Award-winning columnist, writer, speaker and editor
Sometimes, even when I suspect that he knows it will hurt him, President Barack Obama does not follow the script. The evening of the day when terrorists struck in Belgium, the president and his family attended a Major League Baseball exhibition game in Cuba. Why didn’t he rush back to Washington, D.C., or to Belgium to show solidarity with our European allies? “The whole premise of terrorism is to try to disrupt people’s ordinary lives,” he told ESPN during the game.
Agree or disagree with the choice—and Republican critics didn’t hesitate to strongly disapprove—Obama showed the calm that has characterized his presidency but that may be out of step with Americans’ fear of terrorism reaching our shores again. (At least, that what’s GOP presidential candidates and their supporters are hoping.)
When Obama was running for president in 2008, however, calm was one of the few emotions allowed in his public persona. If he had introduced himself in red-faced, hair-on-fire mode (think the current Republican front-runner), his campaign would have ended before it began.
After decisive primary, it’s still a battleground, and the state likes it that way.
Whether the presidential race just got a lot more entertaining or frightening is the question.
In true “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” fashion, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie endorsed New York billionaire Donald Trump in the race to be the Republican nominee, and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio must be sweating more than is his wont.
After finishing first in the Iowa Republican caucuses in 2008 and 2012, respectively, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum were relegated to the undercard and mostly ignored pre-debate debate. Then the duo rushed (or perhaps hastily sauntered) to Donald Trump’s veterans’ event, one timed to clash with the main stage debate from which the front-runner was conspicuously absent because of his high-profile feud with Fox News.
So the leaders of yesteryear spent Thursday night at a Donald Trump veterans’ rally at Drake University — the Pips to Donald Trump’s Gladys Knight, background voices catching a bit of the spotlight but decidedly not the person the crowd and cameras had come to see. (Yes, in reality there were more than two Pips, but the fact that you had to think about it only proves the point.)
CHARLOTTE, NC — Primaries and caucuses in the 2016 presidential election are just months away, and the Democratic and Republican races are as unclear as ever. Joe Biden still hasn’t said whether he’s running. And is Donald Trump the real thing? WCCB Political Contributor, Mary C. Curtis, weighs in on the race for the White House.
In the final days of the just-ended, very long presidential campaign, when supportive crowds booed President Obama’s mention of opponent Mitt Romney and the GOP Congress, he delivered his usual response, “Don’t boo, vote. Vote!” then added, “Voting is the best revenge.” He was he hammered for it, of course, with Romney interpreting it to mean that Obama wanted supporters to “vote for revenge.”
Actually, no. The president, by paraphrasing an old saying, was picking up on a mood of pent-up frustration felt by many who had voted for him in 2008. No one ever expected a president of the United States to govern without criticism or partisan sniping. What they hoped was that Barack Obama — a man born without wealth or privilege, whose life story exhibited the best of the American dream — would, once he worked his way to the White House, be accorded the simple respect due that special office.
