Has President Barack Obama, through his election and policies, created almost irreversible dissaray within the Republican Party? For Mexico’s Excelsior, José Luis Valdés Ugalde writes that intentionally and by happenstance, Obama’s emergence was an ‘anomaly that destabilized the political environment for the better,’ and at the same time, it ‘served as a call to arms for the ultra-right, forcing out elements from the farthest depths of the U.S. psyche, producing an atmosphere at once fascinating and menacing.’
For Excelsior, highlighting the weakness of the U.S. Republican Party and the continuing support President Obama largely enjoys outside of the United States, José Luis Valdés Ugalde starts out this way:
From the moment he delivered that memorable piece of oratory as guest of honor at the 2004 Democratic National Convention that chose John Kerry for president, Barack Obama became the most effective destabilizing force on the U.S. public scene. Let me explain myself: his election to the White House, which according to Lyndon B. Johnson was never to be occupied by anyone but a member of the White Anglo Saxon Protestant community, was itself an anomaly that destabilized the political environment for the better and exasperated spirits that had been placidly enjoying the sleep of the self-righteous.
Obama’s election alone served as a call to arms for the ultra-right, forcing out elements from the farthest depths of the U.S. psyche, producing an atmosphere at once fascinating and menacing. Obama’s victory allowed the United States to move toward the end of racial thinking, and at last, placed issues of great significance and argumentative weight on the table before the more-or-less traditional members of the political establishment.
From the lethargic presidential confines of the born-again, guilt-laden George W. Bush, we passed to a freshness of discourse and elegance of oratory (and, as we have seen, even singing!) of a man who, by Washington standards, is a rather unconventional politician. Obama, a mixed-race activist from Chicago and, after all, a politician of color within the context of U.S. multiculturalism, has himself become the most important political event of our times. His presidency is a continental divide between the old and new United States.
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