This is the text to a video I've posted at YouTube urging President Obama not to run for re-election:
Good evening. My name is Lawrence John Brown.
I would like you to join with me in calling for President Barack Obama to do what President Lyndon Johnson did in 1968 when he announced to the nation:
“I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”
As President Johnson’s war in Vietnam divided the nation and the Democratic Party in 1968, so President Obama’s policies or lack of policies has divided the nation and the Democratic Party today.
Therefore, the best thing Obama can do for the nation and the Democratic Party is to become a one-term President.
Just so no one thinks I’m racist or prejudiced against the President, I want to say that I am, like Obama, half Irish.
Now seriously, I wish President Obama had come across as an angry black man because black men have a lot to be angry about.
Instead, he doesn’t seem to want to stand for anything or defend anything. Everything is negotiable with him.
Perhaps he just doesn’t have the right character to be President.
At the end of this presentation, I will tell you who I would like to see as the Democratic Party candidate for President in 2012.
Now I want to tell you what I hope for in a President in terms of foreign and domestic policy.
Let me add that my political hopes have always been dashed by reality.
But as Andy Dufresne said in The Shawshank Redemption, “Hope is a good thing.”
Recently, when I was watching the movie Bobby, which is about the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, I got to thinking that today many Americans believe America is the greatest nation in the world.
And I remembered that I also once believed America was the greatest nation in the world.
But in my second year in high school in 1966, I found a book in the public library with speeches made at a rally against the Vietnam War.
I learned by reading that book that we were bombing and burning villages in Vietnam and killing women and children.
I have since learned, with the help of books by Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, that our foreign policy has often been dictated by our desire to protect and expand our economic and strategic interests in the world, without regard for the rights of citizens of other lands.
As part of this policy, we have decided to fight our enemies on foreign soil so we won’t have to fight them on our soil.
We have, in effect, turned the people of the other nations of the world into our human shields.
And so I hope that our next President will recognize that we have often acted badly in the world.
And I want our next President to end all our wars and military actions, close all our bases around the world, and end our support for dictators.
Now, I want to discuss what I am looking for from our next President in terms of his or her domestic policies.
First, a little background:
In the 1930s under FDR, this nation began the Social Security program and the federal unemployment insurance program.
In the 1960s under President Johnson, we began the War on Poverty and Medicare and Medicaid and the modern-day food stamp program.
By the 1980s, our country was moving away from the idea that it was government’s duty to help those in need, perhaps because of the success of the War on Poverty, but also because of the idea that individuals were abusing the welfare system.
I am sure there were abuses with AFDC, the program to give financial assistance to mothers, but the size of the abuses were nothing like the recent abuses on Wall Street that brought our economy to its knees and that cost our country billions of dollars.
Besides, federal programs have helped hundreds of millions of people, myself included, who were sick or injured and couldn’t pay their medical bills, or didn’t have work and needed help until they could find a job, or couldn’t put enough food on the table for their families, or were disabled or too old to work.
Last month, President Obama caved in to the Republican Party’s irresponsible and childish threat to block the previously routine raising of the debt ceiling.
I wish the President had refused to negotiate with the extortionists and economic terrorists in the Republican Party and had invoked the 14th amendment instead.
Nevertheless, the debt ceiling fiasco has to be blamed on the Republican Party’s unprecedented and unfair tactics.
What was it the Republican Party was demanding?
That the deficit over the next ten years be reduced by trillions of dollars without any tax increases.
It’s strange that Republicans have suddenly become concerned over the size of the deficit because Dick Cheney said deficits don’t matter when President Bush was doubling the national debt.
The idea that we need to cut spending immediately leads me to wonder if this isn’t a political ploy by Republicans to send our country back into recession just before the 2012 election.
Yes, I am accusing the Republicans of being unpatriotic by putting the good of their party above the good of the nation. This is not the first time they have done this.
In 2002, Republicans scared the American people with stories about Iraq trying to get WMDs so they could turn the issue of the elections away from the weak economy to national security, an issue they felt they could win with. And that was so successful that they decided to invade Iraq. And they rode the Iraq War all the way to victory in the 2004 elections.
The solution to our debt problems does not require the dismantling of the social safety net, as Republicans would like us to believe.
Four trillion dollars over a ten year period could be raised simply through spending cuts on defense and the expiration of the Bush tax cuts in 2012.
I object to Social Security being thrown in with the spending cut negotiations. Social Security has its own funding and should be left alone. It only needs a small adjustment to make it solvent into the middle of the 21st century.
However, President Obama’s reduction of the payroll tax is playing right into the Republicans’ hands. If the cuts are made permanent, then Social Security will be in trouble and this will give the Republicans an excuse to privatize it.
Medicare should be expanded to cover everyone. Making Medicare universal will reduce our national health care costs, which are, per person, the highest in the world today.
And let’s really make the rich and big corporations, who are sitting on billions of dollars in cash, into job creators by increasing their taxes and using the money to create jobs rebuilding our infrastructure, like FDR did in the 1930s with the WPA.
We have not seen such inequality of wealth in America as we have today since the 1920s, before the Great Depression.
Our top individual tax rate was once over 90%.
Why can’t the rich pay 50% of their income in taxes and be glad to do it, like the businessman during the Great Depression who said, “Why shouldn’t I give half my income to the American people? I took it all from them.”
When Martin Luther King was killed, Robert F. Kennedy spoke about the need to remember that we are all brothers, and he said he wanted our country to stand for compassion and love and peace instead of hatred and violence.
We still have a chance to achieve his dream, but the Republican Party is standing in the way.
Republicans are determined to destroy the social safety net and the rights that working people in America struggled to achieve over the last two centuries.
We must not abandon working people or allow attacks on the social safety net in order to appease Republicans.
Now I want to return to the topic that I began this presentation with: President Obama.
Republicans were right about one thing in 2008: Barack Obama was not prepared to be President.
Why?
Because he was naive enough to think today’s Republicans could be trusted.
And he was naive enough to try to compromise with Republicans, as if he had never heard the saying, “Give Republicans an inch and they’ll take a mile.”
For the good of America and the Democratic Party, President Obama should not run for reelection in 2012.
Now, I would like to invite you to join with me in forming the Truth, Justice, and Peace Party. The Party will have no members in keeping with our motto expressed by our honorary leader Groucho Marx (and no, he was not a Communist, Tea Partyers): “I wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member.” The Party will also have no money and no political candidates, but will support progressive Democratic Party candidates.
And now, I would like to offer my choice for Democratic Party candidate for President for 2012: Eliot Spitzer. He is intelligent, experienced, funny, and most of all, is a passionate defender of the rights of the working man and woman and an outspoken opponent of the corruption in this country, especially the corruption coming from corporations and the rich.
Finally, I would like to invite you to read my free ebook Seven Truths for a New Age and my other free ebooks, which are available at Barnes and Noble, Smashwords, and some of the other online bookstores.
Good night.