Dear Editor:
You know, in the old days, when a youngster told his mother that he/ she wanted to be President of the United States, the parent would tell the youth something like this…
1. You need to be much smarter than the average person so you will have to work hard and be very serious about your studies. You will need some kind of advanced degree too because a college degree will be worth about as much as a high school diploma by the time you are grown up.
2. You will need to be a good communicator and know yourself. If you are comfortable in your own skin and know that you are a good, principled, capable and deserving person, you will project that to the world.
3. You will need to work much, much harder than the common man. This could mean that you will be working when others are sleeping, playing, exercising, enjoying free time.
This latest kerfuffle over President Obama’s education speech has really tripped my trigger. After all, what happened to the Republican mantra, “Pull yourself up by the bootstraps, work hard and you will succeed”? If there is anyone who fits that bill, it is Barack Obama. Born to a single mother with no father for support, he did just that. He made mistakes but pulled himself up by the bootstraps to not only get into Harvard ON HIS OWN, he graduated magna cum laude and was the President of Harvard Law Review which is the cream of the cream of the crop.
These parents who were so strenuously opposed to letting their children hear Obama’s inspiring story are ridiculous, if not, hysterical. And then to hear about the parents that were allowing their children to board a bus to go and hear President Bush give a speech the next week- unbelievable!
The sad thing is that so many of these Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh followers do not even see the irony in this. You want your children to hear a speech delivered by GW Bush, a C student, who exercised 2 hours a day for his entire presidency and did not even interrupt his vacation while thousands died in the Katrina Disaster. I stand corrected, he did fly over it.
There is one more virtue that Obama has that makes him even more equipped to be president that anyone in the last 50 years, and that is his courage. No president has more reason to fear assassination than Obama. Every day that President Obama kisses his children good-bye and sends them off to school, he has to have, in the back of his mind, the ominous notion that this could be the last time that he will be able to do this.
I am a politically moderate person and I do not endorse all of President Obama’s policies but we have finally returned to the standard of what a President of the United States should be and it is about time. Starting with smart, disciplined and courageous is a very good start indeed.
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