Bill Clinton

To honor the centennial of the birth of Rosa Parks on Feb. 4, 1913, the United States Postal Service has issued a Rosa Parks stamp. Last year, a stone carving of Parks was added to the National Cathedral. In 2005, she became the first woman and second African-American to lie in honor in the nation's Capitol and, through a special act of Congress, a statue of her was ordered placed in the Capitol. Yet these tributes to Rosa Parks rest on a narrow and distorted vision of her legacy

Current member of the House Paul Ryan offered this theory regarding the current economic battles facing our country: "Look, if we had a [Hillary] Clinton presidency, if we had Erskine Bowles as chief of staff of the White House or president of the United States, I think we would have fixed this fiscal mess by now," Ryan said. "[But] that's not the kind of presidency we're dealing with right now." Both pronouncements raise questions that have been pondered by some political watchers since the conclusion of the 2008 presidential election: Would African Americans have fared better under a Hillary Clinton presidency than under Obama (and will they if she runs and wins in 2016)?

It was precisely at the end of eight years of the most recent Republican presidency that the country was brought down to its knees financially. How can a party take a healthy budget surplus, and in just eight years, convert it into the most disastrous financial meltdown seen in over 70 years—if indeed it were the party of wealth creation? (A blind worship of tax cuts even through a costly preemptive war was one factor.) Wealth and enterprise are synonymous with Indian-Americans. Ditto for Jewish Americans, another very prosperous and enterprising community. If the Republican Party were truly the better choice on these counts, why have these two—the wealthiest demographic groups in America—consistently aligned with the Democratic Party? 

Obama is the poster boy of merit, of a man with no great political connections, no famous family name who rose from being a community organizer to president of the United States. But the true miracle of Barack Hussein Obama is that even though Tea Party types detest him, enough ordinary Americans, and not just those in that convention hall in Charlotte, seem to genuinely like the man.

But it’s clear that most members of Congress are not really loyal to their party ideologies the way their constituents who voted them into office are.  They are loyal primarily to political expediency, which for them really means, “How will this vote affect my political career/ability to get re-elected?”   Since 2008, there has been a slight shift in voter registration as 2.5 million people have left the Democratic and Republican parties, while the ranks of the Independents has seen a modest increase. And what about when the POTUS  gets into office?  How many of his campaign promises does he actually keep?

Buddhism made a bleep in the news early this month when the Times of India and other news outlets, citing an unnamed source, reported that Bill Clinton, has turned to Buddhism for mental and physical well-being. The former president went so far as hiring a Buddhist monk to teach him the arts of meditation. This may come as a surprise to some but to many others, it's only a natural course of how things transpire in the globalized world. For if Americanization is a large part of globalization, the Easternization of the West, too, is the other side of the phenomenon.

The spirit of John Hancock and his gang of aristocrats——optimists all who risked their lives and property as signatories to revolution——is rare. Regrettably, that optimistic spirit——that spirit that drives all American progress——has been at historic odds with an uncharitable impulse among the American people: a selfishness that paradoxically afflicts both the afflicters and the afflicted, as we see in this election season.

In 1998, President Bill Clinton and White House intern Monica Lewinsky engaged in an act that would forever leave its mark on American politics, not to mention a certain blue dress. It was the day that doomed the reputation of one of our most popular presidents and transformed Capitol Hill into The Real World.