FACE TO FACE: Barack Obama is popular in Canada - but should he be?
In his first year in office, U.S. President Barack Obama saved the world economy from a second great depression.
It took the U.S. and Roosevelt 12 hockey seasons to escape the first one and Obama had to stick-handle the U.S. towards economic recovery on his first shift of the game.
With determination, grace and class, President Obama daily faces a Congress that says "no" to everything that's his idea. Despite such unprecedented obstructionism, an improving U.S. economy under Obama has created 2.3 million private-sector jobs since 2010, more jobs in two years than in any trickle-down administration. In addition, Obama saved the now thriving U.S. auto industry in the face of the constantly ranting right.
Far from being a tax-and-spend president, Obama reduced taxes more than former Republican president George W. Bush ($654 billion to $474 billion) and tax rates are lower under Obama than they were under Ronald Reagan, the political Jesus of the U.S. right.
President Obama has resurrected the U.S.'s international profile, winning the Nobel Peace Prize from a grateful world, a world ecstatic to see a U.S. president speak intelligently and respectfully to other nations.
Obama brokered the international action in Libya, which re-engaged the U.S. with the international community and saved Americans billions at the same time.
He ended the war in Iraq and has a plan to leave Afghanistan. He has said "no" to American use of torture and is moving to close Guantanamo Bay.
He championed equal pay for women, affordable health care, re-instated stem cell research and increased funding for scientific research. He repealed the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy and recently, at considerable political peril, came out in favour of gay marriage.
Unlike his plastic opponent, Mitt Romney, Obama lives in the modern world where we move forward rather than long for the good old days.
And Romney survives as the Republican candidate because he was the least foolish of a spectacularly foolish group and because he will do as he's told by Wall Street and the Tea Party.
Obama is a breath of fresh air, a sensible, effective, intelligent voice of sanity - the only buffer between Americans and the angry loonies who astonishingly think their black president is their enemy.
Face to Face columnist Jim Nelson is a retired Tri-City teacher and principal who lives in Port Moody. He has contributed a number of columns on education-related issues to The Tri-City News.
