Obama gets a free pass? Really?

A letter writer to the Riverdale Review claimed recently that President Barack Obama “has escaped serious scrutiny all these many years… because of his color.”

The letter writer stated that President Obama “has been given a free pass because of the fact that he is our country’s first black president and that white people and the media do not want to be called racists.”

The letter writer also claims the president is a “serial and brazen liar,” “incompetent” and “mediocre.”

The Riverdale Review writer certainly has a right to say those things. But to say that Obama has been given a “free pass” is bizarre.

Let’s briefly review the recent past.  The Republican Party has been violently opposed to virtually every policy the President has proposed. Fox News, the most popular cable news network, savages the president daily. Likewise, The Wall Street Journal, the nation’s newspaper with the highest circulation, has been rabidly opposed to the president’s every move.

The Daily News features two columnists, S.E. Cupp and Charles Krauthammer, who express their disgust with the President on a frequent basis. The Daily News recently condemned Obama for the Bowe Bergdahl swap for five Taliban leaders we have been holding for years.  (I didn’t like the swap, either.)

On June 14, The New York Times stated that Obama has “lurched from crisis to crisis.”

A recent Gallup poll shows that 51 percent of the public disapproves of the President’s performance, against 43 percent who approve. That’s pretty bad.

So where is the free pass President Obama is enjoying because he’s black?

Let’s move on to the president’s record.  He spent almost his entire first year in office on health care. I believe he should have focused on the economy, which was in obviously poor shape. His stimulus package helped take the economy out of recession, but did not help it rise beyond a weak comeback.

Obama has tried to pass immigration reform in Congress, which will clearly not occur, due to Republican obstructionism.

The president has withdrawn from the morass that is Iraq. He is trying to get us out of Afghanistan. 

Obama is also trying to combat climate change, which I’m guessing the Riverdale Review letter writer doesn’t believe exists (See daytime flooding in Miami, impending collapse of various polar ice sheets and the massive die-off of western forests for evidence of climate change.)

The president tried to fight the gun lobby because of the endless string of school shootings, an effort which failed because of lack of support from the Republican House. 

Obama has made many mistakes and missteps. So, let’s compare his performance to the perfect record of President George W. Bush, who invaded Iraq under false pretenses (another word for that is “lying,”) and effectively made the country into an ally of Iran, one of our worst enemies. Bush destroyed a federal government surplus in the name of cutting taxes for the wealthy, thereby creating huge deficits, bungled the response to Hurricane Katrina and passed a new Medicare drug benefit for seniors without funding it, making his deficits even larger.

Additionally, the Bush Administration let Al-Qaeda and the Taliban get away at Tora Bora and failed to destroy the groups that attacked us on 9/11. 

Obama made the call to take out bin Laden, which ticked off our so-called Pakistani “allies.” Our SEAL team found him in Pakistan, where he had been hiding for several years, most of which occurred under Bush’s watch.

So, let’s consider these facts, too, when we make our judgments about this president. Obama has made so many errors!  Yet I still prefer him over a Republican Party that gives out billions in subsidies to wealthy oil companies, cuts money for food stamps, doesn’t believe climate change is happening, wants even more people to have guns, thinks poor people are parasites and lobbies for rich people and corporations to get even more tax breaks.

In the last few years, the Republican House of Representatives has almost led this country to default on its debts and won’t even replenish the Highway Trust Fund to repair our roads and bridges. 

Claiming that President Obama is getting a “free pass” in the court of public opinion is completely delusional.

Mike Gold lives and works in the Bronx. Point of View is a column open to all.