Early immigrants had to assimilate.   Grammar School and High School classes were taught in English.   Students from a foreign land were immersed in English speaking schools and were forced to adapt.  To a large extent they helped each other to learn English and through a combination of friends and family support, the Italians, the Polish, the French, the Germans and other immigrants did adapt and they became a part of this huge melting pot.   It is the melting pot that made this country strong not our diversity.  It was the melting pot that overcame our diversity which was the problem, not the strength.     Expectations were high and those who accepted the challenge were in a position to thrive.  Those who did not accept the challenge were destined to unskilled positions despite that many of them were likely capable of much more.  

This was regarded by many as unfair.   For years now many in our society have made excuses and demanded little from immigrants or even from citizen minorities.   Our schools have debated whether grade systems should be replaced by pass/fail methods.  Self respect was taught as something that people could have without first earning it.   Communities debated whether young athletes should be made to keep score at their athletic games.   Political programs like Affirmative Action provided special dispensation to people the law regarded as incapable of measuring up to established norms.   Consequently the concept of the token "you fill in the blank" was developed which was a disparaging term to identify someone who rises to his/her level of success because they are of a particular gender or minority.  This is an example of what results from low expectations.   

We used to say that those who were hurt the most were the individuals themselves who had so little expected of them.  People generally rise to  a challenge but these people were not truly challenged.  Excuses were made for them in schools and in the workforce and they often rose to a level of immediate incompetence.  These persons were never allowed to grow to their potential because no one expected anything of them to begin with.   A new plane has been created with the election of Barrack Obama but it is the public who has been hurt the most because we now have a president that no one is demanding much of.   When we have low expectations of our president, the nation suffers.   How many voted for Barrack Obama because of his skin color?  He garnered the votes of 95% of all black persons voting because they understandably wanted someone like them in the White House.   As a result they demand little from him of the nature of foreign and domestic policy other than the personal gratification they get from having someone that looks like them as President.   How many guilt driven white liberals voted for Barrack Obama because he was black?   Obama is demonstrating time and again that skin color must not be a measure of qualifications to be president at least to those who expect decisions from a president that impact the world stage.  

Obama was certainly there to railroad healthcare legislation because his primary skill is campaigning.  Consistent with the Alinsky Rules for Radicals that he once taught his continuing campaign rhetoric successfully demonizes elements of our society, creates them as scapegoats and drives support for his measures as a means of combating this contrived evil.   With the aid of a teleprompter he has demonstrated an affinity for reading and delivering campaign rhetoric that has no substance behind it, no judgment, only poorly constructed legislation that becomes law. 

How might we expect this president to respond in the event of a foreign crisis?   Does his poor performance on the world stage give us a hint?  He wishes to resolve our country's issues with Iran and N. Korea through diplomacy yet he has continually reduced and eliminated all leverage he might have diplomatically by telling our nation's adversaries what he will not do prior to any discussions taking place.  He has taken water-boarding off the table by erroneously calling it torture.  He has divulged the number of nuclear warheads in our arsenal rather than leaving this for our adversaries as something about which they might otherwise be concerned.   He has treated our friends rudely and turned his back on one of our greatest allies, Israel, and he has made overtures toward Israel's enemies that demonstrate weakness, not magnanimity.  

Is the leaking oil well in the Gulf of Mexico an indication of how little prepared Obama and his administration are?   Federal standards were in existence that might have made this spill far less than it has become.  But those federal standards were not followed and apparently the equipment that might have allowed us to respond to this catastrophe was not available.   Yet the criticism is only a fraction of the criticism of President George W Bush after Katrina.   Favoritism is the often heard reason but this goes much deeper than partisanship in the media.   Despite the existence of the city and state governments who were the true first responders before and after Katrina and despite the offers of assistance from the Bush administration to the governor of Louisiana that were rejected, we all had high expectations of President Bush, particularly those who were directly impacted by the breaks in the levies and who sat and waited for the government to rescue them.  

Ironically, it is this same community that is directly affected by this oil leak yet there is no loud chorus of demands of the Obama Administration.   Oh, no doubt, the choruses are there but not in the same ferocity they were there to declare the Bush response to Katrina inadequate.   There are shrimpers and fishermen whose livelihood is jeopardized.  Environmentalists fear the loss to the ecological system near the Mississippi Delta along the entire Gulf Coast and perhaps up the Atlantic Seaboard should the current take this oil spill that far.  Perhaps the reason they are not as noisy as the Bush critics is that there is no direct fear regarding loss of life, only loss of livelihood.  But again, there is something more significant at work in these diverse criticisms of the Bush and the Obama Administrations.  No one has the same expectations of Barrack Obama as they had of George W Bush.  When people decry racism, this is perhaps racism in its ugliest form.  It is demeaning to this man that we not have the same high expectations of him as president as we did of all former presidents.    

Can this nation thrive under the leadership from whom so very little is expected?   Yes, he responded to his commander in the field and sent additional troops to Afghanistan and this was to his credit, but not completely.   He was a few months late and 10,000 troops short of the request for resources the commander had identified as required to gain victory.   Perhaps the commander also had low expectations of this president and smartly asked for more than he needed and posed a time frame that was more ambitious than required in order to gain what he really needed through compromise with his Commander in Chief.  

There are other examples of the inadequacies of this president.   Did he not jump to an immediate conclusion when police approached his friend, the Harvard Professor who had been seen breaking into his own house?   Without any facts did he not indicate the Cambridge Police had acted stupidly?   Did it not become clear very quickly that the Cambridge Police acted prudently and the Harvard Professor and the President of the United States were the ones who acted both irrationally and stupidly?  Similarly he has already posited that the fault and the expense of the oil spill belongs to British Petroleum and he has done so without first allowing for an investigation to determine just what happened.  What caused that explosion?  We all should want to know.  

Despite the claims on the Sunday news shows that the Obama Administration was on top of that oil spill on day one there is no record of that and it did take the President nine days to make his first statement and was it not rhetoric with as yet, little substance to back it up?  If one looks at the army of persons sent to the Gulf to work this issue we see their makeup to primarily be attorneys, not environmentalists or oil spill / cleanup experts.   Obama has unfortunately proven that he is not qualified to manage but this doesn't bother many because they have such low expectations of this president.  All he needed was to be black and able to speak more eloquently than President Bush.   He had to be "Anybody but Bush." 

The President's healthcare plan was nonexistent and he relied upon the House and Senate leadership to draft the bill that he declaratively discussed for months citing its content.  Was he not often inaccurate in those words he read from his teleprompter?  Does he not depend upon that teleprompter and does he not often find himself in awkward situations when that teleprompter is not available to him or when he decides to interject personal comments?  He speaks of people's incomes as though at some certain point they have made enough money.  He spoke to Joe the Plumber of spreading the wealth, Joe's wealth, not his own.  His skin is thin and he apparently is unable to tolerate criticism from the media that appears more often than not to be concentrated in Fox News, talk radio and on Internet blogs.  The ire of his administration is exposed when  all news agencies and commentators do not provide him the same deference as the alphabet networks and what he is reeling against is really that talk radio, Internet blogs like this one and Fox News have high expectations of a president.  The alphabet networks, true to their form, are treating this president with low expectations and this is killing this country.