and opinion makers to argue that minimum wage increases or stronger labor laws or taxes on the wealthy who could afford it just to fund crumbling schools -- that all these things violated sound economic principles. We'd be told that growing inequality was the price for a growing economy, a measure of the free market -- that greed was good and compassion ineffective, and those without jobs or health care had only themselves to blame. And then there were those elected officials who found it useful to practice the old politics of division, doing their best to convince middle-class Americans of a great untruth, that government was somehow itself to blame for their growing economic insecurity -- that distant bureaucrats were taking their hard-earned dollars to benefit the welfare cheat or the illegal immigrant.

It has gotten so that every time I listen to Mr Obama speak, I come away with the same impression: he is petty; he is divisive; he is small.

If ever there was an occasion for magnanimity, this was it. Dr King's dream has been largely realized: the current administration, Democratic, is led by our first black President and includes our first black Attorney General; the previous administration, Republican, brought us our first two black Secretaries of State. On a day when the President had the opportunity to rise above the “blame game” and bring all Americans together to celebrate the fulfillment of the aspirations of Dr King, Mr Obama could not hold back from a whining partisan attack on his opponents.

His speech impugned the motives of a large portion of the American population. His opponents are not the loyal opposition, but rather mere “entrenched interests.” They disagree with him not out of principle, but because they are unjust, unfair, greedy. They tell “great untruths,” they “resist,” they lack compassion.

And, then, in the same speech in which he launched these partisan salvoes, he had the temerity to suggest that it is his opponents who practice the “politics of division” rather than he himself.

He is not the President of us all. And he would have us believe (and his supporters never seem to stop reminding us) that it is our racism rather than his divisiveness that makes it so.

The American people long for a statesman who can uplift, inspire, unite. Obama only alienates, antagonizes, divides. Instead of celebrating the legacy of the great statesman, Reverend King, Mr Obama's petty attacks only served to demean it. How sad.