Obama Is Now A Historic President
Carol Marin reports how President Obama started his political career in Chicago and how he rose the political ladder to his second term in the oval office.
By winning re-election on Tuesday, Barack Obama graduated from president to historic president -- far beyond the fact of his being the first African-American to hold that office. Obama will turn out to be as important a figure to the 21st Century as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan were to the 20th.
The first reason, of course, is that a second term guarantees that the Affordable Care Act -- a measure so closely associated with the president that even he now calls it “Obamacare” -- will become part of American life, beginning in 2014. Mitt Romney had promised to repeal the bill, and even if he’d failed at that, he would have done everything he could, as chief executive, to delay its implementation. Universal health care was the final stitch in the social safety net the Democrats have been knitting together since Roosevelt’s New Deal, in the 1930s. Obama finished the job.
Obama was re-elected on the same day that four states voted in favor of gay marriage -- the first time that’s ever happened. Obama’s endorsement of same-sex marriage, a great political risk, helped those referendums pass. He’s a leader on the most important civil rights issue of his era.
Obama also solidified a political realignment. His victory blew away the ashes of the white, conservative backlash to civil rights and the New Deal that defined American politics in the last third of the 20th Century. The coalition of religious conservatives, libertarians and blue-collar whites that Reagan built is now as worn out as the Democrats’ New Deal coalition was in the 1980s -- as Republicans found out when they tried to rally it to win one last election for the Gipper. Just as Reagan did, Obama has redefined the political center, and will force the rival party to adapt by moving there.
Video at the link: http://www.nbcchicago.com/blogs/ward-room/Obama-Is-Now-A-Historic-President-177890921.html#ixzz2BgdraO8D
Great video!
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