Qualifying for the big meet

By E. Faye Williams, Esq.
TriceEdneyWire.com Columnist

Over the Labor Day weekend, I took a few minutes to sit down and watch the IAAF World Track and Field Championship Meet in Daegu, South Korea. Having lived and worked in many cities in Korea, it was interesting to see the growth that has occurred there. Also, having been a high school athlete myself, I could relate to all the work that went into the effort of athletes just to qualify for the big track and field event. When I left high school to attend Grambling State University, I saw qualifying on a higher scale. There I met the late Stone Johnson who was perhaps our greatest track star. As good as he was, there was no question that Stone would qualify for every track meet, but he still had to run the preliminaries to qualify for the finals.

As we go through this qualifying Republican show of Mitt Romney being the big dog one day, Michele Bachmann the next day and Rick Perry now, it dawned on me that they are all just trying to qualify to do what President Barack Obama has already done. President Obama long ago qualified to run for, and ultimately become President of the United States of America. While the Republican candidates sit around and throw stones at him, they are merely trying to get where he already is!

Some people worry that President Obama doesn’t get all excited and try to respond to everything the opposition puts out there even though there is often not a sliver of truth to what they are saying. As a matter of fact, even FOX News knows what it is promoting against the President is deliberate manufactured garbage. A recent article in the Washington Post stated that FOX listeners are the most uninformed listeners in the country. Surely by now, everyone knows that Rush Limbaugh is a poor specimen of an entertainer—not a serious analyst. So, stop worrying about these side shows that are designed to distract you from the real work we have to do to keep from losing ground in 2012. I am sticking with this President to finish cleaning up the mess he inherited so we can move on to building a more prosperous nation for all of us—not just those who’ve lied, stolen, cheated their way to the top on the backs of working men and women.

If you heard President Obama’s Labor Day speech in Detroit this past week, and if you heard the response of the people to what he said, you know that both the President and Labor are not backing down just because some naysayers choose to tear down everything the President tries to do.

Labor Day is the traditional day to begin Presidential campaigns in earnest, but that’s Labor Day 2012 for our next Presidential election. President Obama is not campaigning yet, despite what some are saying. He has a track record as President, and even though some criticize him, he’s already saved our nation from financial ruin. You can compare what he’s trying to do with those who fix potholes. It’s costly to fix them and some may criticize him for trying to do so, but he knows the cost would be much greater if he did not try to fix them. He recently revealed the highlights of his proposed remedy for continuing the repairs of the other damage left behind for him to fix, so that he can move on to “building new roads, new bridges, new schools and all that recovery and restoration require.”

This article was originally published in the September 19, 2011 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper