Uncle Luke, the man whose booty-shaking madness once made the U.S. Supreme Court stand up for free speech, gets as nasty as he wants to be for Miami New Times. This week, Luke gives President Obama an A on his midterm report card.
Despite the mess he inherited from George W. Bush, I believe Barack Obama has done an excellent job. It's similar to Randy Shannon replacing Larry Coker as University of Miami football coach. Coker had screwed up the program. Shannon must fix it. When shit gets really messed up, you give the job to the black man.
Obama took over the country on the brink of a depression. The government was broken, the banking system was disintegrating, and we were engaged in two wars that cost us billions of dollars a day. It couldn't have been worse. I ask myself all the time why Obama would want his job.
People expect this man to rebuild Rome overnight after a major disaster. It just can't happen. When you take eight years to mess up a country so badly, Obama can't be expected to fix everything in just two years. When he came into office, the automotive industry, one of the biggest job creators in the nation, was in bankruptcy. Sure, he bailed out the automakers, but he required they pay back the money and threatened to take them over if they didn't. He reformed the credit card industry by stopping it from screwing people over with outrageous interest rates and fees. Despite all the filibustering from the Republicans in Congress, he overhauled our health-care system for the better.
When the oil spill devastated the Gulf of Mexico earlier this year, people expected him to turn into Supernegro and dive into the water and cap the well with his heat-ray vision. It wasn't enough that he got tough on BP, making it pay to clean up the mess and set up a trust fund to help the Americans who lost their livelihoods. No one gives him credit for that. When the Exxon oil spill happened in the '80s, it took years to clean up that shit.
Obama's toughest obstacle, and that of any president really, is job creation in a digital age. I love the Internet, but the web has killed more jobs than it has created. The Internet is great for independent musicians because they can upload their songs and sell them on iTunes. But that killed record stores, and all of those people who worked in the stores were left without work. The record industry is not the only one to go through upheaval. Go to the airport, where kiosks have replaced ticket counter employees.
Yet I have faith in Obama. He has worked 24/7 to fix a broken country. If the voters don't give him another four years and we get Sarah Palin or Mitt Romney as president, we will be in serious trouble.
Follow Luke on Twitter: @unclelukereal1.
