Time 100 Entry on Obama Oozes About His ‘Far-Visioned Initiatives’ vs. Conservative ‘Youthful Illusions’
While the Time 100 has a fair number of Republicans on its most-influential list (Michele Bachmann, John Boehner, Chris Christie, Paul Ryan and the Koch brothers), its Barack Obama article by Stanford history profesor David Kennedy demonstrated that some people are still deeply trapped within a 2008 love bubble for the president. Kennedy wrote this valentine, and Time published it : We remain a young nation,” Barack Obama said in 2009, but he added an unsettling admonition that “in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.” No passage in his Inaugural Address more vividly reflected the President's vision of his country and his times or more accurately foreshadowed the vexations that were to beset his leadership. Oh, wait, so Obama's enemies are childish, and can't put away childish things? But Kennedy was just getting started. Obama's straw-man opponents also believe in the Santa Claus and Easter Bunny of illusory individualism: Like FDR before him, Obama, 49, has looked beyond the near horizon. He has paid the political price of setting far-visioned initiatives on health care and financial reform ahead of short-term relief. And he has tried to persuade his countrymen to shed some of their youthful illusions: to forsake the frontiersman's faith in unbridled individualism for a recognition of the complex interdependencies of modern life, to replace the rebel's fear of government with the citizen's trust that government of the people and by the people is for the people too, to stop assuming that Santa Claus will give us cheap energy forever and the Easter Bunny will pay our bills. Whatever the near term holds, history is likely to record that Obama set the country on the path to a future with fewer illusions. Has Professor Kennedy
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on April 21, 2011. Filed under