Like many of you, I was glued to the tube last Tuesday as former Illinois Sen. Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th president of the United States. I have high hopes for our new president - after all, I endorsed him last fall - but I'm realistic about what Team Obama will be able to accomplish, at least in the short term.
With wars raging in Afghanistan and Iraq, a violent narco-state developing on our southern border and a full-blown recession to deal with, President Obama and his top advisers face daunting challenges at home and abroad. Repeat after me: Obama isn't a Messiah and can't walk on water.
Despite all of the overblown rhetoric emanating from Washington, D.C., last Tuesday, the Obama administration must live in the real world just like the rest of us. Our job as citizens and voters is to support the president when we can and to criticize him when we think he's wrong, as I did when he appointed Hillary Clinton, a walking conflict of interest, as Secretary of State.
I've intentionally downplayed the fact that Obama is our first African-American president, and that's because I don't think race will be a major factor in his historic presidency. Like the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., whose life we celebrated last Monday, I believe people should be judged on the content of their character rather than on their skin color. Besides, our new president is as white as he is black. Veteran African-American leader Andrew Young described Obama as follows in Time magazine: "He isn't just black; he's an Afro-Asian-Latin European. That means he's a global citizen and an all-American boy. He defies categorization." And so he does.
Obama is a multi-cultural American with an inspiring life story that I can relate to because my two adult children had a foreign-born mother and grew up outside the continental United States, as Obama did in Indonesia and Hawaii. Nevertheless, like Obama, both of my kids are as American as apple pie, or Sarah Palin. That's how it is in most multi-cultural families. Like so many American males of his post-Boomer generation, Obama shoots hoops and complains about the BCS football standings while he and first lady Michelle try to raise two young daughters in a white-hot media spotlight. I felt sorry for those two little girls earlier this month as they ran a gantlet of pushy photographers on their first day of school.
Earlier, I mentioned the "overblown rhetoric" that bombarded us on a $150 million Inauguration Day. Listening to inaugural oratory and TV commentary, I couldn't tell whether Obama was the second coming of Abe Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt and/or John F. Kennedy, or all three of them. Actually, however, I think he's the first coming of Barack H. Obama, and that's good for America.
In a somewhat subdued inaugural address, President Obama called on his fellow Americans to put partisan differences aside and work for the common good in these tough times. "The stale political arguments that have consumed us for so long no longer apply," he said. "The question we ask today is not whether government is too big or too small, but whether it works." Good question.
Obama went on to compare the present moment in our national history with the dire situation that our first president, Gen. George Washington, and his troops faced at Valley Forge during the Revolutionary War. "In this winter of our hardship," the 44th president said, "let us brave once more the icy currents, and endure what storms may come" in search of a better world for our children and grandchildren. All of us share that noble goal as we seek to form a more perfect union and to ensure that the federal government serves the people, rather than the other way around.
Guy W. Farmer, a semi-retired journalist and former U.S. diplomat, resides in Carson City.