Response to George Will of 10/2/12... More to Patience with Obama than Race

In this morning's Washington Post George Will advanced the opinion that the American people are being overly patient with President Obama because we are unwilling to vote out the First African American President... I cannot deny that some including myself might be less patient with a white president, but I hardly think that it is a determinative factor. I would be voting for whatever candidate the Democrats put forward in this election, I think this is probably true of 40 something percent of the population, just as it is true of about 40 percent that they would vote for whoever the Republicans put forward. All of this is true regardless of the color of the candidates in question. The real question is whether that remaining 15-20% is giving President Obama a break they would not give to any other President. In this case I think the answer is no, or at least they would grant the same level of patience to any President who came into office with the situation he had to confront and who faced the kind of opposition he has faced, the second of these circumstances can be legitimately linked to some extent, if only a small one, to his race. The Republican Party was bound to be the bunch of obstructionist a-holes they have been over the past 4 years regardless of the who the Democratic President was but it is hard to imagine they would have been able to muster such levels of vehemence and bile for anyone else, with the possible exception of Hilary Clinton. But even in her case, despite being exactly as legally qualified to be President of the United States, it is hard to believe they would have been able to bring themselves to deny her basic legitimacy. The real issue at hand in this election and the reason why the American people are still so decidedly behind President Barack Obama is that no matter how insufficient the argument that things could have been worse may sound we know it is undeniably true. Had John McCain been elected in 2008 the nation would be in significantly worse shape, primarily because Democrats lack the obstructionist backbone of the Republicans and we would be facing the results of 4 more years of disastrous Republican policies. Also we can see that things could be much better than they are today. We can see that the failures of the last 4 years and of Obama's policies are the result of the policies themselves but rather of the Republican obstructionism and the extent to which the policies were compromised upon in the apparently futile attempt to avoid such childish refusal to work together. Mitt Romney and the Republican Party are offering nothing of substance to the American people except a return to the failures that lead us into our current predicament. They dug the country a giant hole and then spent 4 years knocking down every attempt to get us out so as to position themselves to yell and scream about the hole we are in and demand to be put back in charge so they can continue digging. Barack Obama is not being given a break because he is black he is being given a break because the only other option on the table is a group of assholes who got us into this mess in the first time. President Obama has done a better job than anyone could have expected given his circumstances and maybe if the Republicans had not spent 4 years trying to make everything harder they would be in a position to say that he hasn't done good enough.