Obama is no ‘ordinary president’

Re. The Ordinary President, Rex Murphy, June 22. every president is an ordinary president. The extraordinary one is someone who can recognize, articulate at a special time the mood of the moment and deliver a message to his/her nation and electorate in order to win his/her campaign. Barack Obama did that twice. Now what to do with power is another matter. The fact remains that he inherited an extraordinary legacy from his predecessor and on all fronts: military, political, economic and social disintegration.

Given the record of the past five years, any assessment by professional historians and academic specialists, is going to be more credible than Mr. Murphy’s sophistry and poetry of language.

Elie Mikhael Nasrallah, Ottawa. Rex Murphy argues that Barack Obama “was for very many people symbolic of the great advance beyond race prejudice that has been the hallmark of most Western societies. Thus his world popularity.” A tad disingenuous, wouldn’t you say, Mr. Murphy? By reducing Mr. Obama’s popularity to a matter of race, Mr. Murphy fails to appreciate (or admit) that the thinking world breathed a sigh of relief when he was elected, not because they were all cheering for the American underdog, but because what went before Mr. Obama was a national disgrace and an international embarrassment of criminal proportions.

Skin colour? To believe this, a person would have to ignore the deconstruction of events leading up to the Iraq war and the appalling collapse of the loony fringe of the Republican Party.

Anne Moriarty, Vancouver.