Witness to Greatness: The Consequential Presidency of Barack Obama in Perspective

By Obi Nwasokwa

It is the very stuff of legend. A man from the very bottom of the American caste emerges, seemingly out of nowhere, captures the nations imagination and improbably -- within four odd years, defies gravity and rises to the dizzying height of the American presidency thereby becoming the first non-white in history elected to lead an overwhelmingly white nation. A Cinderella like fairy tale? No. Thats the story of President Barack Obama. Seismic and epic, it is a biblical tale of the trials, travails, tribulations and dazzling triumphs of the rejected stone that became cornerstone of Moses as pharaoh. Reviled and vilified like his legendary idol, Abraham Lincoln, whose election sparked the American civil war, Obamas election likewise triggered a cold uncivil civil war. That notwithstanding, his achievements are impressive even historic. Regarded as a Gettysburg-like pivotal moment in American history, Obamas metaphorical conquest of the American presidency is a monumental achievement, a crossing of the Rubicon and a historic 1066-type turning point matched in its sheer historic weight and majesty only by the achievements of Washington and Lincoln. It reboots American democracy and heralds a new Yes We can! era of American and world history with new and expansive possibilities already evident in the unusual and iconoclastic demographic profiles of many of his wannabe successors. It gives credence to the creed All men are created equal and confers legitimacy on American democracy. It redounds to the credit of the nation, and burnishes her image as the pacesetter in the quest for interracial harmony. Citing these and Obamas many other achievements such as saving a moribund economy and reforming healthcare, the author predicts that Obama will be revered as one of Americas greatest presidents.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Mar 23, 2016
• ISBN: 9781514452691

Obi Nwasokwa

Obi Nwasokwa is a cardiologist practicing in New York City. An immigrant from Nigeria, he graduated with a B.S. from Yale where he majored in Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry and was a member of the secret society, Book and Snake. He subsequently earned the MD and PhD degrees from the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and did a residency in Internal Medicine and fellowship in Cardiology at the Emory University School of Medicine hospitals in Atlanta. He is a keen observer of the American social and political scene. He lives in Long Island.

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INTRODUCTION

On the Hinge of History: Greatness in Our Time

As President of the United States, he must have sense enough to see and acknowledge he has been an egregious failure. One thing must be self evident to him, and that is that under no circumstances can he hope to be the next President of the United States.

---James Gordon Bennett, The New York Herald,

August 6, 1864

We feel sure that the discerning and considerate of all parties will concur in our judgment that [his] reputation will stand higher with posterity than with the mass of his contemporaries---that distance, whether in time or space, while dwarfing or obscuring so many, must place him in a fairer light---future generations will deem him undervalued by those for and with whom he labored, and be puzzled by the bitter fierceness of the personal assaults by which his temper was tested.

---Horace Greeley, New York Tribune, April 19, 1865

Have you ever wondered how it must have felt to live in President Abraham Lincoln's time? Or in the time of---let me not say Jesus Christ lest I be crucified---say, Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. or Winston Churchill, or of any other towering historical figure? And to observe them, noting their struggles and their successes, their trials and tribulations as well as their triumphs? And revel in the knowledge that you are experiencing something quite extraordinary? Only a few generations are lucky enough to be granted such a rare opportunity. It is an opportunity to be seated in history's front row and to watch in real time as it plays out one of its extraordinary dramas, one destined to reverberate through time and space and become one for the ages. In any one country, such opportunities occur, on the average, perhaps no more than once or twice in a century.

It is true however that past generations rarely appreciated their time for what it was. Perhaps it is an illustration of the saying, Familiarity breeds contempt. Consider Jesus, for example. Born of peasant stock, he was an obscure, undistinguished, utterly inconsequential, and forgettable upstart from an obscure corner of the Roman Empire. His powerful contemporaries accused him of making what they regarded as absurd, delusional, blasphemous, and treasonable claims. As the scripture says, He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. He came unto his own and his own received him not. Even though his message was one of peace, love, compassion, and humanity, his contemporaries executed him on trumped-up charges. They intended---and expected---to put an end to his story and his influence once and for all. But that was not exactly what would happen. Posterity would see things differently---very differently. His execution, little noted at the time, would be long remembered as it would prove to be---for good and for ill---arguably the single most seminal event in all of human history. After his death, Jesus was deified; and for centuries in Christendom, anyone who dared deny his status as God risked losing his or her life.

For whatever reason, Lincoln's contemporaries had no idea who it was they had in their midst. They considered Lincoln anything but the giant of history he has since become. Today Lincoln's tenure as president, despite being arguably the most polarizing and divisive in American history, is romanticized and mythologized as almost magical. Even President Obama thinks that a President with the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt might have better bridged the divide between the parties and ended the rancor and the suspicion that bedeviled his tenure as president. But the truth is that Lincoln's presidency was beset by the toxicity of a lot more rancor and suspicion and deeper divisions than the Obama era ever experienced. And this was more than the obvious North-South divide that exploded to give rise to the Civil War that practically consumed his entire presidency. The North was riven by divisions: Democrats vs Republicans; Copperheads vs. Republicans; Copperheads vs other Democrats; Abolitionists vs the rest; Radical Republicans vs other Republicans. Know Nothings vs Catholic Irish and German immigrants. They all had divergent, often irreconcilable, views about whether the civil war should be fought and what the Civil War should be about. And they all hated Lincoln who in August 1864, stood alone without friends or supporters. Even after he won reelection, Lydia Maria Child, a Radical Republican, would say: There was no enthusiasm for honest old Abe. Finally let's not forget that these divisions were so deep and irreconcilable that they led eventually to Lincoln's assassination.

Some of Lincoln's contemporaries reviled him as this Presidential pigmy, the obscene ape of Illinois, and a first rate second rate man. After all, before he became president, he had been a nobody---unschooled, uncouth, unkempt, ungainly, unrefined, uncultured, unattractive, unsophisticated, undistinguished, undisciplined, unqualified, and therefore unfit for the office of president, having run nothing larger than a two-man law office and finally untested and woefully unequal to the crisis confronting him and the country he led. His contemporaries despised and disrespected him the way no other president before or since has been despised, disdained, and disrespected. Some of them regarded the Emancipation Proclamation as a venomous blow at the sacred liberty of white men to own black men and a monstrous usurpation, a criminal wrong, and an act of national suicide. The Chicago Times, the Fox News of the midnineteenth century, characterized the Gettysburg Address as silly, flat, dishwatery utterances, a veritable source of shame and embarrassment to every self-respecting American of that time. Commenting on Lincoln's second inaugural address, the same paper could not conceive it possible that even Mr. Lincoln could produce a paper so slipshod, so loose-jointed, so puerile, not alone in literary construction, but in its ideas, its sentiments, its grasp. The hostile New York World dismissed it with a blush of shame and wounded pride and lamented that a divided nation should neither be sustained in this crisis of agony by words of wisdom nor cheered with words of hope.

On November 24, 1863, the Harrisburg Patriot and Union newspaper of Pennsylvania referred to the Gettysburg Address as the silly remarks of the president and opined in an editorial that for the credit of the nation, we are willing that the veil of oblivion shall be dropped over them and that they shall be no more repeated or thought of. Sevenscore and ten years later, in 2013, on the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, having seen the light, the paper finally retracted this judgment in an editorial. To them, the previously silly remarks had become sacred text, and they now deemed themselves lacking in the proper language to exalt, hallow, and venerate it.

Throughout his presidency, Lincoln's popularity was quite possibly the lowest of any American president. His critics called him indecisive, vacillating, and a ditherer (sounds familiar?) despite the fact that when it came to the Emancipation Proclamation, a magnificent act of moral rectitude unsurpassed in human history, he told his cabinet that he had made up his mind irrevocably and that he was seeking their advice only with regards to the timing of the proclamation. Even though he was a man of caution and moderation, he approached the prosecution of the civil war and the related issue of slavery with single-minded strategic clarity. On January 1, 1863, as he was about to sign the Emancipation Proclamation, he paused to steady his trembling hands, saying that he did not want any future examiner of the document to see hesitation in his signature and then declaring that if my name ever goes into history, I know it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it. He was later to say early in 1865 that the Emancipation Proclamation was the central act of my administration and the great event of the 19th century. The same may well be said in the future about Obamacare. It is interesting that Horace Greeley, a contemporary of Lincoln's and one of his most implacable left-leaning critics and one of the guiding lights of the age and the owner of the New York Tribune---even as he judged Lincoln, after the latter's death, to be an unimpressive figure, insisting that he was not the man of transcendent genius, of rare insight, of resistless force of character---nonetheless had the discernment to predict, correctly if grudgingly, that Mr. Lincoln's reputation will stand higher with posterity than with the mass of his contemporaries and that future generations will . . . be puzzled by the bitter fierceness of the personal assaults by which his temper was tested.

Horace Greeley might well have been referring to President Obama, another president who has had to endure the bitter fierceness of unwarranted personal assaults in a political environment that may well be regarded as a cold war---a cold uncivil civil war.

If anyone had suggested as late into his presidency as August 1864 that Lincoln would be regarded as the greatest American president, that person would have become a laughingstock or might have been asked to go and get his head examined. As the presidential election of 1864 loomed, the land was soaked in blood as the American Civil War raged seemingly with no end in sight. Lincoln's reelection prospects were very dim to nonexistent. And Lincoln knew it. He was considered an egregious failure. Indeed, the Republicans were full of buyer's remorse for having renominated him---a would-be loser for sure---to run for reelection despite being widely viewed as a failed incumbent and the man whose obduracy to some, lack of resolve to others and incompetence to yet others, cost the nation so much blood and treasure. What no one knew at that time was that at that darkest of hours, dawn---glorious dawn---was just around the corner. Also, what no one knew that August was that sadly, Lincoln had only eight months more to live.

Today, the veneration of Lincoln borders on not just beatification but deification. He is memorialized in a Greek temple on the National Mall, a place of pilgrimage and a hallowed spot, that is, perhaps the single most-visited memorial site or shrine in America. There, his majestic larger-than-life figure sits in marbled splendor like a deity. The sacred text of his once scorned but now sacramental language adorns the walls. As the faithful file past slowly, solemnly, as befits participants in a sacramental experience, they gaze silently, in quiet reflection, at the figure: the patriarch aptly named Abraham, looking the part, his cheeks sunken and with furrows of care and concern, the fingerprints of the woe visited on his people for the offense of slavery---the father figure who remade the nation, giving it a new birth of freedom, the savior of the last best hope of earth, who met his Calvary fittingly on a Good Friday. Or they read and meditate upon the meaning of the sacred text on the walls, all in silent reverence. Or is it adoration? At Gettysburg, the high priest, here at the altar consecrated and hallowed by blood, presiding over a sacrament, administering an oath of fealty to a proposition even onto death---We here highly resolve. At the second inaugural, again the high priest, now preaching reconciliation to bind up the nation's wounds, at the moment of triumph admonishing, improbably: Let us judge not, that we be not judged. No one now recalls the snobbery and the slights and the slurs he endured at the hands of his contemporaries. And no one bows or genuflects or makes the sign of the cross. Not yet. But who can say? That may well happen tomorrow.

***

Needless to say, I think that even though like past generations we may not know it let alone acknowledge it, we are living in a time of a rare historic opportunity. It is an opportunity to bear witness to greatness. Nothing less. I think that the man of our time who gives our time this rare character is President Barack Obama. Next time you see him, please do yourself a favor and take a good look at him. Then remind yourself that this is no ordinary man. That this is what greatness looks like. Then whether or not you like him, rejoice that you are lucky enough to live in his time and to experience him as your contemporary. The way many others who will revere, venerate, and idolize him will not.

From the moment he burst upon the national scene and into our consciousness---seemingly out of nowhere---Barack Obama has continued, in Shakespeare's immortal words, to bestride the world like a colossus. It is difficult to find another political figure who rose to such dizzying heights in so short a time. In the words of David Von Drehle, writing for Time magazine on December 17, 2008, a month before his first inauguration, Obama hit the American scene like a thunderclap, upended our politics, shattered decades of conventional wisdom and overcame centuries of the social pecking order. A thunderclap indeed. A veritable force of nature.

But how did this happen?

Chris Matthews provides an insight. Commenting on the tenth anniversary of Obama's emergence into the national spotlight, Chris Matthews exulted that ten years ago, Barack Obama came upon the American public as a breath of fresh air. He spoke in ways that awakened our hopes, broke through the clouds of cheap politics and stormy rhetoric. We heard him and elected him our president.

In case you haven't suspected it, let me say explicitly that I am an admirer of Barack Obama. I think that he will be considered one of America's greatest presidents, the judgment of hostile or skeptical contemporaries notwithstanding. Indeed, to my mind, measured against his fellow American presidents, Obama's achievement is rivaled in its historic majesty and social and political impact and importance only by the achievements of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. His presidency has history written all over it the way only the presidencies of Lincoln and Washington did. It is an inflection point in American history. Not even the presidency of FDR could exude history the way Obama's presidency does and Lincoln's and Washington's presidencies did. As Obama raised his hand and took the presidential oath of office on Tuesday, January 20, 2009, what the nation and the world witnessed was one small step for a man, one giant leap for America---and indeed for mankind. That simple act was the moon shot of American---no, world---politics. But in many ways, it was the achievement of one man. Of noncriminal leaders in modern times, only the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Madiba Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, and Winston Churchill rival him in importance. True, comparing these diverse personalities may be like comparing apples and oranges because these men are great for different reasons. Like some of these men, Obama does not have to fight any major wars to achieve this iconic status. Just stop for one moment and consider that Obama comes from the ranks of a people whom the US Supreme Court---that ever-fair and impartial adjudicator of racial matters---considered beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect. That was in 1857---not that long ago. Fast forward to 2008, 151 years later. Obama's greatest achievement is having the audacity, the chutzpah, to seriously think and believe he could overcome centuries of the social pecking order and the rigidity of an American caste, sclerosed and ossified by time and enforced by pernicious custom and tradition, and become president and then planning brilliantly and meticulously and getting himself elected president in a political milieu where just a few years before, the thought of a black president would have been simply laughable. Summoned by history, Obama was ready, having lived a disciplined and purpose-driven life and one with no skeletons in the closet. Michelle Obama, for instance, could tout the quality and consistency of his character as one reason he should be president. He was thus prepared and able to answer the call of history by rising up and stepping forward to meet his moment and to fulfill his destiny. He then defied gravity and deftly rose against, and above, the formidable pull and drag of prejudice to win the ultimate political prize, the very pinnacle of power hitherto seemingly reserved for whites only---the presidency of the United States of America. To put this achievement in perspective, you have to imagine the biblical Moses becoming the Pharaoh. It is simply seismic, epic, and biblical.

There have been few truly monumental and symbolic events in American history. Lincoln prosecuted the American Civil War to a successful conclusion to prove that a new nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that 'all men are created equal' . . . can long endure. This means that the United States was not just an artificial collection of states to be torn asunder at the whim of any secessionist. It was a real nation. He became the symbol of that achievement. Watergate tested and provided proof for the notion that no one is above the law, and Richard Nixon became the embodiment of that creed. Obama's successful quest for the American presidency tested---and gave new credence to that most American of creeds---the proposition that 'all men are created equal.' Obama's election says that this proposition is not mere abstraction or empty if nice-sounding rhetoric. It is for real. Obama's epic groundbreaking and trailblazing achievement marks a watershed in American history. It guarantees that Obama will be a figure of myth and legend down the ages. He will be revered as the man who put the creed All men are created equal to its ultimate and most rigorous test and challenged and enabled America to provide incontrovertible proof that it is true and, in so doing, became its very embodiment and symbol. Before Obama, the creed seemed delusional and hypocritical. It was not for real. Obama's election gave the creed, at long last, undeniable credence and legitimacy and went a long way toward conferring on American democracy, some measure of the authenticity and legitimacy that always eluded it. Obama's ascent to the presidency is proof that, as Obama declared in Grant Park on the night of his election, America is a place where all things are possible and no one out there needs to wonder if the dream of our founders is alive in our time or to question the power of our democracy.

Because Obama gave America's promise a big boost, we are already seeing his legacy unfold before our eyes even before the end of his tenure as president, as we watch Marco Rubio, Bobby Jindal, Ben Carson, and Ted Cruz run for president without anyone questioning their suitability for office just because of their ethnicity or asking of each of them, Is he one of us? With Obama, the nation has crossed the Rubicon. And there is no going back.

After Obama, anyone, no matter his or her appearance or pedigree or national origin or affiliation, may aspire to the highest office in the land and be taken seriously. This, undoubtedly, is the reason why, for instance, at Obama's first inauguration, a mammoth throng of 1.8 million people---this author among them---crowded into the National Mall to be physically in the presence of history and to witness history with their own eyes. I also think that this was why President Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. As Chris Matthews would say on the tenth anniversary of Obama's emergence, in electing Obama president, America wanted the world to know that the belief that 'all men are created equal' was as alive as the American pulse, that making it real would indeed quicken that pulse, make us a more 'alive' democracy. Thus, in a larger sense, Obama's ascent to the presidency was the achievement of the American people. The worth, the authenticity, and the legitimacy of American democracy, a grand historical project with a tortured and tortuous historical trajectory, having been, in Obama's words, scarred by our treatment of native peoples, betrayed by slavery, clouded by the subjugation of women, shaken by war and depression, this project which Lincoln nonetheless called the last best hope of earth was put to the test. And the American people came through with flying colors. Indeed, in no other place on earth could this achievement---Obama's improbable story and ascent to the presidency---have been possible. It is regrettable though that never the ones to see any good in anything associated with Obama, in keeping with their role as the little men of history and perfect foil to Obama, the Republicans and their Supreme Court, in their pettiness and mean-spiritedness, are foolishly and shamelessly bent on degrading and downgrading this American national achievement through rulings and legislations designed to undermine American democracy by making it difficult for some segments of the American electorate to exercise their inalienable right to vote.

***

In their 2009 book on the 2008 US presidential campaign, Johnson and Balz wrote that Obama was the most unlikely presidential prospect in all of American history. Interestingly, the same could have been said of Abraham Lincoln whom Larry Tagg called the least qualified candidate for President ever elected. But there is a good reason why Obama fits the Johnson-Balz billing. Even though since 1776, blacks have always constituted at least one-eighth of the American population; only whites have been presidents of the United States. Not only that, only whites have had the opportunity to run for president seriously and win. If the most important and fundamental tenet of the American creed---namely, all men are created equal, as proclaimed by the Declaration of Independence, had truly held sway, statistically, there should have been five black presidents before Obama. But that didn't happen. Instead, Obama is a pioneer and a champion like no other. He went not just where no nonwhite had gone before but where no nonwhite was ever expected to go. He is the first nonwhite to willfully shatter the color bar and enter this most exclusive of clubs---that of presidents of the United States---in this historically very race conscious and racist society. Simply stated, Obama accomplished something universally recognized as quite extraordinary and previously considered impossible. In the whole sweep of human history, Obama became not only the first black but the first nonwhite to be elected leader of a majority white nation anywhere on earth -- a landmark achievement in not just American but world history. In so doing, Obama has achieved the iconic stature of a great historical figure and a conquering hero who metaphorically assaulted and conquered the American presidency. He has become a veritable beacon of hope, especially to nonwhites all over the globe. That is why his first inauguration was one of the most watched global events in history. He is a symbol of the ideal of unstinting, unqualified, and unreserved inclusiveness and equality, the man who actualized the American creed that all men are created equal. Even if for just one moment in time---one bright shining moment---Obama showed what is possible. He added a period to that creed, making it absolute so that there is no unwritten but understood subtext that forces a cynical whisper of skepticism, skepticism that counters but some are more equal than others. Particularly gratifying is the fact that no one will cry Foul! Affirmative action! or charge racial preference here. For Obama did it fair and square by his own exertions---playing by the rules. He did it through his personal drive, discipline, dynamism, and determination, backed by uncommon and uncanny political and operational skill, smarts, savvy, and sophistication---against seemingly insuperable odds including the stiff and spirited but fair opposition of a majority of white Americans. This would force one of his avowed detractors finally to admit---in the book The Amateur---in spite of a natural disinclination to give Obama credit for anything, that Obama knows how to win elections. But he did so in a context that made the admission less complimentary than pejorative. To prove his inexperience, some others would say that the only thing he has ever run was his presidential campaign, implying that that was trivial in the grand scheme of things. Never mind that some of these critics either failed woefully when they tried their hand at running for president or did not dare to run for president for fear of failing. And by the way, guess which other president was even less experienced than Obama when he became president. His name was Abraham Lincoln. In this regard, it is noteworthy that some of the most experienced and seasoned people who became president were either outright failures or mediocre presidents. Think James Buchanan. Think George H. W. Bush.

Obama did not just stop at winning the presidency. Having won, he then proceeded to execute the office of president of the United States so faithfully that he was reelected with over 51 percent of the vote. His reelection was a feat in its own right when one considers the challenges he faced in his quest for reelection. For starters, history was not on his side at least on two counts. First, on Election Day, unemployment stood well above 7.2 percent, the empirical ceiling for reelection since FDR. Moreover, historically, the American people do not grant a president reelection after doing so to two consecutive immediate predecessors. The last and only time that happened was James Monroe's reelection in 1820 after the two-term presidencies of Jefferson and Madison. Before Obama, only five presidents in US history had been elected then reelected with an absolute majority of the vote. Obama is the first Democratic president to achieve this goal since FDR and the first president of either party to be elected twice with over 51 percent of the vote since Eisenhower. This fact---namely, that Obama was first elected and then reelected, both times with an absolute majority of the popular vote---says that he has been at least a good president. His electoral success in 2012 represents an endorsement and validation of his presidency and affirmation of its success in running the affairs of the nation. To that extent, it counts as just as important as his election for the first time in 2008---arguably even more so---since it shows that the American people appreciate and approve of his stewardship in office, imperfect though it was. Indeed, Obama himself acknowledged this fact. As reported by Time magazine, issue of December 31, 2012, after Obama realized that he had won reelection, he met with his three top advisers David Axelrod, David Plouffe, and Jim Messina to let them know what this victory meant to him. He reportedly said that this [victory] is more satisfying than '08. It wasn't just about what I was going to do as president. It's what I've done. He continued, It was easy to think that maybe 2008 was the anomaly. And I think 2012 was an indication that, no, this is not an anomaly. He mused, We've gone through a very difficult time. The American people have rightly been frustrated at the pace of change, and the economy is still struggling, and this President we elected is imperfect. And yet despite all that, this is who we want to be [President]. That's a good thing.

***

Many books have been written about Barack Obama. The authors are diverse. This diversity shows in the perspectives from which they approached their task as well as the motives and motivations behind their effort. But virtually, all the books have been written by authors who fall into two broad categories. One category is made up of detractors and haters, in one of whose books we read that Obama is the worst president in American history (and I suppose his reelection proves the point incontrovertibly). John Avalon catalogued some of these books in his piece in the Daily Beast of October 26, 2012 entitled The Obama Haters Book Club: The Canon Swells. The other category includes well-meaning and supposedly fair-minded critics who try to be even handed. The latter includes journalists, historians, commentators, and documentarians determined to tell a story they consider either interesting or compelling or both---dispassionately and, to the extent possible, objectively. Some of the detractors on the other hand wrote their books clearly in an effort to help take him down and deny him reelection. Not surprisingly, many such books appeared during the presidential campaign of 2012. John Avalon characterized these books as overheated and often unhinged screed painting a picture of the president as a dangerous radical hell-bent on undermining the Republic by any means necessary. As he saw it, these books constituted a steady drumbeat of incitement aimed at poisoning the well of civic discourse for many voters and thereby divide the nation beyond reason by distorting the president's real record beyond all recognition. One of these books in particular, written by Dinesh D'Souza, entitled Obama's America, was noteworthy for the vitriol in its pages. Without offering any credible evidence, it calls Obama the architect and presiding instrument of America's decline bent on downsizing America. And it was accompanied by a movie, 2016: Obama's America, which doubled down on the same mission---to undermine President Obama and his campaign and help to defeat him and to deny him a second term. If there is yet a book by an unabashed admirer, I have not seen it. I wrote this book to fill this void. It is therefore an attempt to bring some semblance of balance to the cacophony of voices. If it is seen as a paean to Barack Obama, then I shall have succeeded.

This book's publication was originally intended---unsuccessfully as it turned out---to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the emergence of Barack Obama from obscurity unto the national stage and the national spotlight. Considering that Obama is now well into his second term as president, it is easy to conclude that rarely has a political figure had such a meteoric rise.

There is no expectation here that this is a book that will attract attention or that will be read widely or that will be successful and become a bestseller like many previous books on Obama. I am no writer. I have never written a book before. My aim here has been simply to tell the story of President Barack Obama the way I see it and the way I have experienced it, and most importantly, my aim is to say what it has meant to me as a full-blooded African and an African American. Above all, in this labor of love, it was my intention to savor and honor Obama's epic achievement and, in so doing, celebrate it.

I also wrote parts of this book to serve as a primer on America. This book attempts to educate the people of sub-Saharan Africa who often have a utopian view of the United States. I have tried to paint a more realistic picture that is different from the illusory view widely held in sub-Saharan Africa. I hope it will disabuse people of their fantasies about the United States. For it is true that for many black people, the United States is hell on earth. As a group, blacks inhabit the bottom of the American caste and do not get a fair shake in America, the laws notwithstanding. But as one of my friends observed recently, America is full of contradictions. In spite of their indefensible treatment of black people, many of whose lives are still wasted and squandered needlessly in concentration camps called prisons, it is a fact that Americans are the most generous and kindhearted people in history---as a group. No other country is as largehearted. Think the Berlin Airlift, the Marshall Plan, the Peace Corps, the ASPAU scholarships, the War over Kosovo, the volcanic eruption in Goma, the President's AIDS drug program in sub-Saharan Africa, the tsunami in Asia, the Pakistani earthquake, the Haiti earthquake disaster, and the Ebola crisis in West Africa. In all these cases, the USA led the way even though they didn't have to.

I arrived at the United States in the fall of 1972 with less than $100 in my pocket. I then went on to attend some of the best universities on earth buoyed by the generosity of the American people. I recall when I was writing my PhD thesis in 1978 when at one point I found out that it was necessary to make an extensive revision. This was before word processors so extensive retyping was unavoidable. At the time, I could not type well enough to undertake the task myself. I depended on a typist for the task. The revision would cost me another $200. Except that I did not have $200. With some trepidation, I had to go to the dean of students and professor of pediatrics at Johns Hopkins, the late Dr. Henry Seidel (may God bless his soul and may his soul rest in perfect peace). I say trepidation because I had already received a generous financial aid package. When I explained to Dr. Seidel that I needed $200 to complete my PhD thesis, I expected a lecture on how I should be careful with money. Instead, the avuncular Dr. Seidel said, That's no problem, Obi. We have money for that. He gave me a check for $500! I was flabbergasted. And delighted. I have often thought of that day. And it is one reason I make sure I try to make an annual donation to the universities I attended. The generosity thing has rubbed off on me. I am currently actively and passionately involved in rebuilding my Nigerian high school and similar schools in my part of the world all of which have suffered much neglect. If there is anyone out there who is so inclined, they should please help us in this effort by going to www.africaneducationfund.org or gssaaa.org and making a donation. African Education Fund and Government Secondary School, Afikpo, Alumni Association (GSSAAA) are 501(c)(3) organizations and donations are tax deductible.

One of the things that will become apparent in this book is that I see parallels between some of President Obama's political struggles and my experiences living in America and indeed the experiences of just about every African American in this country and, I have dared to say so, sometimes very explicitly. The only difference, of course, is that Mr. Obama's struggles are infinitely more important since the stakes are millions of times higher. Moreover, his struggles are taking place under the full glare of publicity---in full view of the entire world.

Reacting to President Obama's policy prescriptions, his opponents and political adversaries were strident, emotional, and visceral rather than coolheaded, analytical, rational, and cerebral---like President Obama. This was an opposition unhinged, thinking with its guts, not its head. In many cases, they simply could not believe that this man, a black man, is not only president of the United States but is also succeeding in that role. Republican opposition was therefore automatic, reflexive, inflexible, and invidious---and often marked by implacable and irresponsible intransigence, as well as mindless and mischievous obstructionism. Simply put, their policy was opposition. And it was opposition at all costs and at all times opposition no matter the issue and no matter what the president's position was, no matter whether their opposition conflicted with their previous---even recently held---policy positions and no matter whether it hurt the American people.

The opposition was personal born of hatred and, dare I say it, racism. Be it the ferocity and belligerence and, in some cases, the outright insanity of the Tea Party insurrection and the viciousness and gratuitous hostility that surfaced during some of their demonstrations tinged as they were at times with blatant racism, be it Rep Joe Wilson of South Carolina heckling the president during an address to congress by shouting You lie!; or the man in black, the Tea Party Justice Samuel Alito, casting off all restraints and pretensions of self-control and decorum, apparently mad as hell, shamelessly and inappropriately mouthing off the words Not true! at the president of the United States during a State of the Union address to Congress; or the Republican Supreme Court's extraordinary ruling in Citizen's United, which was clearly designed to tip the electoral scale decisively, even if unfairly, in Obama's Republican opponent's favor and thwart Obama's reelection; or the Senate minority leader Senator Mitch McConnell's ill-considered and guileless public declaration that his number one goal was to do everything in his power to ensure that President Obama would be a one-term president; or the record number of filibusters by Senate Republicans during President Obama's first term; or how Arizona governor Jan Brewer, seemingly out of control, confronted the president of the United States publicly on January 25 2012, a threatening finger pointed ominously at his face, unleashing a verbal fusillade at him, angrily and publicly scolding the president of the United States as one would scold an errant and naughty child; or the good doctor, Benjamin Carson, a great man in his own right, who apparently feels overshadowed by Obama and has, metaphorically, to poke out his head from under Obama's shadow and yell Don't forget me! I am still here! by going to the White House Prayer Breakfast to insult his host; or the feckless and reckless Tea Party--inspired government shutdown of October 2013; or Larry Klayman of Freedom Watch, speaking on Sunday October 13, 2013, during the government shutdown, flying the emblem of evil and iniquity, the symbol of man's inhumanity to man, the American swastika, the Confederate flag, during a demonstration supported by Tea Party senator and Mr. Government Shutdown himself, Senator Ted Cruz, as well as Tea Party queen, Governor Sarah Palin, berating the president of the United States supposedly for being some kind of closet Moslem who bows down to Allah, urging the crowd to use civil disobedience and demand that this president leave town and that he put the Quran down and get off his knees and figuratively come out with his hands up; or the insane rants of Rudolph Giuliani alleging that President Obama doesn't love America; or the Republican House Speaker, John Boehner, without informing the White House, inviting Prime Minister Netanyahu to come and address the Congress and thereby poke a metaphorical finger in the president's eye by publicly criticizing his diplomatic overtures to Iran in the sanctum of the US House Chamber; or the unprecedented move by Senator Cotton and forty-six fellow Republican senators in trying to scuttle the nuclear agreement the administration was crafting by writing to the Iranians and gratuitously advising them that a future president would not honor any agreement President Obama made with them; considering all this, it is difficult not to conclude that this president was being treated the way perhaps no president in US history has been treated---with utter disdain and disrespect. And this is an experience with which every black person in this country has some familiarity. But this is all part of the story of Barack Hussein Obama, a man his political opponents considered too big for his breeches and in over his head and unimpressive even as his performance in office was nothing if not spectacular and astounding. It is a story that is in large part about succeeding---or finding a way to succeed---in spite of daunting and seemingly impossible and overwhelming odds. I find that story tremendously fascinating.

When this story, the story of Barack Obama and his time, our time, is finally told in history books, much as the larger-than-life figure of Lincoln dominates the American Civil War era, Obama will be by far the dominant figure---the leading man, a Gulliver in the midst of Lilliputians. To the extent that they deserve mention, all the other cast of characters, including notably his political foes and detractors, the empty barrels now seeking to make the most sound, will be bit actors and extras, the supporting cast of characters playing their roles in his shadow and merely providing the details that give the story of Barack Obama its peculiar color and texture and its unique allure. Even his most implacable and more discerning critics obliquely, if grudgingly, acknowledge this fact except that they manage to twist the facts and blame Obama for it. For instance, one Obama hater, Charles Krauthammer, the Harvard-trained shrink turned journalist and political commentator, alleged as only a shrink could allege that Obama has a narcissistic personality and always sees himself as the man at the center of the stage, declaring, I think he's extremely self-involved. He sees himself in very world historical terms . . . He does have this sense of this all being a drama about him, and everybody else is just sort of part of the stage. One would like to think that Dr. Krauthammer has the intelligence to know the truth, namely, that this extraordinary man, Obama, is indeed at the center of the world stage and will be seen in world historical terms no matter what Charles Krauthammer and other critics and detractors think. But often, envy and jealousy and group think cloud the judgment of otherwise rational people and at times drive such people to madness. Whatever the case, in spite of his insults directed at President Obama, the name Krauthammer is unlikely to merit mention, except possibly at best as an obscure footnote, in the history of the age of Barack Obama. Krauthammer and his ilk should be smart and discerning enough to know that, whether or not they like it. As one implacable critic of President Lincoln, Horace Greely, was forced to acknowledge even if grudgingly, Krauthammer should acknowledge that Obama's reputation will stand higher with posterity than with the mass of his contemporaries [including Krauthammer]---that distance, whether in time or space, while dwarfing or obscuring so many [such as Krauthammer], must place him in a fairer light---future generations will deem him undervalued by those for and with whom he labored, and be puzzled by the bitter fierceness of the personal assaults by which his temper was tested by unfair critics like Krauthammer. In this regard, today, few people other than professional historians have heard of Clement Vallandigham. Yet this pro-slavery contemporary of Lincoln's and leader of the Copperheads, the Tea Party of the Lincoln era, was a thorn in Lincoln's flesh during the latter's presidency. Now forgotten, Vallandigham was then a prominent and formidable foe.

Obama has endured all that came his way with uncommon grace and dignity. Like a good sport. Unfazed. Keeping his trademark cool and composure. Cheerily smiling even while being reviled and insulted as almost no other president has been. Could it be that he understands that greatness comes at a price and is not handed to you on a platter of gold? After all, his idol and fellow Illinoisan Abraham Lincoln was reviled and insulted even more than Obama has been reviled and insulted except perhaps for the fact that there was no cable television or Internet or Facebook or Twitter or Fox News in Lincoln's time to amplify the insults and send them echoing and ricocheting through the airwaves at the speed of light from sea to shining sea. Or could it be that he thinks that after all, he is black and, like Shakespeare's Shylock, believes that sufferance is the badge of all our tribe. For instance, he, the president of the United States, was compelled to stoop to a beer summit---an oxymoron if ever there was one---with a lowly policeman. This would ordinarily have been considered an entirely trivial and pointless exercise and a total waste of presidential time. But the circumstances surrounding it, the context of it, and the cast of characters involved made it entirely cogent and compelling. The policeman was white, and Obama, even if president, is black. Expectations were warped to reflect and fit this unique situation in American politics. Obama, his distinguished but black Harvard professor friend in tow, was required to genuflect, and so he did genuflect to his white supporters in this otherwise---for a president---humiliating manner and do a public act of contrition to soothe feathers ruffled by the offense of calling a white man stupid, a veritable formulaic epithet reserved in America only for his kind.

Of course, Obama is well aware that if you do anything important in the social sphere, you are bound to encounter strong and spirited opposition. The fervor and ferocity of the opposition's reaction is commensurate with the scale and scope of the social impact of the change wrought by the new initiative. The more earthshaking the social change, the stronger and more energized and passionate the opposition in conformity with what could be considered Newton's third law of sociology and politics---for every social action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves and the result was that he was denied seeing his second term through, and opposition to the seismic social change he wrought was unleashed and crystallized in the form of the Ku Klux Klan, giving America its first taste of terrorism outside of the institution of slavery even though the terror targeted almost exclusively the freed slaves and their descendants. The civil rights legislations of fifty years ago so riled the political right that President Johnson predicted that the South was lost to his party for a generation, clearly an underestimate. The fact that Obama became president---the first black man to do so---is seismic in its own right. This reality alone was sufficient casus belli for a veritable cold civil war, the Republicans deciding on the eve of his inauguration to oppose everything he proposed no matter what it was. Then there is Obamacare, a groundbreaking legislative accomplishment, one that like-minded presidents with a social conscience had sought to pass and been denied for nearly a hundred years before Obama. It is Obama's Emancipation Proclamation, destined to take its place alongside Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid as a historic legislation that strengthened the social safety net, smoothing out the rough edges of capitalism and thereby strengthening it no matter what contemporary detractors and political foes claim. True, its rollout was anything but smooth and caused even its supporters anxiety and frustration. But this was also true of the Emancipation Proclamation. Like Obamacare, the Emancipation Proclamation was very unpopular with detractors, and for supporters, its rollout was frustrating and a debacle. For instance, after the Emancipation Proclamation took effect, abolitionists were in despair that not a single slave was freed by it for a long time. A majority of whites oppose Obamacare because they have been told repeatedly---and mindlessly believe being so predisposed---that it gives health care to the undeserving and the lazy and that they, the hardworking whites, are being forced to pay for it. This belief born of bigotry, prejudice, mean-spiritedness, and hatred of blacks, which run deep in the bloodstream of much (but not all) of white America especially in the South, ignores the well-known fact that those who will benefit the most are the white middle class. White opposition has congealed and crystallized out in the form of the Tea Party, the twenty-first-century version of the nineteenth-century Ku Klux Klan. As of this writing, the Republican Party, under the control of the Tea Party, has repealed Obamacare over sixty times and counting in the House of Representatives where they have held sway the longest. If one definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result, one has to conclude that the Tea Party and the US House Republicans have lost their mind. Nihilistic opposition to everything Obama supports or proposes is their policy. This makes it unlikely that Obama will have any legislative successes in his second term.

Thinking about all this, I find the rueful lament of Shakespeare's Mark Anthony echoing in my ears: O judgment, thou art fled to brutish beasts and men have lost their reason. In reaction to Obama, the opposition lost their reason and threw overboard their previously held, well thought-out policy positions in order to oppose Obama, resorting to all kinds of disingenuous contortions of thought and rhetoric to justify the unjustifiable. For instance, individual mandate, an idea first proposed by the Republican intelligentsia at the Heritage Foundation, became anathema because Obama finally got around to supporting it. Romneycare, Governor Romney's signature legislative achievement in Massachusetts that provided the blueprint for Obamacare, became radioactive, and its originator distanced himself from it and virtually disavowed and disowned it in order to be able to say that he would repeal Obamacare, the way his backers expected him to.

I am, of course, a supporter of the president. I am thrilled, and I exult in the fact that he is president of the United States and that he is succeeding beyond measure in that role. I also believe in the statement attributed to Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes to the effect that as life is action and passion, it is required of a man that he should share the passion and action of his time at peril of being judged not to have lived. And so I have participated to the extent the constraints of my life, both personal and professional, allow, in the passions of my time, largely with modest monetary contributions to Obama's campaigns and with my prayers. Yes indeed. I did pray that he succeed. I have never prayed for any politician before, but I prayed for this one. I was that invested in his success. No surprise here, given my background. This book is also one way I am sharing in the passions and actions of my time as a contemporary of a great president, President Obama. Indeed, of all the wonders I have been privileged to witness in my lifetime---namely, the demise of apartheid, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Internet, etc. etc., the ones that top them all are seeing a man walk on the moon and seeing a black man become president of the United States.

Another way I am sharing in the passions and actions of our time is to use this book to call attention to what an extraordinary time ours is because of Obama by yelling, Hey people, open your eyes, see your time for what it is and for what it will be seen to be. You are lucky to have a Lincoln-like figure in your midst. Wake up! Recognize him now as who he is. For whom he really is. Set aside the lies and the caricatures of him painted by political foes who will do and say anything to gain political power. Enjoy his presence. Count yourselves lucky that you are breathing the same air as he is, seeing the same sights he sees, and sharing the same concerns. Count yourselves lucky that you live in his time. Enjoy his presence. Celebrate him!

But much as I supported and rooted for President Obama, there was at least one time he gave me pause and disappointed me---as he did most of his ardent supporters. I am talking here about the first presidential debate of October 3, 2012. After that debate, I wondered whether President Obama still wanted to be president. Seriously. In fact, ludicrous as it might now seem, it crossed my mind that he might in fact be a secret Romney supporter. A phony. When soon afterward I received an e-mail from his campaign---supposedly from him and signed with his name, asking whether I had his back, I was incensed and livid. I fired off an e-mail to his campaign venting my anger at him. I wondered whether he had any self-awareness, any understanding of who he was and what he meant to millions of people including me. Of course, I am sure he never saw my e-mail. And that's just as well. But after firing off that e-mail, I felt better. At least my blood pressure returned to normal. Or almost to normal since one still had to deal with the anxieties created by the fallout from that dismal debate performance in its near-disastrous aftermath.

Another disappointment is that President Obama did not put an African American in the US Supreme Court. He must know how important the Supreme Court is especially to the fate, fortunes, and future of African Americans in this land. I believe that if he had been given a third chance early, say by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg retiring early, he would have appointed an African American. But Justice Ginsburg has not been inclined to leave early -- Democrats seem not to want to keep Democratic seats in the Supreme Court as much as Republicans -- so he is unlikely to get a realistic third chance. He should have known this and should not have taken the chance. He should have appointed an African American woman or man to replace Justice John Paul Stevens. Justice Elena Kagan should have been on a waiting list in case another opening occurred. Another opening did finally occur as a result of the sudden death of Justice Antonin Scalia on February 13, 2016. The Republican Senate promptly vowed to obstruct any attempt by President Obama to fill the vacancy making it unrealistic to expect that Obama will nominate an African American to fill the vacancy