My President

Since I have been eligible to vote, I have voted in eight of the past nine presidential elections.  In four of the eight, my choice won; in four he lost.  The election I missed saw the candidate I was leaning toward winning.  But get this: win or lose, I always carried the attitude that the individual holding that high office was MY president.  Now this doesn't mean that I agreed with his decisions; often, much too often I found myself shaking my head in disbelief, readying myself to support someone else with a more agreeable political philosophy in the next election.  On three different occasions, I supported a candidate's initial election to the presidency and voted against him for reelection (all three times unsuccessfully).  So I have not been ideologically monolithic, instead going back and forth from one party to the other.  I suppose this might imply that I am a centrist, or a political moderate.  This tends to bear out in conversations I have with liberals who say I am conservative, or with conservatives who say I am liberal.  But that doesn't mean that I am devoid of strong opinions on the issues.  I just believe that some of the ideologically-based positions on them tend to be short-sighted and lacking a sense of the greater needs of the nation and its people.

Each and every president in my memory has been MY president.  Unfortunately, the trend increasingly seems to take presidents one opposes and regard them as not legitimately belonging in office.  According to this type of narrative, depending on your perspective, Bush stole the 2000 and 2004 elections and Obama wasn't really born in the good old United States of America, so he wasn't really elected in 2008 (in some people's universes).  So instead of having a leader one recognizes as the leader, whether for better or for worse, we're left with a much lower discussion of whether the individual is really legally president.

We desperately need to get away from this destructive way of thinking if we are going to survive as a viable, civil democracy in the future.  Barack Obama is my president, and he's yours, too, if you are an American.  It matters not how conservative or liberal you are, or whether or not Mr. Obama has said or done (or been alleged to have said or done) something that offended you.  He is your president.  Mitt Romney isn't exactly my first choice for the presidency.  But should he win the election this November, guess what?  He's gonna be MY president!