A Quote by Bill Moyers
Barack Obama seemed to think he could win over his enemies. He certainly seemed to believe too much in his own powers of persuasion. One thing's for sure - he misunderstood the nature of his adversaries.
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I believe that our own experience instructs us that the secret of Education lies in respecting the pupil. It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he shall do. It is chosen and foreordained, and he only holds the key to his own secret. By your tampering and thwarting and too much governing he may be hindered from his end and kept out of his own. Respect the child. Wait and see the new product of Nature. Nature loves analogies, but not repetitions. Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Trespass not on his solitude.
Obama is hardly the first president to seek rapprochement with our adversaries and reconciliation with our enemies, of course. But his determination to make nice - even in the face of clear and repeated rejection from the other side - is unparalleled. For Obama and his team, diplomacy with rogue regimes is an end in itself, and any deal, however one-sided, is a win, especially one that the White House communications mavens think that friendly media will call a 'breakthrough' or 'historic.'
He [Barack Obama] just seemed very firm about the change, and that's, like, his motto.
Barack Obama was elected during my second year of college, and save for his skin color, he had much in common with Bill Clinton: Despite an unstable life with a single mother, aided by two loving grandparents, he had made in his adulthood a family life that seemed to embody my sense of the American ideal.
Then when dusk began to settle he would retrace his steps, back to his own world. And on the way home, a loneliness would always claim his heart. He could never quite get a grip on what it was. It just seemed that whatever lay waiting "out there" was all too vast, too overwhelming for him to possibly ever make a dent in.
[Barack] Obama won two elections but certainly the first one not because people wanted that agenda of his. He never told them what his agenda was. Not as it played out. Obama was something other.
Barack Obama spent his first day as president-elect putting together his transition team. And if you believe MSNBC, by tomorrow he will have chosen all 12 of his disciples.
The old hunger for voyages fed at his heart....To go alone...into strange cities; to meet strange people and to pass again before they could know him; to wander, like his own legend, across the earth--it seemed to him there could be no better thing than that.
As time passed and he grew to know people better, he began to think of himself as an extraordinary man, one set apart from his fellows. He wanted terribly to make his life a thing of great importance, and as he looked about at his fellow men and saw how like clods they lived it seemed to him that he could not bear to become also such a clod.
The only future Barack Obama is trying to win is his own re-election.
A politician knows that his friends are not always his allies, and that his adversaries are not always his enemies.
[Barack] Obama isn't pointing to anyone, and certainly doesn't like it when others note (correctly) that his influences were the likes of Saul Alinsky, the Chicagoan and modern founder of community organizing, or Frank Marshall Davis, the communist journalist and agitator from Chicago who mentored Obama in Hawaii in the latter 1970s, and who Obama warmly acknowledges in his memoirs.
If Obama came by his liberalism in the faculty lounge, then sure, he can see it hasn't worked, and he can modify it. But if Obama got his formative ideas when he was very young, and if they are the result of his traumatic relationship with his father, then they are built into his psyche.
Though others before him had triumphed three times, Pompeius, by having gained his first triumph over Libya, his second over Europe, and this the last over Asia, seemed in a manner to have brought the whole world into his three triumphs.
I did not believe I was superior to him. Perhaps the chief reason for his defeat was the overestimation of his own powers arising out of his overwhelming victory in New York, 1927, and his underestimation of mine.
That is who Barack Obama is - a person of admirable character - and that is who he has remained for me over these last four years. I have not agreed with his every decision, but never once have I seen him break his cool, lose his composure, or abandon his insightful perspective - even during the most serious and/or absurd national disasters.
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