Fareed Zacharia's point in this article is that Obama is neither Liberal nor Rightest but Pragmatic as a president. If people could see this more they would see he has done much more good than harm for this country. However, those on the extreme left and right are so lost in ideology that they forget to be pragmatic and practical. So hopefully, enough people see the President as Pragmatic and therefore a Centrist much like Clinton so he can finish the work he started after the next Presidential election. I think to change presidents right now might just cause another Great Depression for sure because we aren't there yet but we sure are close to one now. That Obama could turn an inevitable Great Depression when he came into office into a really bad recession says a lot about his pragmatism and practicality already. And I think too many people get lost in ideology and forget this one very important point.
Sometimes for me when left and right go at it I can imagine them arguing incessantly in the middle of a highway and a big semi truck hits them because they are not either one being pragmatic. Well, the next Great depression is about to hit both left and right like a big Mac Truck. I wonder if either left or right will survive that?
begin quote from Fareed Zaharia's Time.com Article:
My bet is that the American people will see it as the latter. Obama's temperament was eloquently expressed by the late Bart Giamatti, a former president of Yale and former baseball commissioner, when he urged students not to fall prey to ideology from the right or left and to celebrate the democratic process that balances the two extremes. "My middle view is the view of the centrist," he said, before quoting law professor Alexander Bickel, "who would ... fix 'our eyes on that middle distance, where values are provisionally held, are tested, and evolve within the legal order derived ... from the morality of consent.' To set one's course by such a centrist view is to leave oneself open to the charges, hurled by the completely faithful of some extreme, of being relativistic, opportunistically flexible, secular, passive, passionless ... Be of good cheer ... To act according to an open and principled pragmatism, to believe in the power of process, is in fact to work for the good."
My father and Grandfather were Republicans so I grew up Republican much like Hillary Clinton. However, since I'm around her age when I went to college I was also exposed to extreme leftest view in addition to extreme rightest views. However, I tend to be a very practical and pragmatic person like my father and grandfather so I found myself over time becoming and independent centrist after the nation was betrayed by the Viet Nam War and President Nixon. So, I pretty much stayed an independent over the last 40 to 50 years or so since then. I found myself voting for almost every president Republican and Democrat over the years simply because the Democrats to some things great and some things terrible. And the Republicans do some things great and other things terrible. So you need to go back and forth between the parties so the country isn't completely destroyed over the years by one's excesses or the others. For me an independent pragmatic point of view means for me that I always think of what is best for my country long term before I think of my own needs when I vote. So, I am always voting for posterity so we actually have this great country 100 years from now as good or better than it was when I grew up in the 1950s. This is what I believe in doing when I vote.
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