Thinking it over ... The good question
By Félix Alfonso Peña Leave it to the press to ask a useless question. A CNN/Essence Magazine/Opinion Research Corp. poll asked, “Is the United States of America ready for a black president?” Given the front-runner position of Sen. Barack Obama, that question is superfluous. Voters already said yes in numbers sufficient to shove Sen. Hillary Clinton back into the Number Two spot in the Democratic presidential race. Never mind all those white guys in the wannabe pack. The voters had already answered. When 76 percent of poll respondents said, yes, we’re ready for a black president, they only restated the obvious. The only person who might have been given some pause by those numbers is the Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain. After a dogfight or two, he’s cleared the air of Republican contenders for Numero Uno and is now flying on automatic pilot with a happy landing forecast for the convention. But over three-quarters of the voters said they’re ready for a black president, and when you put the words “president” and “black” together, the next word that comes to mind is “Obama.” McCain rightfully ought to be concerned whether he’s going to be outgunned, outflanked and outmaneuvered once he takes off against Obama, so he may be asking himself and others some very serious questions about how to convince the public that maybe they’re not ready for Obama to become the first black president. That’s his battle. A good question for us to ask each other is whether we’re ready for a good president. Forget the color; good is what matters. After all, we are in the eighth year of theater in lieu of good government, watching as the Bush administration kept the drama going by casting one villain after another in its production of “It’s Us or Them.” The gays were Them, out to undo our way of life by marrying each other, so we needed a constitutional amendment to protect Us from Them. Flag burners! Heaven help us, but a match and a can of fuel made Them such a dire threat they needed to be extinguished. The tax-and-spend Liberals were Them, bent on ruining our economy with their do-gooder mentality, so the administration gave the richest people tax breaks in the face of astronomical deficits. How that helps Us remains a mystery to me, and to many others. The assault on the twin towers awakened the administration temporarily to the existence of a very real Them, people who really do intend to damage us, and who could hit us where we hurt. But soon Saddam Hussein — powerless outside of his borders and even within them in some places — became one of Them, and our attention shifted to him and away from our attackers. A couple of dog-and-pony shows by the Secretary of State, a lot of macho talk and arm-twisting, and suddenly we were blasting our way into the country Bush the Elder said we should leave alone because the problem would be getting out, not in. Flash forward to 1 May 2003: Bush the Younger probably thought he embodied Us triumphant over Them when he strutted across the carrier deck to announce that the mission had been accomplished in Iraq. The loss of over 3,500 American lives and expenditures totaling hundreds of billions of dollars — all accumulated since Bush’s photo op off the shores of the California coast — have proven otherwise. And before Bush, we had Bill Clinton, unwilling or incapable of rousing himself and the legislative leaders of this country to mount a successful offense against those who eventually managed to bring down the towers. His successful arousal for a White House intern became the focus of his last four years and of his political enemies, who were only too happy to erect a media circus around our president’s errant putz. After sixteen years of presidents amusing themselves at the expense of progress, we damn well better be asking ourselves some questions about our choice. And the first one isn’t the color of the president, it’s whether he’ll be good for the United States of America. |