For a presidential to contest for the powerful seat in America, lots of his life aspects and believes are put through a rigorous evaluation. It is required that the presidential candidate should be well known by the citizens; this could be the reason why some presidential hopeful announce their candidacy three to four years prior to elections. Additional requirements is that the candidates should be of good values such as courage, experience, political savvy, understanding, programmatic, communication skills, tenacity intellectual honesty and ability to build morale. Additionally the candidates are required to attract and organize a staff, identify core issues and build a supportive constituency. So one might ask how president Obama performed on this requirements. This paper aims to explore the legitimacy of the president Barrack Obama.
One of the primary reasons why a fraction of Americans felt that president Obama was illegitimate is the controversy about his citizenship. Some feared that Obama was not eligible to become president because he was not a natural born citizen of the United States as required by the constitution ( Jones, 2013). There had been theories that the birth certificate that Obama presented was forged and his actual birth place was in Kenya and not Hawaii. In 20008 Obama was held in a controversy that led to a fallout with his pastor ad church leaders ( Fishe, n.d ). In a speech Obama claimed that American history had been tarnished by numerous cases of racism and he was determined to address it once he was elected the president. However I feel that these controversy are not justifications enough to term Obama as an illegitimate president.
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Comparing the Obama administration to other president’s term in office would be important in determine how legitimate he was and if he remained so throughout his era. Firstly the election that saw Obama rise to power could not be termed as controversial. He was elected by majority votes, 69,498,516 to beat the republican candidate Joe Biden who garnered 59,948,323; this means Obama won by 52.9 percent. There had been controversial elections in which candidates with popular vote had their victory overturned; a good example is the election that occurred in 2000 where George W. Bush was declared the winner despite his opponent Al Gore being more popular. The 2000 election was reported to have cases for voter fraud and disenfranchisement ( FairVote.org. n.d. ). However the Obama administrations was faced by a scandal that changed his reputation. In 2012, the government conducted the Benghazi attack that led to killing of innocent people including the US ambassador to Libya ( Wallenfeldt, 2018) . This is a scandal that made people question the government intentions on the attack and its capability of its citizen leaving in far off countries ( Watchmojo.com, 2014 ). The government failed to offer sufficient information about the attack. Therefore present Obama popularity was greatly impacted by the attack
References
FairVote.org. (n.d.). Controversial Elections. Retrieved from https://www.fairvote.org/controversial_elections
Fisher, L. (n.d.). Obama. The Barack Obama Presidency . doi:10.1057/9780230370456.0006
Jones, C. O. (2013). 3. Electing Presidents (and Other Ways to Occupy the Oval Office). Very Short Introductions . doi:10.1093/actrade/9780195307016.003.0003
Wallenfeldt, J. (2018). 9 American Political Scandals. Retrieved from https://www.britannica.com/list/9-american-political-scandals
Watchmojo.com. (2014, March 14). Top 10 U.S. Political Scandals [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b10UMtraFRw
